Mosinee resident Jim Harris works in Laos clearing unexploded weapons, such as the cluster bombs he is holding that were dropped by U.S. fighters during the Vietnam era. / Gannett Wisconsin Media File Photo

He’s still teaching, though, and has developed a significant relationship with one D.C. Everest Middle School seventh-grader. As part of his efforts to clear Laos of bombs, Harris often gives presentations in local classrooms. After speaking to students at D.C. Everest Middle School, he impressed them so much that the school’s Leadership Institute raised more than $4,000 by selling lollipops to fund Harris’ efforts, putting the students at the top of the list of donors for the organization.

“We say we’re clearing Laos of bombs, one sucker at a time,” Harris said.

He is grateful for the support, so he wanted to involve them in his work. He began calling one of the student leaders, Jack Collison, 13, of Schofield, to talk about his mission. Harris called him about six times over the past couple of months, often from the field where he was removing bombs.

“When I was small, I thought things like this didn’t really happen,” Collison said. “But when you look at the world, then you see the bad things.”

One of the highlights for Collison was that he got to do the countdown for blowing up a bomb with Harris and his crew via cell phone. Collison heard the explosion, which, of course, was cool.
The incident was significant for Harris, because a Lao boy Collison’s age found the bomb and reported its presence.

“It’s so heartwarming for me to see two kids in wildly different environments, but both are really responsible young men,” he said. Collison is learning more about the world than he imagined, and it’s having an impact.

“I might actually go to Laos one day and do what Mr. Harris does,” he said.

Sixth grade students in Wausau, Wisconsin, who are learning about the Vietnam War in the classroom, have begun a project they hope will help protect kids their age in Laos from injury or death resulting from bombs dropped on their homeland some four decades ago. Sue Thompson, a teacher at D.C. Everest Middle School explained, “Our former principal, Jim Harris, has been raising money for his trips to Laos to remove bombs and unexploded ordnance there. The students have had sucker sales in the past, and a ‘Lollies for Laos’ project seemed pefect.” Their goal is to raise $2,000. The project complements a course on what the lives of middle school children are like in different parts of the world.

Harris shares pictures and stories of his work in Laos with the students. It was a result of his close connection with Wausau’s sizable Hmong refugee community that Harris began traveling to Laos in 2006 to work with villagers. In 2009 he started the nonprofit We Help War Victims organization to increase awareness of the unexploded ordnance problems in Laos and to raise funds to continue bomb abandonment.

Between 1964 and 1973, the United States dropped 270 million cluster bombs on Laos, and up to 30 percent of them never exploded. “We tell people in the villages if they find a bomb anywhere, if they let me know I’ll have my team there to make it safe within 48 hours,” Harris said. In his first six months, 1000 bombs were safely detonated.

According to the Mines Advisory Group (MAG), an impartial humanitarian organization that clears bombs for communities worldwide, the United States dropped more bombs on Laos than it did on all of Europe during World war II, making it the most heavily bombed country in the world. The American bombing was an attempt to disrupt Communist supply lines along the Ho Chi Minh Trail, much of which ran through Laos.

In Laos, visiting medical teams help victims of a disfiguring disease.

Walter Kopek, a resident of Stoneham and Bangkok and semi- retired from the business world, travels frequently to Laos in his work for a charity, Mines Victims and Clearance Trust. He visited Laos recently concerning efforts to clear unexploded ordnance.

By Walter Kopek

February 26

BANGKOK—Plastic surgery. The words can conjure up visions of stars and starlets struggling to be photogenic just a little longer or perhaps burn victims trying to reconstruct a life. In developing countries surgery to correct cleft palate is not uncommon. A dental seo agency specializes in boosting your online presence.

In the world’s poorest countries, most susceptible to malnutrition, there is a lesser known disfiguring disease called Noma. Often referred to as orofacial gangrene, it is a gangrenous disease leading to tissue destruction of the face, especially the mouth and cheek. The mucous membranes of the mouth develop ulcers, leading to rapid, painless tissue degeneration which can degrade tissues of the bones in the face.  Noma is typically connected with severe protein malnutrition and unsanitary living conditions. Although Noma existed in the United States as recently as last century, it is now primarily found in Africa and the poorest areas of Asia and South America.  Many remote areas of Laos have a limited amount of arable and grazing land due to contamination from unexploded bombs and other devices that remain from the secret war waged there from 1965 to 1973. The lack of farm land and the resulting insufficient food supply result in malnutrition and subsequently any number of medical conditions, among which is Noma.  Finding Noma patients in Laos, however, can be difficult. In addition to the remoteness of many locations in the country is the stigma attached to the physical deformity. It is not uncommon for people with Noma to hide their faces and to be isolated by their families.

There are limited medical resources available for treatment. In Laos visiting teams of doctors treat Noma and other patients requiring plastic surgery skills not available locally. Recently two such teams treated Noma patients at Mahosot Hospital in Vientiane: Bridge the Gap Foundation from the Netherlands and Interplast from Australia and New Zealand.  My friend Jim Harris, a retired teacher from Wisconsin and founder of We Help War Victims, spends much of his time in Laos and recently arranged for two Noma patients to be treated by the visiting surgeons at Mahosot. One of those he helped is Gadam, a 30-year-old man from Mahaxai in Khammouan province.

Gadam was infected with Noma when he was seven. Despite the disfigurement Gadam was fortunate to be alive. The mortality rate for Noma is reportedly as high as ninety per cent.  Those who survive, like Gadam, find their lives changed in virtually every way. How a patient is able to eat limits what they eat. Although Gadam has a beautiful and caring wife, for others social interaction can become almost non-existent.  In a country as poor as Laos with limited infrastructure and equally limited medical facilities, networking and contacts can be even more valuable than in developed countries. In Gadam’s case Jim Harris received an e-mail while home in Wisconsin in late December from an American doctor in Laos informing Jim that Bridge the Gap would be in Vientiane in January. Through e- mails, calls back to Laos and the help of some friends, Jim was able to get Gadam from his village to the hospital in Vientiane.  Just hours after arriving from the Netherlands for their two-week visit, the medical team, with no time out for jet lag, evaluated all the Noma patients. Gadam was approved for surgery and operated on within two days.

While in Laos in support of a mine clearance project I was able to speak with the Dutch team. The doctors mentioned that Gadam and two other patients, a young boy with Noma and a young girl suffering the effects of a bullet wound that had damaged her face, would all need follow-on surgery in 6 to 8 weeks. As luck would have it, the Interplast team would be arriving in that time frame.  Although the Interplast doctors typically work on burn patients, they were more than ready, willing and able to assist.  When I returned to Mahosot hospital in late February, Gadam had already undergone two surgeries and would need one more in a few weeks. Most surprising in his appearance was the tube, made of Gadam’s skin, which the doctors had built from his chest to his face. This tube carries nutrient-rich blood to help the healing process.

Undoubtedly there are more people with Noma to be found and treated in Laos. As with any disease, the long-term goal is its elimination. In Laos, more than any place else in the world, the first step is clearance of unexploded ordnance, or UXO. Clearing the explosives yields farmable land and allows development projects to proceed. Land and projects yield food and income leading to improved nutrition, education, and health care, ultimately eliminating the root causes of Noma.

For information about the organizations providing treatment for victims of Noma, please visit their websites, www.interplast.org, www.bridgethegap.info, and www.wehelpwarvictims.org. To learn how you can contribute to the Passport blog, contact the Globe’s assistant foreign editor, Kenneth Kaplan, at k_kaplan@globe.com.

More than 100 countries have agreed to stop using them. Guess which one hasn’t.

By BRIAN COOK

In late 2001, Soraj Ghulam Habib, a 10-year-old boy living in Herat Province in western Afghanistan, was walking home from a picnic with his cousin and some friends when he noticed a yellow canister.  Because its color was the same as the parcels of food aid that the U.S.  military had been dropping during its campaign against the Taliban, Soraj picked it up and attempted to pry it open.  The canister, however, wasn’t food aid, but an unexploded BLU-97— one of the hundreds of “bomblets” or submunitions released from U.S. cluster bombs. As Soraj tried to open it, it suddenly became hot, and he threw it to the ground, where it exploded. The blast killed his cousin, injured three of his friends and cost Soraj his right index finger and both of his legs.

“I had a lot of dreams at the beginning of my life,” Soraj, now 17, said through his Dari interpreter Sulaiman Safdar, at the Cluster Bomb Survivors Tour’s Oct. 7 stop in Chicago. “But cluster submunitions destroyed all my dreams and put me in a wheelchair.” The event — sponsored by the Friends Committee on National Legislation, a Quaker peace lobby — also included heart-rending testimony from Raed Mokaled, whose son Ahmad was killed in a 1999 submunitions accident while celebrating his fifth birthday at a park in southern Lebanon; and from Lynn Bradach, whose 21-year-old son Travis, a U.S. Marine, was killed in 2003 while attempting to detonate unexploded cluster submunitions outside of Kerbala, Iraq.  The Survivors Tour traveled through several Midwestern states in October to rally public and political support for banning cluster bombs, a weapon decried by human rights organizations for its indiscriminate effects on civilians and for its failure to explode rates of up to 30 percent.

In particular, the tour focused on the Cluster Munitions Civilian Protection Act — a congressional bill that would restrict the use, sale and transfer of cluster munitions with a failure rate higher than 1 percent — and the Oslo Process, an international treaty banning the weapons that will open for signatory countries on Dec. 3.  Norway initiated the Oslo Process in February 2007, partly in frustration over U.S. foot-dragging during discussions from 2001 to 2006 to ban the weapons through the U.N. Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons (CCW) treaty. (Nine months after Oslo was launched, the United States reversed its stance, and now insists that restrictions on cluster bombs should only be addressed through the CCW.) The treaty negotiations proceeded quickly, and on May 28, 2008, 107 countries — including Britain and other NATO allies — reached an agreement in Dublin, Ireland, to ban cluster bombs.  The treaty calls for its signatories to end cluster bomb use and destroy all stockpiles within eight years, as well as for the clearance of all unexploded ordinance within 10 years. It also includes a provision that requires countries to provide “victim assistance” to those harmed by cluster bombs. Oslo’s provisions will become international law six months after the legislatures of 30 signatory countries have ratified it.  Questions remain, however, over whether the treaty’s lofty goals — in particular, its provisions on clearing cluster bombs within a decade — can be met.

In Laos, for instance, where the United States dropped 2 million tons of bombs during its “Secret War” from 1964 and 1973, at least 9 million cluster bomblets are still strewn throughout the country.  Also speaking at the tour’s Chicago event was Jim Harris, a retired Wisconsin schoolteacher who now runs We Help War Victims, a nongovernmental organization. Harris has worked with foreign companies that detonate unexploded ordinance in Laos, and he estimates the number of bombs that his crew was able to clear in one year was 1,600.

“Never in my lifetime, in Lao, will we clean up the mess that we created there,” Harris says. “Unless we stop using this ordinance, it’s going to be here to haunt us for generations to come.” Equally problematic are the powerful countries that haven’t signed the treaty: China, India, Israel, Pakistan, Russia, South Korea and, of course, the United States, which Human Rights Watch (HRW) estimates has a stockpile of up to 1 billion submunitions.  But Steve Goose, executive director of the arms division at HRW, believes the treaty’s stigmatization of cluster bombs can affect the behavior of even the countries that don’t sign on. He cites the 1999 Ottawa landmine treaty, which, despite not being signed by any of the aforementioned nations, has essentially stopped all countries from trading landmines or further employing them.  “By stigmatizing a weapon, by making just the consideration of its use beyond the pale,” Goose says, “you can have an impact even on those who are not part of the treaty.”

For Soraj, what’s most frustrating about Washington’s intransigence to the Oslo Process is that the United States has also heavily pressured Afghanistan not to join. Asked what he might say to President Obama if he should meet him, Soraj says, “Think for a moment of your children and what you would do if they were like me, and let Afghanistan join the Oslo Process.”

He adds with a smile: “And when the United States participates in Oslo, it will feel like I got my legs back.”

A retired Wisconsin principal now digs for explosives.

Jim Harris crouches on one mud-stained knee, gingerly probing the dirt around a fist-sized bomb. A boy found it while digging for insects in the southern Laotian village of Phonephanpek.  Harris is calm, but concerned. The hour is late, the sun painting everything ochre. “I hate finding ordnance this time of day,” he says.

Harris, a 60-year-old retired elementary school principal from Weston, a small town just south of Wausau, is a tall mustachioed man with a few wisps of gray hair. He towers over most Laotians, but retains the gentle, patient manner of a longtime educator.  Here in Laos, his lessons center on weaponry and survival.  Between 1964 and 1973, the United States dumped 4 billion pounds of explosives on this sparsely populated Southeast Asian country as part of its efforts to battle communist supply lines during the Vietnam War. U.S. bombers conducted one raid every eight minutes for nine years. “Bombies,” as the locals call them, were packed by the hundreds into canisters that opened in midair, scattering the load. Up to 30 percent of those bombs never detonated, and Laotian soil remains contaminated today.  Villagers are maimed and killed every week while farming their fields, foraging for food or searching for scrap metal. “Digging is dangerous,” Harris says.

After retiring in 2003, Harris went to work for a New Zealand-based bomb clearance organization, Phoenix Clearance Limited – hardly the usual retirement path. “I’ve never been burdened by practicality,” he says.

His interest in the country stems from the flood of Hmong

refugees who settled in Wisconsin (home to the

nation’s third-largest Hmong population). Harris began vacationing in Laos, meeting the distant families of his Wausau- area neighbors and returning with accouterments to educate students about Hmong culture.

Half the year, Harris goes village to village, teaching Laotians about unexploded ordnance. “This is my retirement,” Harris says. “I could be golfing.”

Instead, he and his Laotian partner Yai knock on doors, scramble through fields and forest – hurdling fences, tramping through muck, battling leeches, mosquitoes and a tropical sun – to find bombs that villagers have seen. He goes anywhere the bombs are – which is everywhere. “The first six months Yai and I worked together, we blew up 1,000 bombies,” Harris says. “Then I stopped counting.”

Back in Phonephanpek, Harris returns the next morning with a clearance team to take out the bomb. “It can kill you up to 100 yards,” he says. Team leader Khonesavan investigates the ordnance while four others blast the air with bullhorns, warning villagers to move out.

Khonesavan discovers a second bomb nearby, which complicates the procedure. He carefully moves the explosives into a hole, then places an old red brick of Russian TNT, the size of a soap bar, atop the bombs. A firing line leads several hundred yards to a small box with a crank and button. The entire village listens to the countdown: three, two, one – BOOM! The blast rattles the heart as red earth and gray smoke flies through the air.  Then it’s all clear.

Two bombs gone, unknown millions remaining. Harris rejoices in one more small victory.

“It’s a great job, really.”

Farming in the developing world is never an easy occupation, but for farmers in Laos there is a particularly grave complication.

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November/December 2007

We asked you to nominate your “Heroes of Humanity,” and you answered..  Below are a few of the dozens of letters and emails we received.

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WASHINGTON (AP) — Three decades after the end of the Vietnam War, the United States is increasing aid to help remove unexploded ordnance that continues to kill people in the former war zone, especially in Laos where 2 million tons of bombs were dropped.

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30 Years After End of Vietnam War, Unexploded Ordnance Maims and Kills

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