Phonsavan: Modern Horrors

** Disclaimer: This post is not cheerful. If you're in a fragile mood or feeling bad about humanity today, you might want to skip it until later when you have a kitten close by or something. Fair warning. I'll also be simultaneously posting a much more upbeat, isn't-Southeast-Asia-charming post, so feel free to jump to that one. 

I'm not an historian. Any errors here are due to superficial research of complicated events. Please let me know about any grievous mistakes. And many of these photo aren't mine. It's probably pretty clear which ones. **

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"After such knowledge, what forgiveness?" -T.S. Eliot, Gerontion

The first time I heard about the C.I.A.'s Secret War on Laos wasn't while sitting in a high school or university classroom. It was sitting on my best friend's couch watching No Reservations, a travel and food show hosted by the inimitable Anthony Bourdain, who was traveling and eating in Laos that week. In a voice-over on top of black-and-white footage of bombs falling from a plane to explode on a jungle landscape, Bourdain said that between 1964 and 1973 the U.S. dropped two million tons of bombs on Laos. Pilots returning to their bases in Thailand after missions to Vietnam were encouraged to drop whatever explosives they hadn’t dropped on Vietnam on Laos. Just for the hell of it was implied.

As it turns out, the C.I.A.'s motivations in bombing Laos were more complicated than can be summed up in a thirty second voice over, or in this blog post. The U.S. military dropped some of those bombs partly because it was highly dangerous for American pilots to land a plane with explosives still underneath them. But mostly their motivation seems to have stemmed from the American fear of communism. 

Laos had been fighting a civil war since 1953 that looks, to this untrained eye, much like the Vietnamese civil war. A group of Viet Cong-supported rebels called the Pathet Lao camped in the north and squared off against the Royal Lao government, which was holding their ground in the south with the help of Western powers. As the Vietnam War escalated, it spilled over into Laos and complicated their slow-simmering conflict. Much of the infamous Ho Chi Minh trail, the Viet Cong supply line that brought people and supplies from north to south, flowed through the Lao countryside. There was in particular a lot of Pathet Lao and Viet Cong activity in the countryside of Xieng Khouang province, of which Phonsavan is the capital. 

So in spite of having attended the 1962 Geneva conference's Declaration on the Neutrality of Laos, which provided that the conference participants would respect the sovereignty, independence, neutrality, unity, and territorial integrity of the country, the U.S. dropped two million tons of American bombs on Laos over a period of nine years. It was the largest paramilitary operation in the history of the C.I.A., and it made Laos the most heavily bombed country per capita in the world. The number of bombs dropped averages out to one bombing raid every eight minutes. For nine years. The U.S. dropped more bombs on Laos than the entire allied forces dropped on Japan and Germany combined during all of World War II. 

Deactivated bombs outside a business in Phonsavan. 

Found in farmland. 

A massive bomb crater at the Plain of Jars. Probably thirty feet across. 

Jar split by a bomb.

But let's set that horror aside for a moment. The salient point today is that thirty percent of those two million tons of bombs (which seems excessive, no matter how you slice it), and which mostly killed farmers and villagers and women and children and old people hiding in caves, didn't explode forty years ago. So Laos, the 44th poorest nation in the world, the citizens of which are overwhelmingly subsistence farmers, is riddled with 600,000 tons of UXO, which stands for unexploded ordnance. Every fourth village is contaminated. 

A marker placed by MAG, the Mines Advisory Group. They remove mines and UXO all over the world. 

Walk only in between the white MAG markers. Anywhere else hasn't been cleared and is dangerous. 

The Lao countryside is full of artillery shells, anti-tank rockets, mortar rounds, and grenades. But the biggest problem Laos has is due to cluster bombs, massive missiles that contain hundreds of smaller explosives that scatter from the larger bomb. Those smaller bombs should have detonated shortly after their release from the larger bomb while in midair, but many failed to do so. 

The smaller bombs, colloquially known as bombies, are roughly the size of a tennis ball. Each bombie contains 300 metal fragments similar to ball bearings which scatter in all directions when the bombie is detonated.

Children are particularly at risk of injury or death from bombies. They mistake the bomb for a toy or a fruit, or they know what it is and are curious. But anyone can accidentally step on one, kick one, hit one with a hoe while farming, light a fire near or on top of one (this is especially common as it’s the accepted method of dealing with garbage), or drag one up from the river bottom with a fishing net.

Over 70% of Laotians are subsistence farmers. In the areas contaminated by UXO, they're afraid to farm the land because when people farm, they lose limbs. This is stagnating Laos’ already sluggish economic development.

The Mines Advisory Group has an office in Phonsavan, which I visited. Along with helpful displays that helped inform what I’ve written here, the employees kept a tally of people injured by UXO in the area in the past few months. Note that half of those injured are under the age of 18.  

MAG is one of a handful of clearance organizations in Laos, and they've been working here for the past 20 years. Clearing the land is a painstaking process that requires the utmost concentration; one wrong move could prove fatal. MAG can't respond to all the requests they receive to deal with bombs, so they focus on neutralizing explosives buried in farmland owned by impoverished farmers, in villages, and near main roads. Since MAG began work here in 1994, they've cleared and detonated 600,000 bombs from the Lao countryside. If work continues at the current pace, they estimate that Laos will be free of UXO in 2,250 years.

It wasn't until 1994 that the United States military acknowledged that the events of the secret war had taken place. They have never apologized.