American School of Vientiane 1974-75
I re-discovered an old school yearbook last year and over several months I scanned a few of its 100+ pages at a time to make the full book available to the public. There is an active alumni interest in the school but my interest lies in its uniqueness and the unusual time and place that it occupied.
The 1974-75 yearbook of the American School of Vientiane finds me in the First Grade, smiling under an Emo-esque haircut and seemingly looking around, Brady Bunch style, at the other kids whose pictures and names today revive memories that never left but feel fresh for having been dormant so long. I am not as vulnerable to nostalgia as I used to be but the images of this strange place I inhabited amaze me.
I had a mad crush on the girl whose picture is one up and one to the right of mine. Next to her (one to the right) is a picture of the boy whose birthday party was a mildly traumatic event for me. The other kids at the party were climbing on tractors and getting into mud fights while I was dressed to the nines in a little tuxedo. While the other kids roughed it up and made a mudbath mess of their bad selves I laid low in my immaculate outfit, afraid to get so much as a fleck of filth on it. I wandered around the boy’s enormous house and spent some alone time with a dead pig, its mouth stuffed with an apple and its roasted body laid on a silver platter. I thought the pig was still alive as the flies and moths buzzed around its face and body. I guess that was the birthday feast but I don’t remember eating any food that day.
Elsewhere in this yearbook are pictures of those kids who beat the shit out of me on the school bus, poking me in the eye with a broom stick and kicking me in the stomach. And I see the kid from my class with whom I stayed in touch as a pen pal for many years after we returned stateside.
I was too young as a little first grader to appreciate it but I browse through the book now and marvel at the multi-national makeup of the student body. The Senior Class pages show students from Iran, Syria, Yugoslavia, Thailand, Korea, Laos, and the U.S. — or “The States,” as we referred to the U.S.A. while we were in Laos. Today I live in Queens, possibly the most multi-national community on earth, and I sometimes find myself similarly impressed to be in a place among people from a dozen nations or as many creeds. The American School (called “ASV” for short) was situated on a compound named KM6. KM stood for “Kilometer” and the number represented the distance of the compound from the capitol city of Vientiane. There were other KM compounds but the only one I remember hearing of while we were there was KM8, a place I never saw but which seemed like an exotic, far-away relative of KM6.
In a 1969 article Time magazine described KM6 as “a U.S. suburb transplanted to Asian soil”, a description which fits my memory of the place. My family did not live on KM6 but many American military families did and several of the kids I knew at ASV lived at the compound. The place was an oasis in Laos, a nation of secret wars and military operations that many of the miltary personnel at KM6 knew nothing about.
Today the grounds of KM6 are used as a golf course. Some of the structures used for the school still stand but the use of the land is very different today.
As seen in an invitation to my birthday party (specifically on the inner portion) we lived at Salakoktane B-13, a street address burned forever in my mind by the sound of the school busdriver — Mr. Gnook — repeating it over and over one day when he got lost driving me home. I was the only child left on the bus as we drove for what seemed like an eternity over miles and miles of Laotian dirt roads and alleys. I had the address of our house written down and I handed the scrap of paper to Mr. Gnook. He seemed like an amiable, chatty man but his concern in getting me home was palpable. “OK, OK, Salakoktane B-13, B-13, B-13,” he repeated until we found the house. Mr. Gnook (whose name I am almost certainly mis-spelling and possibly even mis-remembering) is not pictured in the ASV yearbook.
Our phone number — 6684 — had only 4 digits, a reflection of how few phones there were in Laos at the time.
My memories of the house are somewhat more vivid. Stampedes of water buffalo — a common site in Laos — roared past outside on a regular basis. I remember a sugar cane stand up the street from our house.
