Very early in the Vietnam War American military planners considered using our ground forces in a blocking action to stop the flow of soldiers and supplies down the Ho Chi Minh Trail.  Instead, the United States attempted to halt traffic through aerial interdiction.  We bombed peaks and valleys along the trail to the limit of our technology and treasure, lost numerous planes and pilots in the effort, but never appreciably staunched the flow of men, women and material moving south.

The Vietnamese used low-tech strategies that fit the environment.  Early on, they pushed supplies forward on reinforced bicycles.  (The record bike load weighed over nine hundred pounds and took two men to manage.)  Later, the Vietnamese sent convoys of trucks down the trail, driven by men so familiar with the route that they could maneuver through hazardous segments in the dark of night without using their lights. (Sometimes, women dressed in white garments would serve as human road markers so drivers could more easily detect the edge of the road).

The Vietnamese cut multiple roads through the forest so if bombing cut one segment, traffic could be quickly re-directed to an alternative route. By war’s end, the trail consisted of over 12,000 miles of interlaced roads, trails, footpaths and waterways.

The Vietnamese mobilized thousands of workers and assigned individual crews responsibility to keep just one, small segment of the trail in passable condition.  Working with hand tools alone, a crew could, in a single day, fill bomb craters measuring 15 feet deep and 75 feet across, frustrating American plans to dam traffic and create convenient pools of targets.

Vietnamese soldiers climbed to the top of trees that bordered roads and wove branches together to create a canopy so trucks could travel undetected below.  They laid bridges across streams, but just beneath the water’s surface so they could not be seen by American planes overhead.

Late in the war, to fuel truck convoys, the Vietnamese ran plastic pipe linking a series of pumping stations that dotted nearly the full length of the trail.  If American bombers made a lucky hit on the pipeline workers quickly repaired the damaged segment and soon had fuel flowing again. (In those days, with existing technology, it took more luck than skill to hit a target the size of a four-inch-wide pipe!)

The United States, in frustration, attempted bazaar experiments.  We dropped laundry detergent on steep segments of the trail hoping that the resulting mud would be too slippery for trucks to manage .  We planted listening devices that we hoped would detect the sound of soldiers or trucks in motion.  Subsequently, to create sufficient noise to activate those instruments, planes scattered gravel-sized bomblets whose snap, crackle and pop beneath feet or tires were radioed to listeners in Thailand who then dispatched bombers who often arrived after the trucks or soldiers had disappeared into the forest.  We planted devises intended to detect the odor of humans congregated in an area.  (In turn, the Vietnamese misdirected American bombers by hanging bags of buffalo urine near the monitors).

I would nominate as the most hair-brained scheme of the war, the planting of cases of beer along the trail in the hope that soldiers, porters, and repair crews who found them would become too drunk to perform their assigned duties.

In the end, the United States pinned all hope on a bombing campaign so massive that it ultimately became unprecedented in military history.  In essence, America attempted to use bombs to form a steel wall.  Over nine years America spent 150 billion dollars on that effort, dropped millions of tons of ordnance, sprayed millions of gallons of defoliants, lost hundreds planes, and still failed to appreciably diminish the flow of enemy soldiers and material.

One study documented that in the single month of March 1967, American planes flew approximately  8,500 attack sorties over the trail.  Still, in that month alone,  more than 8,600 Vietnamese soldiers and porters successfully concluded their journey south.  (In essence, one attack sortie for every People’s Army infiltrator). Another study put the cost of killing one enemy soldier on the trail at over a million U.S. dollars.

And, the cost to Laos?  The campaign to cut the trail resulted in more than 50,000 civilian casualties (20,000 of those have occurred since the war ended), a total that grows whenever old bombs detonate and create new victims.

We Help War Victims has donated Book Box Libraries to approximately sixty villages in Laos.

Report 37

Over the years donors to We Help War Victims have provided approximately sixty Lao villages with “Book Box” libraries.  Each library contains  200 books, all in the Lao language, that students can read at school during the day and then take home on loan to share with friends and relatives.  Since over 90% of Lao schools have no printed reading materials the libraries usually provide students with the first reading books that they’ve ever held in their hands.

Yesterday we participated in a ceremony in which libraries were presented to three schools here in Sekong Province.  The head teacher for the schools organized a heartwarming event in which teachers from all three villages were on hand to receive the books and to express their appreciation.

After our truck pulled onto the school grounds to deliver the boxed libraries, all students were summoned from their classrooms and organized into orderly rows.  Before the presentation ceremony began teachers policed each row making certain that shirttails were tucked, flies were buttoned, hair was combed. Clearly, teachers were suffering no slackers on such an important day. Only after the teachers were satisfied with the students’ appearance and deportment did the ceremony begin.

I made my usual speech, telling students that the libraries were not a gift from me but from donors in America who love books and value education.  I told students that I look forward to visiting again next year and challenged them to read all 200 books before my return.

Teachers surprised us with a heartwarming gesture. In appreciation for our gift of books students presented us with stacks of firewood that they had collected in the forest.

To my surprise the head teacher announced that, in appreciation, students had a gift for our team.  He apologized for not having a gift equal to the value of the libraries, but explained that the villages, being poor, had few resources.  At a signal from the teacher students suddenly appeared carrying stacks of firewood that they’d collected from the forest the evening before. The head teacher told us that he hoped the firewood would add to our comfort on chilly nights to come.  It was, without a doubt, the most touching gesture ever prompted by our delivery of books.

This year’s gift of boxed libraries was made possible by donations from the Altusa International Club of Wausau, Wisconsin, and the family of Kerm and Peg Wiechman, Decorah, Iowa.

Sorry…but we can’t share the firewood. The students’ gesture warmed our hearts and the wood will soon warm our hands and feet!

A doctor in a district hospital inspects hundred of sutures donated from a clinic in the United States.

Report 36

I usually arrive in Laos carrying medical supplies that donors collect for me throughout the year, items that American clinics discard when they update their inventory of supplies. Often, the items are in excellent condition but are approaching an expiration date.

I won’t deliver prescription or over the counter drugs even though they’re badly needed here.  I don’t want to chance having drugs misused, or of having patients treated with drugs that have outlived their effectiveness.

If you aspire to be a pharmacist here, about all you need to  do is purchase a white coat and set up shop.  And, patients here don’t need a physician’s prescription in order to purchase drugs. The wives of a couple of our deminers moved up from selling dry goods in a street-side stall to selling pharmaceuticals, without obtaining any pharmacy education.

The casual approach to dispensing medicines leads to interesting behaviors.  Often, the guys on our team will compare the medicines they’ve received from different pharmacies and then swap pills so each has a combination of shapes and colors, assuring the desired “shotgun” approach to treatment.

Most items that I donate are common in America but rare or expensive here.  In even the best hospitals, in the largest Lao cities, disposable gloves are a luxury item.  Staff in hospitals here wash what are intended to be disposable gloves again and again.  One Lao nurse told me that her standard procedure is to wash gloves twenty times before discarding. (But, she admits that she often loses count and simply uses gloves until they wear through.)

Sutures are often in short supply, and I’ve had doctors walk me through a ward and introduce me to patients who are waiting for surgery delayed by a shortage.

I’ve yet to fill a long-standing request from a Lao surgeon for a set of surgical instruments.  The need for instruments is best illustrated by one surgeon’s call for help during an emergency operation to amputate a mangled leg.  His only saw blade broke mid-operation and the medic from a clearance team had to supply a hacksaw from the team’s truck so the doctor could finish sawing through the patient’s femur.

I once asked a surgical tech instructor at an American college how her department acquired the many varied instruments that students study in the school’s training program.  I learned that the instruments had been donated by an area hospital.  Although every item was in fine condition, a new surgeon, as a pre-condition of his accepting employment at the hospital, had insisted on new instruments produced by his preferred manufacturer.

Given the months between my travels to Laos and the abundance of about-to-be-discarded medical supplies in the United States, I could easily fill my entire baggage allowance with hospital surplus, if that were the entire focus of my work.  But…it’s not, and I don’t.

Furthermore, filing a shortage here won’t necessarily improve treatment if the Lao staff lacks knowledge of the item’s proper use.  Will a gift of disposable catheters improve treatment if those devices are simply washed in soapy water and used again and again among different patients?

Before I left Vientiane, I crossed paths with a tour group that was traveling throughout Laos and Vietnam, visiting weaving villages.  They had completed their itinerary and, somehow, still had in-hand gifts not yet shared.  So… they asked me to pass the remaining items on to people in need. Most popular were pairs of used eyeglasses.

Every time I displayed the assorted pairs before villagers, hands thrust forward to grab a pair and try them out.  I had planned to deliver the glasses exclusively to elderly weavers who have had to cease working due to failing eyesight, but I couldn’t bring myself to exclude others who needed help, so they went “first come, first served”.

Youa Xiong Vue is a resourceful problem solver. He often fills his spare time making tools from objects he finds in the scrap bucket. Here, he displays children's toys woven from reeds.

Report 35

Youa Xiong Vue is the elder of our two Hmong deminers.  He’s fifty years old and is addressed by everyone on the team as “Paw Tou” (Uncle).  I’m impressed by the dignity with which he carries himself.  He’s a soft-spoken, unassuming man who asks little for himself and is quick to see to the needs of others.

Youa Xiong has a talent making use of scant resources to fashion creative solutions to problems.  The other day he spotted an unusual piece of scrap metal.  By the next morning he had fashioned a knife from it, somehow also finding the time to carve a hardwood handle. He has the amusing habit of pilfering the scrap pile for things that turn up in our digging — things that he works into useful objects to carry home when this project ends.  A pair of forceps, of all things, turned up the other day and then quickly disappeared. I know who must have them. One day, over lunch, he entertained us by weaving children’s toys out of reeds that he found growing along a nearby stream.  His hands deftly brought to life a couple of cranes; he then wove a water bowl for the birds to drink from.

Youa Xiong hasn’t worked in clearance long, I’m guessing that he has just recently made the first career move in his life, from farmer to deminer.  This job may well be the first time that he has worked for wages.

Youa’s from the area around Lak Sao in Bolikomxai Province.  I’ve visited Hmong villages in that area when I conducted clearance on the Nakai Plateau; I even recruited Hmong villagers from his district to cut brush for my project but, apparently, I never reached his village.

The first step in clearing a new parcel of land is to rope the area into clearance boxes. Then, the deminers run their detectors over every square inch of the box and listen for the detector to indicate the presence of metal. Every indication has to be investigated and all metal removed from the site. Bomblets, on the other hand, are never moved and must be destroyed in place.

Most people associate the Hmong in Laos with the mountaintops in Xieng Khuang or Huaphan Province but there have been Hmong in southern Laos for generations.  During the Vietnam War, when General Vang Pao led the CIA-recruited Hmong forces near the Plain of Jars, the southern Hmong did not join that effort.  There were even Hmong in the south, the so-called “Red Hmong,” who aligned themselves with the Pa Thet Lao.  The divisions among the Hmong in those years had less to do with political philosophy than they did old rivalries among Hmong clans for leadership and the economic advantage.

Youa Xiong has two daughters in America, one in a city in California that he can’t recollect, the other in Saint Paul.  Both have married Hmong-American men from the Vang clan. I told Youa Xiong that Saint Paul was an easy jaunt for me and that when I return home I’ll make a point of calling on his daughter and her family.  Youa seemed pleased but cautioned me that his son-in-law, an American citizen who came to Lao to find a bride, doesn’t like his daughter to be out in public much; he prefers that she stay close to home.

I didn’t need my glasses to read between those lines.  Some Hmong-American men, put off by the liberated ways of some Hmong-American women, travel to the old country to find a spouse they trust will live life according to the old ways.  (Ways that… guess what?… usually favor the male!)  Sadly, stories abound in Hmong communities in America of a wife in such a marriage assimilating to American culture faster than her husband.  Often, anger, frustration, and domestic abuse result.

Youa Xiong and our other Hmong deminer, Chan Mai Vue present themselves as cousins, but even the Lao on our team don’t entirely grasp what that means.  Every Hmong in the world who is a member of the Vue clan views every other Vue in the world as a brother, sister or cousin. For that reason no two Vue’s can marry one another.  The prospective bride and groom might be born continents apart, but they are cousins and their marriage would be an incestuous union, an anathema among the Hmong worldwide. (The same incest prohibition exists within all of the major Hmong clans).

There isn’t a single member of this year’s crew that I wouldn’t enlist for next year’s project but, should future work take me to northern Laos or other region heavily populated with Hmong, Youa will be my first recruit.

Without refrigeration its difficult for us to keep fish or meat on hand. Luckily, village women forage for food to sell us and men hunt game. Not every find or catch is what we prefer but usually the offerings are a good supplement to foods available in the Dak Cheung market.

Report 34

We’re overdue for another food run to Dak Cheung, twenty miles east of here, the closest village that has a food market. Making the slow, round-trip over terrible roads always costs us a half-day of productivity so we don’t make the trip until we’re badly in need of either food or fuel.  While we’re not yet desperate, the quality of our meals is unquestionably heading south and we can’t put off shopping much longer.

Our food situation is always feast or famine. For a couple of days after shopping we eat like kings but, since we lack any way to refrigerate food, our provisions age quickly, spoilage strikes and soon we’re down to rice and little else.

Ben Franklin observed that fish and company both smell after two days.  In this heat, fish lose their charm faster than that.  We grill fish the first day it comes home, boil it the next. By day three it’s usually too far gone to eat so we feed what remains to the dogs.

Fish gone, we start in on the red meat that we’ve purchased: pork or beef, or water buffalo.  At first we grill or fry the meat.  A day or two later, we add the aging cuts to stews and cook the hell out of it.  When we judge that a hunk of raw meat is nearing the end of life, we slice it into thin strips and smoke them until they are as dry as a  leather belt. (Our homemade jerky is great when dipped in a Lao salsa made from chilies, onions, garlic and tomatoes that have all been  charred over glowing embers and then pounded into a mash).

The Lao consider any meal--- breakfast, lunch, or dinner, incomplete without rice. We're able to purchase both steam rice and sticky rice from local villagers. That's lucky for us because among our multi-ethnic team there are definite preferences.

We’ve never run short of rice; it’s proved to be the easiest staple to find and we have a supply of both steam rice and sticky rice to see us through the end of this project.  The Khmer and Hmong guys prefer steam rice; the Lao and Laven vote for sticky.  I’m a switch hitter and will go with whichever is available when the rest of my meal comes together.

Vegetables are hard to find, expensive to buy, and difficult to keep.  The market in Dak Chueng rarely has beans, peas, broccoli or other greens. Cabbage, cabbage and more cabbage fill the gap.  While tomatoes are abundant potatoes are precious gems.

This morning a young lady stopped by camp with a wild hen and a squirrel that her husband caught in snares, and an elderly woman showed up with five small fish from her family pond as well as two large hands of bananas and a plastic bag filled with a variety of greens, some from her garden and some from the forest.  So… dinner tonight should be much better than today’s breakfast and lunch.

We appreciate the women who forage and the men who hunt on our behalf but often we don’t have knowledge of all the plants that we’re offered and sometimes the wild game is a mite too gamey. We’ve turned down snake, rat, and dog.

I’ve still got a stash of falang food that I’m hoarding against desperate times.  There’s a can of Hunt’s tomato sauce, two small onions, a bulb of garlic and several egg plant that I’ll turn into a meal that I’ll pass off to the team as Italian food  (so America doesn’t take the blame for my poor cooking skills).

Two nights ago I served the team “Mexican.”  I added grilled onions and minced garlic to a can of re-fried beans, then stirred in a healthy dollop of Lao salsa, and brought the mixture to a boil.  Lacking taco shells, I convinced everyone to wrap the bean mixture in cabbage leaves.  (If there’s one thing we have in abundance, it’s cabbage!)

It's a long drive for us to reach the nearest market and even then the choices are very limited. Luckily villagers hunt and trap small game for us.

The villagers here are discerning about which rats they’ll eat.  They trap rats living in the wild and cook them up much as they do squirrel.  On the other hand, villagers won’t eat rats caught around the house. I agree with the distinction they make: rats in the wild live a cleaner, healthier life and therefore make for a more wholesome meal. (With tail removed and fur burnt off in the coals of a fire, its mighty hard to tell a good-sized rat from a small squirrel).  Don’t you agree?

Pang Xi is an ethnic Laven, and one of two female deminers on our team. When she broke the news to her mother that she was going to work with bombs her mother replied, "Good. We need the money".

Report 33

Pang Xi is the elder of our two female deminers but she’s much more timid than Kik, her younger colleague.  Where Kik is gabby and fun loving, Pang Xi is reticent and unassuming.  She hasn’t much life experience outside the insular confines of her village  but, give her credit, here she is farther from home than ever before, excavating bombs and landmines.  She’s ethnically Laven, from the Bolaven Plateau in south-central Laos.  She speaks Laven as her first language; Lao as her second.

Pang Xi learned about possible employment with us when her village naiban walked from house to house informing people that Phoenix Clearance Limited (PCL) was recruiting staff and especially hoped to enlist female deminers in an upcoming training program.

I asked Pang Xi how her widowed mother reacted when she broke the news that she was thinking of leaving home to work with unexploded ordnance.  Pang Xi laughed when she shared her mother’s response: “Good.  We need the money.”

This is Pang Xi’s third outing with a clearance team, so she’s twice before experienced a payday when a sizable amount of cash has been handed to her.  She turned each of those payments over to her mother who, in turn, added the cash to the family kitty. When I asked whether she would have liked to use the money to purchase something for herself, perhaps a motorbike or sewing machine, she demurred, saying, “No.  It’s better to help the whole family.”  She does confess to one indulgence. A few months ago she bought her first cell phone.  She now uses it to make daily calls to her mother and five siblings.

Although a novice, Pang Xi handles all the demands of clearance work well. The experience she gains working with our project will help her find full time employment with any of several humanitarian clearance organizations.

Pang Xi hasn’t much formal education; she left school after “level four” and is barely literate.  She’s not certain of her exact age but thinks she must be “twenty-five or twenty-six.”

Pang Xi has the least field experience of all our deminers, even less than Kik, who is seven years younger.  But…Pang Xi is motivated to learn and to improve.  She works hard and never complains; never palms work off on others.  She’s proof that women can successfully perform every task associated with UXO clearance.  Our crew is stronger for having her as a teammate.

We are dependent on water piped down the mountain for drinking and cooking but that source is drying up. Hopefully, what water there is will see us through the remainder of our project. We hope to avoid having to boil river water, but it might come to that.

Report 32

I’m growing worried about our water supply.  We arrived here with eight 20-liter bottles of water, and a 400-liter storage tank.  Every container was filled with water from a water factory in Sekong.

Does that mean that our drinking water was guaranteed wholesome and pure?  As a horse trader in Wisconsin once told me when I asked him to guarantee the health of a horse, “In this life, son, the only guarantee is that there ain’t no guarantee.”  But…it was the best water we were going to find near this village and, so far, we’ve all stayed healthy.

The very first day that the whole team was in camp, we discovered that the 400-litter tank was only a 200-liter tank.  It has a split seam in its midsection and won’t hold water above that level — a disappointment, but not a game changer.

We have limited our use of factory water to drinking and cooking.  We wash pots, pans, dishes and eating utensils in cold water that flows continuously through a pipe that runs down the hillside from some unseen, providential spring.  Then, we rinse those items in a pan of spring water that we’ve boiled over our campfire.

The team can choose to bathe at either the pipe or in a nearby river.  The river offers a more satisfying volume of water, but water buffalo wallow in sluggish places upstream and it’s a known fact (you can look this up) that the very first thing a water buffalo does when he steps into a pool is evacuate his bowels. I’m proud to report, everyone on our team has chosen to bathe at the pipe.

We have now consumed all of our factory water.  Unfortunately, on our last food run we learned that we can’t refill our bottles; the factory is out of commission.  So… we loaded up, not on bottled water, but on bags of charcoal in anticipation of boiling water from the mountain spring around the clock, to stay ahead of our consumption.

Now, it appears that the volume of spring water pouring out of the pipe has, for some reason, been reduced by half.  What’s going on?  A leak in the pipe?  The spring going dry?  If that source dries up, we’ll be in serious trouble.

Forget winter, spring, summer and fall.  Laos only has two natural seasons: the dry season and the rainy season.  (Some people subdivide the dry season into two parts and talk about the “burning season,” the weeks when farmers burn their fields and the resulting smoke cover can be seen from space. But…since that’s not a climatic event, so I discount it).

The water running down the hill and through our pipe did not fall just recently as rain.  (We are deep into the dry season).  Rather, its source must be a spring flowing from an aquifer, discharging water  that rained down months ago and saturated fissures in the rock. (The Lao have a proverb that advises someone looking for water to “go up the mountain, not down”).

This part of Lao gets as much as 80 inches of rain a year, abundant precipitation that annually recharges the aquifer that we’re tapped into.  But…there must be years when that aquifer  goes dry.  If that happens this year, buffalo or no buffalo, we’ll all be bathing in the river.

Chan Mai Vue is ethnic Hmong, from a province in central Laos. He is new to our team but has proven to be cheerful, honest and hard-working. He is fluent in both Hmong and Lao. His language skills will be helpful if our project moves to a northern province where Hmong villages are plentiful.

Report 31

Chan Mai Vue, the younger of our two Hmong deminers, lives in Bolikhamxai Province, in south central Laos.  That’s not a region that people commonly associate with the Hmong, but there have been Hmong settlements there for generations.  In fact, I made my first visit to that province on a mission to find the extended family of one of my Hmong-American students in Wisconsin — a case in which most of a family fled Laos and made their way to America while other relatives, less fortunate or less daring, remained behind.

Chan Mai is twenty-five years old and, for now, unmarried.  He makes daily phone calls to someone whose name he won’t share.  When we ask who’s on the phone, he blushes, grins and identifies the caller as family.  We all read him like a book, know it’s a girlfriend, but keep pestering him just to watch him squirm. (Such is our limited entertainment in camp!)

I always ask the deminers what they do with the pay that they earn from working for our project.  Usually, I teasingly accuse the guys of drinking or gambling their money away.  In truth, the guys are careful with the hard-earned cash that they earn.

Last year Chan Mai put his pay, a couple hundred dollars, into the family kitty to help purchase a tuk tuk. (The small motorcycle-powered taxi that people without cars hire when they must carry goods or travel in groups too large for a motorbike).  This time around Chan Mai doesn’t know of a particular purchase that his family might make but he says that he’ll again add his wages to the family pool.

Often, one of the first items Lao people buy when they come into some money is a motorbike but Chan Mai doesn’t need a bike of his own; his brother has a bike that he freely shares.

Within the home televisions are a popular item for families to poll money and purchase.  In villages without electricity people will power their TV off a truck battery that, in turn, they charge with a water-powered generator placed in a nearby river.  Chan Mai’s family has both a television and a DVD player.

Chan Mai is one of eight children, one of the middle kids.  When he’s not in the field clearing UXO, he lives at home with his parents and most of his siblings.  Between clearance jobs, he’s a rice farmer like his parents and everyone else in his village.

Trying to get a feel for his aspirations in life, I asked Chan Mai if he would someday enjoy living in a big city, like Vientiane.  He replied, “That would be fun, but my parents live in a village.”

I pressed on, “But YOUR preference?  Would YOU enjoy living in a city, with electricity, running water, lights, computers… music all day on the radio?”

My proposition was too far beyond his life experience for him to comprehend.  He replied, “Vientiane would be nice, but I don’t think my parents would ever want to move to a big city.”  I got the picture and dropped the subject.

Chan Mai and the other deminers work hard. To get to the workplace they often have to hike through thick jungle. Then, on the job, they must scramble up and down steep hills. Here, Chan Mai is bundled up against the morning chill.

Chan Mai and Youa Xiong are from the same village and both are members of the “Vue” clan.  They may well be cousins in the American way, or they might not, but it doesn’t really matter — they are kin in the Hmong way, and look out for one another.

One funny quirk about Chan Mai — he can really pack away the food.  We eat standing up, around a table on which we’ve placed all the serving bowls.  As people finish eating they simply leave the table, one at a time, to wash their hands.  (We eat everything but soups with our fingers.)  Night after night, Chan Mai is the last man standing, often emptying each bowl in turn.  Every deminer exerts the same effort throughout the day but Chan Mai’s tank must run dry faster than the rest.

At dinner last night when I explained the old saying about a big eater having a ” hollow leg” the rest of the team jumped in and teased Chan Mai about his hearty appetite.  I suspect that in his Bolikhamxai home, his family doesn’t have much food, or much variety, and that here in camp he’s enjoying the novelty of having Lao, Khmer, American, and Laven recipes in front of him. As sparse as I think our pantry is, it may be bountiful compared with what his family has in their small village.

When we work in areas that have been heavily bombed we must excavate thousands of bomb fragments. If the deminers ignore detector readings they might leave dangerous UXO behind.

Report 30

Our team is grinding along, clearing expansion garden plots, but it’s frustrating work.  Early on we were fortunate to be working fields with little scrap, but now we are harvesting thousands of pieces of bomb frag every day.  Metal shards by the bucketful.

We’re working both sides of a steep valley that is pockmarked with bomb craters.  Old people in the village tell us that during the war the North Vietnamese had a depot here; when The United States discovered the encampment American planes flew hundreds of sorties over the site.  One old villager told us that the bombing went on, around the clock, for days.  He and his family took shelter in a bunker and remained hunkered down until the bombing finally stopped, afraid to leave for any reason.

During the war reconnaissance planes, trail watchers, or electronic surveillance equipment would pick up clues indicating a concentration of trucks or soldiers, and signal American forces in Thailand or Vietnam.  Planes would then bomb the suspicious area.  If the first bombs set off large secondary explosions pilots would know that they were on top of a supply depot or other lucrative target and would call for additional bombers to carpet the area.

Most of the large, general-purpose bombs that we find here are in the range of 250 to 750 pounds.  Shrapnel from a bomb that size can fly nearly a mile, but most of the fragmentation in this narrow valley was contained in the hillsides, leaving us a highly contaminated site to clear.

Villagers clear fields ahead of our team, usually by burning grass and brush. Often, munitions explode while the fields burn so we insist that villagers burn far ahead of us. Too often villagers tending the fires venture too close and are killed.

If hundreds (or possibly thousands) of bombs were dropped here during the campaign that villagers describe, a failure rate of just two percent would leave a gaggle of unexploded bombs for us to locate and destroy.

The villagers whose gardens we are clearing just burnt these fields of dried brush last night so the land is covered with a thick layer of ash.  Fortunately, our deminers are using some new metal detectors, models that are not confused by high carbon levels in the soil.  Years ago, in Khammouan Province, our team used an earlier model that was tricked by carbon concentration and proved unreliable. The detectors our deminers have in hand today cost nearly three thousand dollars a pop and have bells and whistles not found on the coins-on-the-beach models you can buy at Walmart.

When we are near suspected ordnance we have the benefit of our metal detectors. Villagers don't and often mistake corroded bomblets for rocks. Can you find the bomblet in this photo? Are you willing to bet your life that you are right?

Update:

Before breaking for lunch we demolished several cluster bomblets that we found on the hillsides; they were so badly corroded that they were barely recognizable as ordnance.  Villagers, working without the benefit of metal detectors, would likely have mistaken the bomblets for rocks, making an encounter all the more dangerous.

Kik, the youngest member of our team, sends her pay home every month to help her widowed mother and siblings. She gets homesick for her village in the Bolavens but knows that her job working with UXO will help her entire family achieve a higher quality of life.

Report 29

Kik took some ribbing last year for being the youngest member of our team but, in truth, if she hadn’t admitted to being just seventeen we wouldn’t have guessed that she was so young.

In Laos girls start taking responsibility for tasks around the home at an early age.  It’s common to see female children, only four or five years old, bathing, feeding, nurturing, younger siblings.  By age eight or nine girls have learned to build cook fires and prepare entire meals on their own.  By her teen years, a young woman has learned to do all of the tasks that her mother contributes to the family’s well being, which is to say most of the work.

This year, Kik is again is the youngest member of our team — seven years younger than the next youngest staff.  But we no longer consider her a novice.  She’s worked on several clearance projects over the past year and has honed her demining skills.  In fact, she’s become an excellent mentor for Pang Xi, our other female deminer.

Kik is from the Bolaven Plateau, the premier coffee region of Laos. Kik’s family maintains a small grove of coffee trees, less than two acres, but their modest harvest is their only source of cash income.  Their entire crop goes to a factory that processes the beans into a variety of products such as foil-packed instant coffee and canned coffee-flavored beverages. Ironically, Kik doesn’t much care for fresh brewed coffee; she drinks what the Lao call “three in one”, a commercial product that combines instant coffee, artificial creamer and sugar — to my mind a trade of money, health and flavor for convenience.

Our deminers work in every kind of weather, often in unique locations. Here, Kik searches for UXO that rains have washed into a stream bed.

Kik’s father died in a motorcycle accident when she was just five, leaving her mother to raise six children alone.  While work takes Kik far from her family for months at a time she continues to send her pay home to help meet family expenses.

Although Kik misses her family and friends in the Bolavens, she plans to continue working with UXO as long as she can find employment.  There are few jobs around her village that pay at all, and none that pay as well as demining.  She sees little future in farm work — only a hand to mouth existence with no opportunity to acquire consumer goods, to pay for an education, or to build a cash reserve to see her family through difficult times.

Kik’s mother worries about her daughter working with ordnance, but consoles herself with the thought that hundreds of men and women in Laos do the same work, mostly without incident. She trusts in her daughter’s training and the reputation of the company that employs her.