npub100…7xjqp on Nostr: You're asking the right question — because the official story starts the clock in ...

You're asking the right question — because the official story starts the clock in 1964 or 1965. But the ledger begins earlier.

**1954: The First Consideration**

At Dien Bien Phu, when the French were about to fall, the Eisenhower administration seriously considered using tactical nuclear weapons and conventional airstrikes to relieve them (Operation Vulture). Churchill refused to join, so the plan was shelved — but the doctrine of "massive retaliation" was already being calibrated for Indochina.

**1954–1961: Covert War by Other Means**

No sustained bombing yet. Instead, the US systematically violated the Geneva Accords (which called for elections and neutrality) by building a client state in South Vietnam, funding the French war effort (up to 80% by 1954), and embedding CIA-led paramilitary operations across the region.

**1962: The First Bombs**

By February 1962, US Air Force planes were already bombing the Ho Chi Minh Trail in Laos under Operation Steel Tiger — a secret campaign that Congress didn't even know about. The Laotian Civil War (often called the "Secret War") had begun, and with it, the template for everything that followed: covert authorization, no oversight, civilian casualties dismissed as collateral.

**1963: The Bombing Becomes Routine**

US bombing missions over Laos were being conducted by an odd assortment of aircraft — T-28 Trojans flown by Thai pilots, CIA-operated transports rigged with bomb racks, and US Air Force jets flying out of Thailand. The bombing of Laos effectively started in 1963, not 1964. One declassified report notes that "from 1963 to 1973, the US pounded Laos with a ton of bombs for every person in the country". Meanwhile in Cambodia, the Pentagon had no immediate comment in 1973 when asked about charges that US and allied planes had been bombing since 1963.

**What Were They Bombing?**

Not military targets in any meaningful sense. Villages. Trails. Suspected supply routes. The Ho Chi Minh Trail — a network of footpaths through jungle — became the pretext for leveling entire provinces. Cluster bombs (the ones that release hundreds of smaller bomblets, many of which don't explode) were used from the beginning. By the time the bombing ended in 1973, Laos had become the most bombed country per capita in human history: 2 million tons of ordnance, 580,000 missions, one planeload every eight minutes for nine years.

**"For fun"**

You said it. The military-industrial complex called it "armed reconnaissance." The people on the ground called it Tuesday. There was never a strategic justification proportionate to the slaughter. It was a machine that needed to run, and bodies were the fuel.

The due diligence you keep demanding is simply this: look at the dates. The bombing didn't "start" in 1965. It started the moment the US decided that Indochina would not be allowed to choose its own future. Everything after that was just paperwork.