The next day, Lincoln got his first closeup look at the Plain of Jars.
The plain couldn’t be seen from Vang Khom, which was situated on the southern slope of a mountainside, just below the crest. He and Donovan, accompanied by Koob and four of the other young men from the village, had to climb up that side, over the top, and then follow well-trod but often precarious footpaths down.
Lincoln figured he would learn everybody’s name, eventually. So far, they mostly sounded like random combinations of letters; things that might have been formed by taking a child’s ABC blocks and throwing them up in the air. Sometimes even when he thought he had one down, he couldn’t manage to say it the way the Hmong did. Then again, they had a hard time with “Lincoln,” though most could get “Clay” right.
Emerging from the jungle-choked slopes into the plain was like walking into a different world. “Plain” might have been a misnomer, since it implied flatlands, and this plain was a vast, hilly expanse. But instead of the lush palms and bamboo stands and other trees that seemed to carpet most of the country, here what trees existed were stunted. Mostly, as they headed into the plain itself, they walked through spiky elephant grass.
“Watch your step,” Donovan warned Lincoln. “We’ve been bombing in here since ’64. You’ll see plenty of craters from the 250s that went off, but there are a lot that didn’t. Every now and then, some random water buffalo or dog gets itself blown to bits. Sometimes people, too.”
“Thanks for the tip,” Lincoln said. “When do we see those jars?”
“Patience,” Donovan said. “Once you do see ’em, you’ll never forget ’em.” He turned to Koob, who carried a bow, with a quiver of arrows strapped to his back. Only one of the Hmong had a gun, and it was a French bolt action from somewhere around the turn of the century. It was remarkably well preserved, and Lincoln guessed it could kill somebody, if it had to. He was almost disappointed that it didn’t have the bayonet, because that would have been an impressive sight.
“Koob,” Donovan said. “Have you seen VC around here? Or Pathet?”
“No Pathet here,” Koob answered. “VC, yes. Some.”
“Do they have a camp around here?”
“No camp. They just pass by.”
“Okay. Everybody stay sharp.”
He resumed his conversation with Lincoln. “It’s worse in the bush, but even here, it’s dangerous. The VC are so good at camouflage, even if you’re looking for the fuckers—even if you know they’re there—you can be standing two goddamn feet from them, looking right at them, and not even see them. They blend in, and they can stand so still they’re just part of the scenery. Like I said, it’s harder here, where there aren’t as many trees and the grass is shorter. But even so, they could be down in a hole or trench, and unless you fell in, you wouldn’t even see it.”
“Or unless they shot you,” Lincoln suggested.
“Or that. Still, I’d rather go up against a hundred VC than thirty NVA. Those guys are real soldiers. They’ve got fire discipline. They know their tactics. They follow orders. And they don’t mind dying if they have to, but you can be damn sure they’ll take some folks to hell with ’em when they go. I wouldn’t count out the Pathet Lao, either—they’ve got some tough motherfuckers in that army.”
Lincoln didn’t really understand what the agent was driving at. He’d been exposed to NVA tactics before he even left the States, and again after he’d arrived in Vietnam. He’d seen plenty of combat. At Special Warfare School, he’d been trained in guerilla tactics, which included comprehensive analysis of North Vietnamese and VC combat styles.
“I’ve been in-country for a while now,” Lincoln reminded him. “I’ve seen my share of action.”
“I’m just saying, it’ll be different here. You won’t have a squad with you, much less a platoon. It’ll be you and some half-naked tribesmen, and they’re going to be looking to you for leadership.”
There it is, Lincoln thought. That’s the difference. In Vietnam, he had been a grunt, a soldier taking orders from officers—some of whom had more experience—or NCOs, all of whom did. He’d had to make decisions under fire, and some of those decisions had paid off. He hadn’t been killed yet, so that was something.
But he hadn’t had the responsibility for large numbers of men. And he certainly hadn’t been responsible for taking and holding huge swaths of territory. The Agency didn’t expect him and the men of Vang Khom to secure the entire Plain of Jars, but they did want this sector of it, including a crucial crossroads, to be won.
“You wouldn’t have put me here if you didn’t think I could do it,” he said.
Donovan tossed him a quick grin. “That’s right. I’m just reminding you that it’s not gonna be a goddamn picnic. You’ll earn your keep, Lincoln. And then some.”
Cautiously, they climbed up a hill. Nearing the top, they crouched, then flattened themselves at the summit to look out over the territory below without being silhouetted against the sky.
And there were the jars.
Lincoln hadn’t been sure what to expect, but the sight exceeded any expectations he could have had. There were hundreds of them, it seemed. It was hard to get a sense of scale from here, but they looked huge. He had thought they would be knee-high, maybe, but these clearly dwarfed that. They were thick-walled, formed from some dark stone. Most were open at the top, but some had discs over them that could only be lids.
“Fuckin’ A,” he said.
“I know,” Donovan said. “I’ve seen them half a dozen times. It never fails to blow my mind.”
“All clear,” Koob announced. “No Pathet, no VC.”
“You want a closer look?” Donovan asked.
“Hell yes. I’m not even sure what I’m lookin’ at.”
Donovan stood and motioned the others up. The agent lit another cigarette as he started down the slope toward the jars. “Nobody is,” he said. “Scholars aren’t certain who made them. They’re estimated to be a couple thousand years old, maybe made by some indigenous people who lived here for a while, then moved on. I’ve poked around in a few, found bones and teeth—”
“Human ones?” Lincoln asked.
“Yeah. Some nonhuman, too. A rat falls inside one, it might have a hard time getting out. Sometimes birds fall in and die. Mostly there’s rank water and spider webs, but every now and then you’ll find most of a human skeleton. Others have human figurines inside, mostly shattered now, but some are whole.”
As they drew closer, the ground dipped, then rose again, so they were walking up a gentle incline toward the first of the jars. Some were as tall as Lincoln, others shorter, but still four or five feet tall. Stone discs had fallen off many and lay crumbling on the ground, returning to the earth.
“So they’d toss someone in and cover them up?” he asked.
“Basically,” Donovan replied. “Some people in Southeast Asia believe that after death, the soul moves through stages on its way to the afterlife. If those people were related to the ones who did this, it’s thought that they might have put a body in one jar, let it decompose a bit, then moved it to another one for the next stage, and so on.”
“That would mean a lot of lifting those lids off and putting them back on.”
“Yeah. And they weigh a couple hundred pounds each. Whoever did this—and however they pulled it off—it wasn’t something they did on the spur of the moment. It took hundreds of years, probably, and a lot of effort. Not something your present-day Laotian pansies could pull off.”
Lincoln walked among the massive urns, speechless. He couldn’t imagine the thinking that had gone into building them. And then, having done all that work, just walking away from it.
“There are other patches around the plain just like this,” Donovan said. “Some have a few more jars, others less, but basically the same.”
Koob said something in Hmong, and the other men broke into laughter. “What was that, Koob?” Donovan asked.
“These were not for the dead,” Koob replied. “These were made to brew rice wine, for giants. Some people got drunk and fell inside.”
“That’s another theory,” Donovan admitted. “I’m not so sure I buy that one.”
Lincoln pressed his palms against the rough upper edge of one jar and hoisted himself up. In the late-morning sun, he could see nearly all the way to the bottom. Mostly it looked carpeted with wet leaves and the spider webs Donovan had mentioned.
But underneath that layer of leaves? Who knew? He could go in, dig around, but it would take years to check every jar, so why start?
The world was full of mysteries that would never be explained. New Bordeaux had its share, with its heritage of voodoo and piracy, its depthless swamps, its narrow alleys and old buildings.
This place, though, was unworldly on a whole different level. In New Bordeaux, at least, the history was mostly known, even if the bodies were never found. The Plain of Jars, with its origins lost in the mists of time, was something else entirely.
He was creeped out and fascinated at the same time.
As he lowered himself from the jar, he heard one of the Hmong men make a clicking sound with his tongue. An instant later, Donovan said, “Lincoln! Pathet!”
Lincoln dropped to the ground and scooped up his AR-30.
Donovan scrambled to his side. Crouching behind the jar, he jerked a thumb toward the northeast. “There’s a road over there. Not much of one, but it stays drier than the main road during the rainy season. Sometimes it gets used when people want to avoid the Ho Chi Minh Trail.”
Lincoln moved around the jar until he could see the road Donovan described. Sure enough, a couple dozen men in khaki uniforms and soft Mao hats walked up the road in a loose line, keeping enough distance from one another to make them hard targets. Most of them wore rubber sandals on their feet; Lincoln had heard that they made them from old tires.
He scooted back to Donovan. “Should we engage?”
“And get our asses handed to us?” Donovan asked. “We’ve got seven guys, four of whom have bows and arrows or spears. Two guns—”
“Three,” Lincoln corrected. “Thong has his Enfield or whatever that is.”
“His name’s Thoj,” Donovan said. “And it’s a Lebel, from 1890 or some damn time. Ten-round magazine, but we’d be lucky if he has five rounds in it. It’s not useless, but it’s damn close. Look, Lincoln, you’ll get your chance to take these guys on, but today’s not that day. Unless they see us, we’re not engaging.”
“So we just hide up here and hope they pass us by?”
“We could hide inside the jars, but they’d see us getting in. You’ve heard about shooting fish in a barrel?”
Lincoln could see that the agent was right. He took another peek and determined that the Pathet men were much better armed, in addition to outnumbering them by more than four to one.
He was heartened, though, that they were just walking down the road, in plain sight, instead of somehow melting into the background. They were alert, and their column was tactically sound, but they could be easily seen. That meant they considered this area safe territory.
“Not safe for long,” Lincoln promised in a whisper. “Not for too damn long.”