During the Vietnam war, Laos was officially a neutral country. In practice this meant everybody could do whatever the fuck they wanted on Lao territory. The Vietcong used part of Eastern Laos for their Ho Chi Minh trail, traficking arms and other goods through the jungle. As a result, the US decided to bomb the hell out of them.
Between 1964 and 1973, the US Air Force flew 580,944 sorties, dropping 2,093,100 tons of bombs on Laos. On average that’s a plane load of bombs every 9 minutes for 9 years. More bombs were dropped in Laos than during the whole Second World War.The total cost of the operation was 7.2 billion dollars, or 2 million dollars a day. The Ho Chi Minh trail never stopped operating.
It was during this time that the military started experimenting with a new type of bomb, the so-called cluster bomb, a large shell containing thousands of smaller bombs (“bombies”) the size and shape of a tennis ball or a small pineapple. During the secret war, an estimated 260 million of these bombies were dropped on Laos. It is estimated that about 30% of these never exploded, which means there were about 78 million unexploded ordnances (“UXO”) left in Laos.
Since the war, more than 12.000 people have been killed by UXO. They are still surfacing today, and it will take decades before the threat is completely gone.
COPE is an organisation that helps to rehabilitate victims of UXO in Laos by offering prosthetics, physiotherapy etc. I visited them in the capital Vientiane. Their highly informative museum describes the various types of cluster bombs, the danger for the locals (many people in rural areas were salvaging scrap metal from bombs to recycle it in their homes or just to resell it, often at great personal risk), and the various activities COPE undertakes in order to re-integrate UXO victims in society. It was a highly moving exhibit.
In the museum, I started talking to this young boy, who lost his eyesight and both his hands after picking up a bombie. (Somehow, he still managed to use a mobile phone.) We were talking for quite a while, his English was pretty good. And when I left, without a trace of irony, he said: “See you later!”
