~laos/phonsavan/bombs

A little background of Laos, if you dont already know. From 1964 to 1973, America engaged in a 'Secret War' with Laos. After signing an agreement stating that they explicitly would not get involved in 'ridding the world of evil communists' in Laos, they decide to bomb the crap out of it, whist all the time denying that they ever dropped a single bomb in Laos. (this was all during the Vietnam war. Laos borders Vietnam). The US conducted 580,344 missions over Laos dropping 2 million tonnes of bombs!!! Laos is tiny, check the map. Lao people are lovely people. They live simple lives, mainly farmers. Most live in tiny villages in huts made of bamboo and wood, and because they had a communist government, the US decide to kill everyone!

The guesthouse in Phonsavan showed a BBC documentary on Laos and the bombing called "Bombies". It is pretty horific. All around Northern laos, you can see remnants of US fighter jets, bomb shell casing, US fuel tankers... all engraved with the United States. Villagers build huts with the bomb shells, use them as bbqs for cooking, melt down the metal and make cuttlery, its crazy! But the worst thing about it all is the type of bomb that the US used. They used a newly developed 'cluster bomb', desigened for the single purpose - to kill many people over a large area. A cluster bomb consists of 500 tennis ball sized 'bombies', each containing 350 ball bearings, some gun powder and a fuse. When dropped from a plane, they scatter all over the land and explode, killing only civilians... the bigger bombs were used to destroy towns/buildings.

Tragically, 30% of the bombies did not explode, leaving millions of mines lying all over the countryside. The smallest movement sets them off. For the last 20 years, Lao people have been forced to harvest fields littered with mines, suffering deaths and limb loss on a weekly basis. Because the bombies are coloured yellow, many children die picking them up thinking they are fruit, or a ball to play with.

The saddest thing for me, is watching school children singing songs that go something like this "If we see a bombie, we must run and get help, we must never pick it up, otherwise we will die, because America bombed our country etc etc etc". Kids should not have to sit in school and sing about bombs, they should be singing about happy stuff... no?