Christopher Whitehouse

Lone Buffalo: Conquering Adversity in Laos, the Land the West Forgot Christopher Whitehouse

Lone Buffalo is the story of Manophet Mouidouangdy, a man born in the wrong place at the wrong time: Muang Khoun, Laos as the Secret War was reaching its climax in 1969 and American bombers were razing the last buildings to the ground. His family had just seen everything that it possessed destroyed. Manophet grew up in a communist state cut off from the outside world and littered with unexploded ordnance. For years he was bogged down in a mire of poverty, traditional values and the harrowing knock-on effects of the war, from which there seemed to be no escape. But he was not prepared to give up his dreams of forging a better life for himself and his fellow men without a struggle. As much by accident as by design, he developed a skill set that allowed him to play a role in the reconciliation process that slowly gathered momentum as the years went by. He began reaching out to the country's remote ethnic minority tribes, some of whom had been recruited by the CIA to act as America's fighting force on the ground during the war.
When Laos finally reopened its borders with the outside world, he found himself rubbing shoulders with two of the more significant American figures from the war. He learned how to bridge the divide between East and West, connected up English, Lao and minority language speakers, and showed that capitalist and communist value systems need not be incompatible. Events and conversations from his later years are documented in electronic records, but the narrative begins in an era where information passed only by word of mouth. As the story unfolds, it becomes apparent that not all versions of the early years agree. Truth has a degree of subjectivity to it in this part of the world, and a disarming habit of being stranger than fiction.