Day 59 Mr. Seeun, the blacksmith’s brother, is constructing a house. He asked our team to clear the lot where he and his friends are currently building the traditional, stilted, thatched-roof, bamboo-walled structure. I had to turn down his request. Our project just doesn’t have the funding to permit us to conduct time-intensive, “sub-surface”...
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Day 58 Yai’s been gone for two days and phone contact with him has been frustrating. He’s in Odumxai within easy range of cell phone towers so the problem must be on my end. The three blind villagers that he’s guiding left here smiling, waving, and calling “bye-bye” to my camera, all happy to...
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Day 57 We destroyed the 750 today. My first decision of the day was whether to work the exploder and detonate the charge, or position myself where I could film the demolition. When we destroy a big bomb, we can certainly feel the concussion and hear the explosion but we usually work blind because...
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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...
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Last month, we spent nine days in the field with Jim Harris’s team in rural Phongsali province. We camped at the local dispensary and showered with cold river water, which was piped uphill to the village. The team hired two young women to cook, clean and launder. Our meals were served communally, outside, on...
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Day 55 Karen and Jerry are getting some excellent interviews and photographs. I’ve made Yai available to serve as their interpreter, but that offer expires within hours, as Yai departs later this afternoon for a two-day trip, via local buses, to the city of Oudomxai, capital of Oudomxai Province. Yai’s guiding three visually impaired...
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From 1964 to 2008, more than 50,000 Lao people were victims of accidents involving unexploded ordnance (UXO), according to the first survey report of the National Regulatory Authority (NRA) for UXO/Mine Action Sector in Laos. NRA representatives, senior officials from government and international organizations, donors and NGO operators gathered at the...
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During Project Phongsali we found numerous cluster bomblets designated the “M-83” in and around Sop Houn Village. This device has three fuses: an impact fuse, a mechanical timing fuse, and an anti-handling fuse. Containing over 200 grams of high explosive, they pack greater destructive power than most other, more frequently encountered, cluster munitions. The...
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Day 54 Yai and I woke up this morning with the clearance team breathing down our necks. They have caught up with us, and unless we come up with more ordnance, they’ll be standing idle, waiting for an assignment. Then, after breakfast, Mr. Deng walked into camp and asked us to deal with a...
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Day 53 We were back out to Mr. Khambao’s rice field today. We’ve nicknamed him “Mr. Magnet” for his propensity for attracting ordnance. We’re finding numerous American rockets and cluster bombs on the hills above his farm, but also a few Vietnamese weapons. Obviously his farm was a hot spot during the war —...
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