Project Phongsali: In the spirit of “swords into plowshares” a local blacksmith turns bomb fragments into useful tools.

The village blacksmith makes hoes, knives, machetes, and other useful tools out of old bomb shards.

Day 56

Our guys have collected a lot of bomb fragments during their work in the schoolyard, and Jerry Redfern, my friend the visiting photojournalist, decided to take a couple of the larger shards to the village blacksmith for him to fashion into knives and a machete.

The bombs America dropped here were made from high-grade steel; knives made from fragments of old bombs will hold a wonderful edge through all kinds of use and abuse.  With 58 bomb craters in this village alone, this blacksmith will never run out of fragments to heat in his forge and hammer into tools. (In most villages, the smith’s anvil is an old American artillery shell).  Watching the blacksmith work, one can’t help but consider the biblical adage of turning swords into plowshares.  In this village, it’s bombs into farm tools.