Laos: The Most Bombed Country on Earth, and Still Beautiful

Between 1964 and 1973, American aircraft dropped two million tonnes of ordnance on Laos. This included approximately 270 million cluster bomblets, of which an estimated 80 million failed to explode on impact and remain in the soil, in the rivers, in the fields, and under the floors of houses, across approximately a quarter of the country’s landmass. Laos is the most heavily bombed country per capita in the history of aerial warfare. The bombing was conducted largely in secret, authorised by successive American administrations without congressional approval and without public acknowledgement, because it was technically illegal under the terms of the Geneva Accords that had established Laos as a neutral state.

The strategic logic was the Ho Chi Minh Trail, the supply network that North Vietnam used to move troops and material through Laos and Cambodia to communist forces fighting in South Vietnam. By bombing the trail relentlessly, the American military hoped to cut the supply line and starve the southern insurgency. It did not work. The trail was not a fixed infrastructure but a network of paths, depots, and improvised routes that could be rerouted around damage faster than aircraft could inflict it, and the Laotian population bore the consequences of a military campaign that had no formal relationship to their own country’s war. The CIA simultaneously ran a covert ground operation, arming and training Hmong tribesmen in the northern highlands to fight the Pathet Lao, the communist faction that was the domestic party in the Laotian civil conflict, producing a war within the secret war that cost the Hmong community tens of thousands of lives and created a refugee crisis that sent hundreds of thousands of Laotians into exile in Thailand.

270 million

This included approximately 270 million cluster bomblets, of which an estimated 80 million failed to explode on impact and remain in the soil, in the...

The unexploded ordnance kills and maims people in Laos today. The figures are difficult to establish precisely, but roughly 20,000 casualties have been documented since the end of the bombing in 1973, and the rate, though declining as clearance operations expand and awareness programmes reach more communities, remains significant. Children are disproportionately represented in the casualty figures because the cluster bomblets, which are roughly the size of a tennis ball and which local children call bombies, resemble toys or interesting objects to someone who does not know what they are. The subsistence farming communities that live on the affected land cannot simply leave it; the land is where their food comes from. Scrap metal collectors earn their living by finding and selling unexploded ordnance, which is both a survival strategy and a cause of death.

I went to Laos to attend the wedding of Noy’s brother, which is not the context in which most people encounter the country’s history with American bombs. It was beautiful in the way that countries where the development pressure is low tend to be beautiful: the Mekong moving through a landscape that the bombing did not reach in the south, the French colonial architecture of Vientiane sitting with a tropical ease that cities built by the French tend to develop in the decades after the French leave, the food produced by a country whose location between China, Vietnam, Thailand, Myanmar, and Cambodia has given it access to techniques from all of them. The monks in the morning in Luang Prabang, the alms-giving ceremony at dawn where the saffron robes make a line through the street that photographs cannot quite capture because they flatten the light.

What the beauty and the bombing share is the same geography: the same rivers, the same limestone karst, the same hills that contain the Plain of Jars in Xieng Khouang province, where thousands of stone jars of uncertain purpose from an unknown civilisation sit in a landscape that also contains more unexploded cluster bombs than anywhere else in the country. You can visit the Plain of Jars on marked paths, because the paths have been cleared and the area immediately around them has been swept. You stay on the paths. The landscape around the paths is not safe. This is what the most bombed country on earth looks like forty years after the bombing: not destroyed, not recovered, but carrying its history in the ground beneath its feet, literally, in the form of objects that explode when disturbed.

The United States provided roughly nine million dollars a year to Laotian UXO clearance in 2013. The country receives about thirty million in total international funding annually for this purpose. The scale of the problem, covering an area of roughly ninety thousand square kilometres, means that at current rates the clearance process will take centuries. This is the arithmetic of the secret war: nine years of bombing, decades of dying, centuries of cleaning up.

20,000

The figures are difficult to establish precisely, but roughly 20,000 casualties have been documented since the end of the bombing in 1973, and the rate,...

dave@launchcx.com

A British ginger seeing the world one questionable decision at a time. Based wherever the wifi works.

Laos: The Most Bombed Country on Earth, and Still Beautiful

“The monks in the morning in Luang Prabang, the alms-giving ceremony at dawn where the saffron robes make a line through the street that photographs cannot quite capture because they flatten the light.”

This is what the most bombed country on earth looks like forty years after the bombing: not destroyed, not recovered, but carrying its history in the ground beneath its feet, literally, in the form of objects that explode when disturbed.

Laos

You might also like

Detours and Decisions: Why the Philippines Came First

Komodo: The Dragon, the Island, and the Wallace Line

Makati: The Geometry of Inequality

This is what the most bombed country on earth looks like forty years after the bombing: not destroyed, not recovered,
but carrying its history in the ground beneath its feet, literally, in the form of objects that explode when disturbed.