Project Phongsali: Trying to destroy bombs without disturbing village events.

Trying to show respect for village customs we must work around weddings, festivals and funerals.

Day 39

There is a wedding in the village today, and since today is also Women’s Day, a national holiday, few people are holding to their usual work schedule.  Women are supposed to have a light day. I’ve heard it said that husbands are supposed to cook and clean, but take my word for it: it ain’t gonna happen. Schools close on this day, as will any government office or business in town, should a government office or business someday open.

I was awakened about 4:00 AM when the father of the bride, our neighbor here at the camp, slaughtered a pig.  The pig did not go gently without complaint.  Therefore, at 6:00 AM I was well awake and privileged to witness ten men attack various quarters of the beast with foot-long knives; they hacked every big piece into many little pieces and started to cook not one or two, but several pork dishes over open fires.

In the largest wok I’ve ever seen, a couple of men were frying hand-sized chunks of pigskin in bubbling pork fat.  At another fire several men were tending a steaming pot in which seasoned chunks of pork roiled. At yet another fire, men and boys grilled spitting skewers of pork over red-hot coals.   Lao popular music blared over loudspeakers as women set tables and arranged chairs.  In place of table clothes the women spread broad, glossy, green banana leaves on the tabletops.

Our team was just eating breakfast, but the wedding festivities were well underway.  By that, I mean to say that some villagers were already drunk.

We had several demolitions planned, but we stopped by the party on our way out of town.  Yai assured the parents of the bride that we were going to work far from town to avoid creating any ear-splitting explosions that might disturb a ceremony, frighten guests, or rob the party of festive spirit.

We did three demolitions in the morning: a BLU 26, or “bombie” in a garden, two M-83 cluster munitions in a rice field, and a rocket on the bank of the river.  The rocket was somewhat of a surprise package; its casing was too corroded for us to decipher any markings that would indicate whether it held high explosive or white phosphorous.  The landscape being so dry at the moment, we were hoping for explosive and not phosphorous.

At a demolition yesterday we destroyed a canister of white phosphorous and the whole team had to work like the devil to put out several grass fires that resulted.  White phosphorous is nasty stuff if it lands on you; they say a teaspoonful will burn clear through a human hand.  There’s nothing quite like it to put the fear of fire in a person’s mind: images of hideous burns; cries of unremitting pain.  I suppose that’s what some mad scientist had in mind when he invented a weapon using it.

When we returned to camp for lunch, the wedding party was in full form, with hundreds of villagers seated at tables and chairs borrowed from the local elementary school, feasting on the dishes we saw prepared in the morning.

Our entire team had been on notice for days that we were not just welcome, but expected to attend.  (Of course, with the invitation came the cultural expectation that we would each make a monetary gift to the bride.)

So… we lunched at the party and did our best to drink as little lao-lao as we could.  At 1:00 PM we politely extracted ourselves, explaining that, wedding or no wedding, Women’s Day or no Women’s Day, we had to get back to work.  Suspecting that the guys would have had something comparable to the corporate, two-martini lunch, I planned afternoon activities that would not involve ordnance.  Instead, we met with the naiban, the head teacher, and some village elders to discuss the possibility of expanding the school playground by clearing an adjacent land parcel of scrub, and then clearing the area of UXO.