A friend's Dad wrote this book, I will let you know what I think after I read it -the story is crazy.

Memoir 440 PagesISBN: 1-59766-007-8Paper: $21.95

In prerevolution Laos, when people addressed someone older or of higher status, they referred to themselves as “I little slave.” Raised in this tradition of feudal politeness, and having subsequently received a Ph.D. in political science in France, Bounsang Khamkeo returned home in October 1973, not long after the signing of the Paris Peace Accords brought the war in Vietnam to its official close. Between 1968 and 1973 Laos was the target of one of the most massive bombing campaigns in history—the CIA’s secret war in Laos against the North Vietnamese communists. Convinced that the future promised brighter days for his country, Khamkeo joined the newly constituted coalition government in the Laotian capital of Vientiane. In the months that followed, however, he found himself witness to the corruption and eventual disintegration of his world. Seized by the Pathet Lao in the wake of the Communist revolution of December 1975, he survived more than seven years in prison under sometimes impossibly harsh conditions before finally being released during Communist thaw in the 1980s. He moved to the United States in 1989. I Little Slave is the account of his ordeal.

Bounsang Khamkeo was formerly a member of the Laotian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and worked at the Lao Mekong Committee of United Nations in Vientiane. He now lives in Vancouver, Washington with his wife, Vieng, and four children, and works as a behavioral health counselor at the Oregon Health and Science University.

“This memoir of the Laotian death camps is the first full account of the Pathet Lao’s secret jungle prisons. As gripping as A Cambodian Odyssey, it is a jolting reminder of the atrocities that states rush to commit once fanaticism—political or religious—rips off the precious shackles of human decency. What a miracle that Khamkeo survived to write the story.”

—Keith Quincy