Project Phongsali 2011: Some village “bomb experts” handle UXO for gain. Some take risks to keep others safe.
For nearly forty years Mr. Khangbao has had to deal with ordnance as best he could. He's learned to be daring and self reliant. It's difficult to persuade people like him to not handle UXO when they believe that the lives of their family members might be at stake.
Week Two
Day Thirteen:
Mrs. Khangbao, a genial, peaceable soul, somehow ended up married to one of the most daring village bomb experts that I’ve ever met. She jokes that long ago she conceded defeat, and no longer struggles to drag him with her into old age. Now, both physically and emotionally, she distances herself from his projects and simply hopes for the best. Last year, our team tagged her husband “Mr. Magnet” out of admiration for his uncanny ability to locate all manner of deadly refuse.
Mr. Khangbao has extensive land holdings in and around Sop Houn and his many varied avocations keep his feet constantly in contact with contaminated land. He grows rice and cassava as his principal cash crops but he also raises chickens, ducks, cows and pigs. In addition, every day he roams the forest that surrounds his farmstead, collecting firewood, hunting game, and foraging for wild foods.
For a sixty-five year old, Khangbao has remarkable agility and impressive stamina. He consistently takes the straightest line between two points even if it necessitates wadding streams, climbing fences or blazing trail with his machete, a tool he fashioned out of a bomb shard at his own forge.
Khangbao usually shows good sense in deciding what ordnance he’ll handle and what he’ll leave undisturbed. While he might dismantle an occasional rocket to harvest explosive, he’ll never crack open a bombie. He might roll a 500-pound bomb to a more convenient location; he might even saw one in half. But, he knows better than to try and chisel its fuse from the casing. Given the fact that Khangbao and his fellow villagers have had no choice but to deal as best they can with problem ordnance for the last forty years, I find his audacity understandable, if not particularly admirable.
On this day, Khangbao was out of character. He was actually sheepish about the UXO that he led us to see. Before stepping off on our hike, he apologized saying, “I know you will be unhappy that I moved this one. I knew it was dangerous. But, it was in my garden where the grandchildren work and I had to keep them safe”.
Sure enough, the device he found and moved was a sub-munition that we always leave undisturbed. It’s a BLU (Bomb Live Unit) 3-B, the bright yellow, aluminum-finned cluster bomblet that villagers around here have nicknamed “the pineapple” for its resemblance to that fruit.
We felt compelled to gently lecture Khangbao, emphasizing that he could have left the bomblet where he found it, and protected others by stacking sandbags, rocks, or logs over it. In turn, he told us that he considered those choices, but was afraid that a conspicuous pile of rocks, logs or sandbags would only alert children or scrap collectors to the bomb’s location and entice the curious to explore.
Khangbao moved the bomblet to a deep crevice in the bank above the stream that irrigates his rice field. It’s well out of reach by his grandchildren, but next week, when we return to conduct the demolition our team will have to work in knee-deep water to set a charge above it.