The Plain of Jars

What would you do if you found out that the bones and ashes you were given by the Air Force were not the remains of your loved one? Dorothy Kozeny, a 64 year old widow from a small town in Ohio, after getting no answers from the relevant authorities, decides the only thing to do is to go to Laos herself to search for the truth concerning her son's fate. In 1990, accompanied by a trusted Laotian called Kampeng, Dorothy travels deep into the mountains of rural Laos, attempting to trace her son's path through inhospitable terrain, an unforgettable trek that provides her with a rewarding, often humorous, and at times frustrating, cross-cultural experience. All clues lead her to a mysterious figure, an alleged CIA operative left over from the war, living in a remote and hostile area deep in the jungle. The second part of the book traces the life of this enigmatic character hiding in Laos, the two main characters linked through Dorothy's son. More than just an entertaining action adventure, the story also portrays the plight of the simple peasants caught in the middle of a Cold War conflict of little relevance to their own daily lives, revealing the inner workings of village society - the hopes, dreams, cultural norms, as well as the diverse Buddhist and Animist ceremonies that give the local populace the faith to get through the vagaries of life. It is actually two novels in one, a Book One and a Book Two, with both stories thoroughly (although at first not perceptibly) linked together. Book Two is about a man, possibly her son's assassin, and his spiritual journey down the Buddhist path. He becomes a monk on two occasions, and ends up as a New Age hero riding on top of an elephant, 'cultivating goodness in his own way' by clearing bombs and pacifying the remnants of a CIA army. The first half of the book deals with mutual cross-cultural understandings and misunderstandings, as a sixty-four year old woman travels through Laos with a Laotian guide named Kampeng, looking for answers concerning her son's fate, a pilot who was shot down during the secret war in Laos. In the first part of the book, the culture of the country is mainly experienced through her eyes as an outsider, while the second half is a more intimate and profound description of the many elaborate aspects of Southeast Asian traditions. The last half of the novel is actually a separate, yet connected story about the transformation of a prisoner of war into the mythical figure of the Chao Baa, a monk who rides an elephant pushing a device known as a flailer to set off and rid the countryside of the remains of cluster munitions, little brightly colored ball-like grenades that up to this day kill more than one hundred people each year, more than half of them children. The tenets of Buddhism and the techniques of walking, sitting, and sleeping meditation are told in a great enough detail that even an uninformed reader is able to readily identify with the concepts. The treatment of life, death, and karma are in overall accordance with Buddhist teachings. Admittedly, the novel presupposes the worldly and encouraging outcomes of such behavior through their positive influence, which verge on the glorious and triumphant, perhaps making the issue a bit overstated, but at the same time, inspirational. In the words of one reader, "To read this book is to bear witness, and in the process be uplifted and proud of the human power to transmute boundless remorse into benevolence".