The Bombs That Keep on Killing in Laos

In early 1981 my husband, our infant son Jonah and I moved to Laos, a small landlocked country in Southeast Asia. We had been hired by the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) to work with villagers to help rebuild their war-devastated communities.

A young mother in the Laotian village of Muong Ngoi whose husband was killed by a cluster bomb. Photo Credit: Bob Eaton

Early on we flew by helicopter up to the Plain of Jars, a vast plateau in the central region of the country that was pounded with bombs during the U.S. air war. We stopped by a small jerry-built structure that turned out to be the province hospital, and inside we found seven casualties lying in roughly made beds. Four of them were brothers, the sons of a Hmong woman sitting miserably in the corner. Her boys had been working in an upland rice field in the hills above the plain when the eldest struck a guava cluster munition lying just beneath the surface. His arm had been blown off and he had been blinded. The three younger boys fared better and were expected to recover once their shrapnel wounds healed. The heat and the smell were awful, and I remember concentrating on not throwing up.

Many months later my husband made a trip up river to visit a string of villages along a tributary of the Mekong that reportedly had been severely damaged during the air war. He spent the night in the village of Muong Ngoi, sleeping on the porch of one of the small houses on stilts, the guest of the village chief. The next day he was taken to meet a young shellshocked woman holding tight to two young children. She was surrounded by family who were preparing burial services for her husband, who had gone into the forest the day before with a friend to search for medicinal plants. He climbed a tree to cut down some twigs. Jumping from a branch, he had landed on a buried “bombie”, which went off, killing him instantly and grievously wounding his companion.

It was 1983, ten years since the bombing had ended. We did not understand how so many lives could still be destroyed by weapons used in a war that had ended years before. Along with colleagues from the Mennonite Central Committee office in Laos, we set out to understand what these things were that were blowing people up and, more importantly, how to stop the carnage. We thought there must be some technical solution out there and that all we needed to do was figure out what it was, how much it cost, raise the money, and fix the problem.

Months of research and inquiry led nowhere. The U.S. government would not release information or maps, nor was it willing to let us have technical details on what exactly had been dropped. A Swedish military engineer seconded to the Swedish Development Agency working in Laos finally took pity on us and sat us down to explain that no quick fix was possible. According to him, no military anywhere had the slightest idea how to clear, or demine, a country the size of Laos. He said that cluster munitions, as they are called, had never been used to this extent before and that armies—taught how to clear a path just wide enough to permit the passage of troops in trucks or tanks—would have no idea how to remove unexploded ordnance from the Plain of Jars or from the highly polluted areas along what had been the Ho Chi Minh Trail—the supply route for the Vietnamese forces fighting in South Vietnam, some of which ran through Laotian territory.

90 Million Bomblets Dropped

The U.S. air war left behind a devastating legacy, and to this day Laos is thought to be the most heavily bombed country per capita in history. From 1964 to 1973, the U.S. dropped 90 million cluster bomblets over Laos in 580,000 bombing missions—equivalent to one plane load every eight minutes, 24 hours a-day, for nine years. Contrary to the tested rates, up to 30 percent of the cluster bomblets failed to detonate, leaving as many as 25 million unexploded bomblets still littering nearly 40 percent of the land
in Laos.

It has been 34 years since the last cluster munitions were dropped on Laos, and still there is no end in sight to the damage caused by them. Since 1973 as many as 12,000 civilians have been killed or maimed, and hundreds of new casualties occur each year. Cluster bombs hamper basic food production and economic development in Laos, one of the poorest countries in the world.

Bombs Still Going Off

According to the 2006 Landmine Monitor, 164 new landmine or unexploded ordnance casualties occurred in 91 reported incidents during the previous year: 36 people were killed and 128 were injured. Many of the incidents still take place in Xieng Khouang province, in and around the Plain of Jars. A sharp increase in injuries and deaths was reported in 2004 and 2005—a rise that experts attribute to population pressure, poverty, and a consequent increase in the number of people desperate enough to work in the dangerous scrap metal trade. Recent studies by Handicap International, the organization I now work for, show that boys aged six to 15 account for nearly one-quarter of the cluster munitions casualties in Laos today.

Jonah, that infant son, is now in his twenties and long out of college. The year he turned 25, a 25-year-old rice farmer from Sepon District in Savannakhet province was cutting trees to clear a rice paddy about three kilometers from his village when his shovel hit an unexploded cluster submunition. Neighbors carried him unconscious in a hammock to the district hospital three hours away. He lost his forearm, his hearing, and the sight in his right eye. He can no longer work and is in near constant pain.

According to the UN Development Program, at current funding levels, the cluster bomb removal program in Laos may take up to 100 years to complete.

I wish I had a different ending to the story, but I don’t. The lesson we must take away is don’t permit the use of cluster munitions: not now, not ever again.

For more information go to www.banclusterbombs.org. Organizations that continue to work on cluster bombs in Laos include: Legacies of War; The Mines Advisory Group (MAG), Handicap International,and the Mennonite Central Committee (MCC).

Wendy Batson is Excecutive Director of Handicap International-U.S, which recently published "Circle Impact," an authoritative study of cluster munitions casualities avaliable at www.handicap-international.us.