A horrific image haunts me: my father amputating a little girl’s leg to stop her from bleeding to death. The girl attended the same village school as my siblings and me. She was about my age, around 5. As blood flowed from her tiny body, my father’s snow-white lab coat turned bright crimson. The girl’s cries and her mother’s painful screams terrified me. I stood frozen, unable to turn away until my mother swept me to the safety of our home.
My father worked on countless victims of unexploded ordnance, or UXO—bombs that failed to detonate when they hit the ground—throughout Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam in the 1970s and ’80s. My mother altered clothes for people who lost their limbs. My parents’ work resonates with my own efforts leading Legacies of War, an advocacy and educational organization addressing the long unfinished legacies of war in Laos.
Laos has earned the title of being the most heavily bombed country per capita in history. For nine straight years, from 1964 to 1973, Americans carried out 580,000 bombing missions in a country roughly the size of Oregon. The equivalent of a planeload of bombs dropped every eight minutes, 24 hours a day. This carpet-bombing campaign was all part of the U.S. effort to destroy the supply routes of the North Vietnamese troops along the Ho Chi Minh Trail, which runs the entire length of the border between Laos and Vietnam. Despite having signed the 1962 Geneva Accords, which promised Laos’ neutrality in the war, the U.S. and North Vietnam interfered in Laos’ sovereignty, using force to illegally enter the territory and “impairing the peace.” The violent interference was dubbed the American Secret War, and Laos was collateral damage.
Up to 30% of the bombs the U.S. dropped in Laos failed to detonate, leaving the landscape littered with 80 million UXO, and rendering the land dangerous and unusable. Fifty years have passed and, according to the National Regulatory Authority for UXO in Laos less than 10% of the contaminated areas in Laos have been cleared.
These UXO are war trash laying dormant—material reminders of a brutal time, waiting patiently, ready to be torn open once again, prolonging the conflict and its casualties. The twin efforts to clean up UXO, and to recognize crimes committed require us to hold on to the memory of this war and to remember better, more fully, more publicly.