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Bombs in Laos
A Deadly Harvest
At top, bombs, mortars and rockets on display beneath a painting of the war against the US, in a Phonsavanh guesthouse.
At left, a young man leans up against a dud bomb used as a fence post in a northern village.
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By Karen J. Coates
Between 1964 and 1973, in an offshoot of the Vietnam War, the US military dumped 4 billion pounds of bombs on Laos. Laos is the most heavily bombed place on earth. Up to 30 percent of those bombs did not detonate, and they remain in the soil today, covering more than 35,000 square miles of the country.
Every week, Laotians continue to die while plowing their fields, playing in their yards, tending their cattle. Jerry and I have visited remote villages along the old Ho Chi Minh Trail, where a woman dug up a toxic phosphorous bomb in her front yard; it remains there because the provincial bomb removal team does not know how to remove it.
Jerry and I have seen US parachute flare canisters used as rice pails. We have seen bomb casings still stamped with their serial numbers and origins in Pine Bluff, Arkansas. We have seen live bombs in the front yard, in the back yard, within meters of a baby’s bassinet.
As villagers clear new land for planting, the fires cause the bombs to explode — so many bombs, it still sounds like a war rages on. As the price of scrap metal rises, villagers head to the fields, gambling their lives on the chance to find valuable metal. In April, one villager lost both hands. But most often, the victims end up dead.
A boy lies in a cot in the Phonsavanh hospital, severely injured after hitting a buried bomb while plowing his family's fields.
