HOUAYKHAY,
Laos — Thao Kae and his friends were foraging for their dinner,
collecting the bamboo shoots that grow in the jungle a half-hour’s walk
from their remote hamlet along the Mekong River. As they dug and sifted
the soil, one of the boys found a small metal sphere and brought it back
to a house in the village.
“They
thought it was a pétanque ball,” said Khamsing Wilaikaew, a 59-year-old
farmer, referring to the French bowling game similar to bocce. “They
were throwing it against the ground.”
Four decades after it was dropped from a warplane, the metal ball, an American-made cluster bomb,
did what it was designed to do. Thao Kae, 8, was killed on the spot.
Mr. Khamsing’s wife and a 9-year-old boy died of their injuries days
later.
The
accident in Houaykhay happened a year and a half ago, but two boys are
still limping from untreated and painful injuries to their feet, and the
villagers are still traumatized.
They
recounted the story on a recent morning to a visitor, Channapha
Khamvongsa, an irrepressibly cheery Lao-American woman who for the past
decade has led a single-minded effort to rid her native land of millions
of bombs still buried here, the legacy of a nine-year American air
campaign that made Laos one of the most heavily bombed places on earth.
From 1964 to 1973, American warplanes conducted 580,000 bombing missions over Laos,
one of the most intensive air campaigns in the history of warfare. The
campaign is often called the Secret War because the United States did
not publicly acknowledge waging it.
The
targets were North Vietnamese troops — especially along the Ho Chi Minh
Trail, a large part of which passed through Laos — as well as North
Vietnam’s Laotian Communist allies.
Since the war’s end, more than 8,000 people have been killed and about 12,000 wounded in Laos by cluster bombs and other live, leftover ordnance.
Thanks
largely to Ms. Channapha’s lobbying, annual United States spending on
the removal of unexploded bombs in Laos increased to $12 million this
year from $2.5 million a decade ago.
“The
funding increase is almost single-handedly due to the dogged efforts of
Channapha,” said Murray Hiebert, an expert on Southeast Asia at the
Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. “She
operates from a tiny shoe-box operation in Washington with almost no
budget. Her only tools are her charm, conviction and persistence.”
Sam
Perez, a deputy assistant secretary of state, called Ms. Channapha “a
driving force behind the awareness raised and attention gained for
unexploded ordnance removal efforts in Laos.”
A
vast amount of unexploded ordnance remains in Laos, a mountainous and
landlocked former French colony. Clearance teams working across the
country pull hundreds of unexploded munitions and bomb fragments from
rice paddies and jungles every week. Last year alone, 56,400 munitions
were found and destroyed.
“This
country, every time I’ve been here, blows my mind,” said Tim Lardner, a
former British Army bomb disposal officer who has worked on clearing
unexploded ordnance from Laos and other countries for 25 years. “The
scale of the contamination is horrendous.”
Having
worked in many war-torn countries, including Afghanistan, Cambodia,
Angola and Mozambique, he added, “In terms of the amount still in the
ground, Laos is worse than any other country I’ve seen.”
Kingphet
Phimmavong, the coordinator of the Laotian government’s bomb clearance
efforts in Xieng Khouang Province, one of the most heavily bombed areas,
said he had found bombs in riverbeds, termite mounds and tangled in the
roots of a tree.
“They are everywhere,” he said.
Tragic
stories of bombs unexpectedly detonating are distressingly common. Mr.
Kingphet’s mother and brother were killed in 1976 when they were tilling
a rice paddy and struck a bomb with a hoe.
These
days bombs are most often detonated by children who play with them,
scavengers seeking scrap metal to sell and villagers who unwittingly
build cooking fires near where they are buried.
Three
years ago, Nengyong Yang, a farmer in a remote village in Xieng
Khouang, was chopping down a tree when a bomblet embedded in the tree
trunk exploded and blinded him.
Unable to farm, he later hanged himself, said Maw Khang, 32, his widow, who was left to raise their four children.
“I have to work in the fields, and there is no one to take care of the children,” she said.
Designed
to cause maximum casualties to troops, a cluster bomb splits in midair
and sprays hundreds of bomblets onto the ground. In Laos, many of these
bomblets did not explode for a variety of reasons, including muddy soil
that cushioned the impact. Experts estimate that around 30 percent of
the American cluster bombs dropped in Laos remain unexploded.
Despite
the scale of the bombing campaign, Ms. Channapha, 42, said she became
aware of it only as an adult. It was not discussed by her family, who
fled Laos in 1979 when she was 6, or in the Laotian community where she
grew up in Virginia.
“I
considered myself somewhat well-read and conscious of right and wrong,”
she said. “Yet this major piece of Lao-American history was unknown to
me.”
Ms.
Channapha said she was spurred into action when she came across a
collection of drawings of the bombings made by refugees and collected by
Fred Branfman, an antiwar activist who helped expose the Secret War.
In 2004, when Ms. Channapha founded an organization to raise awareness about unexploded ordnance, Legacies of War, she used the drawings in a traveling exhibition.
Her campaign was initially met with resistance, especially from within the Laotian diaspora in the United States.
Lao-Americans,
many of them aristocrats and high-ranking soldiers forced to flee after
the United States withdrew, were not inclined to help Communist-run
Laos. Many also wanted to leave the past behind.
“The
elders in the community were not supportive,” Ms. Channapha said. “They
had lost their land, their country, their homes and their status.”
So
she rebranded her campaign. Instead of describing it as “a project on
the secret U.S. bombing in Laos,” she called its mission “history,
healing, hope.”
She
brought over a young amputee from Laos who was born after the war and
who delivered a message of humanitarian need free from politics.
She
targeted members of Congress with large Laotian populations in their
districts. In 2010, she testified before Congress, urging more funding
for bomb clearance and assistance for victims.
And
the attitudes of Lao-Americans have changed in recent years as more
have returned to Laos, Ms. Channapha said. “As their own personal
relationship with the country was evolving and changing, so did their
opinion about what we were doing,” she said. “They were starting to
understand that it wasn’t about taking sides.”
Mr.
Kingphet, the ordnance clearance manager, praises Ms. Channapha’s
efforts, but he said the United States should do more. Many Americans
are still unaware of the war in Laos, he said.
“Some Americans come here and they are shocked at how many bombs were dropped,” he said.
The
United States provided roughly 30 percent of the $40 million that
charities and governments — including those of Australia, Ireland,
Japan, Norway and Switzerland — are contributing to clearance efforts
this year. But even with a surge of money, it will be decades before all
the unexploded bombs are removed from the Laotian countryside. In the
meantime, officials are traveling to remote corners of the impoverished
country and urging caution.
Houmphanh
Chanthavong, a government official who was among the group visiting
Houaykhay village, told residents of the painstaking process to remove
ordnance from the ground, the metal detectors and the clearance experts
who delicately dig for them.
“We keep on digging,” he said, “and we keep on finding more.”
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