Project Phongsali: In the dead of night, someone walks off with six landmines. Who? Why?

Day 61

Just before lunch a fellow led us up the steep hill behind his house to a bomb crater filled knee-deep with chopped corn stalks, his safe deposit box for ordnance that he finds in his garden or rice field.  His intent was to show us six identical items of UXO that he’d found the day before.  They were unusual to him and he couldn’t come up with a name for them: “Maybe bomb.  Maybe mortar.  Maybe rocket.”  I shouted to Yai, “Make certain that guy doesn’t touch anything!”

Yai, frustrated, shouted back, “I’ve told him three times!”

As those words hung in the air, the fellow dropped into the crater and started rooting through the stalks.  Immediately he was both puzzled and concerned.  He couldn’t find the items he was looking for.  In frustration, he lifted armfuls of stalks and tossed them left and right.

I insisted that Yai get the fellow out of the crater while I warned onlookers back from the rim.  We simply didn’t know enough about what the man was looking for to stand nearby as he rooted about.  Yai kept asking the fellow to stop.  The man continued to stomp around in disbelief.  His bombs, his rockets, his…whatever…were missing.

After a suspenseful minute the man surrendered and climbed out of the crater; he could not comprehend how his stuff, under his cornstalks, in his crater, buried just the night before, had suddenly gone missing.  He was reduced to speculation: “Maybe my wife moved them to keep them away from the children.”

Upon reflection, the man expanded his list of suspects: his wife might have moved the ordnance to protect the children; his father might have moved the items out of concern for the entire family; his ten-year-old son might have sold the ordnance to a Vietnamese scrap dealer for ice cream money.

“Ice cream money?” I asked.

The father nodded.  “Yes.  He buys ice cream.”

Someone was dispatched to fetch the wife.  When she arrived, sharing her husband’s disbelief, she dropped into the crater to search herself in case he had simply overlooked the stuff. (My mind flashed to a scene halfway around the world.  My wife, triumphantly holding a TV remote control before my face and exclaiming, “You were sitting on it!”)  Eventually, like her husband before her, the wife emerged empty handed.

For the moment, no one could locate the grandfather.  In the old man’s absence the full, bright light of suspicion was directed on the son, the ice cream lover, who was sweating enough bullets to buy a half-gallon of Ben and Jerry’s Chunky Monkey.  The boy couldn’t decide whether the best survival strategy was to affect ignorance, innocence, disbelief, or outrage.  (If I’d had sufficient Lao vocabulary I’d have insisted that the boy look me in the eye and give me a straight answer: yes, no, or maybe).

In the end, the kid got himself out of hot water by confessing to having lifted a single piece of ordnance.  The boy described the pilfered ordnance in such precise detail that his father was certain that it was an older item, not one of the recent additions to the crater.

(The piece the boy carried off was most likely a cluster bomblet called the BLU 24, a favorite among bomb fishermen for the ease of removing its fuse and detonator.  The boy made a convincing argument that that item was safe:  “Empty, for sure, because I could see inside.”)

At this point, to get a better picture of what we were searching for, we asked everyone on the scene who had seen the ordnance to give us every detail they could recollect.  Some spoke up; others squatted down and drew pictures in the sand.  At last, we got some useful information:

There were six items.  All found close to one another in a field.  The items were more round than long.  They were big, but not too big.  They were tall, but not too tall.  Shaped like paint can but not that big.  More like a cooking pot.  But not the big cooking pot.  The cooking pot that’s not so big.  But, not the small cooking pot either.  Yes, come to think of it, very much like a cooking pot.  Or, paint can.  But not the big paint can, the smaller one.  All six of them had parts sticking up.  Like a thumb, or a candle.

My stomach started to feel not so good.  I looked at Vilasack. Vilasack read my mind, nodded, and said the word I didn’t want to hear: “Landmine”.

After returning to camp we pulled our cheat sheets out of the file and looked for information on the M-16 anti-personnel mine.  Drawings, diagrams photographs, and written descriptions all confirmed details noted by the villagers.  The man who found the mines had dug them out, picked them up, inspected them, and then carted them home, all the while clueless about what they might be and how they might respond to tampering; he simply recognized the rusty objects as something alien to a rubber tree plantation and thought them best removed.

(The M-16 mine is not a common find here in Laos, and few self-proclaimed bomb experts would know how to approach disarming and dismantling them).

At this moment we are at a standstill.  Until the grandfather of the family is located and milked for clues, there’s no sense burning energy looking for the missing ordnance.  If the grandfather is as bewildered as everyone else, then the only plausible explanation is that someone picked up loose talk about UXO in the crater and came, in the dark of night, to heist them.  Perhaps the same person who removed the M-83 cluster bomblet from the hill above the school.

Clearly, someone does not want us doing demolitions near the village burial ground.  That, or someone is jealous of all the ordnance that we’ve destroyed and is trying to hoard items until we go home.  Go figure.

For a while, Sai was a prime suspect in the case of the missing landmines since in the past he has sold UXO to scrap dealers to get ice cream money.