Clusterbomb / clusterfuck / redux
Reprint, with appended update, on the occasion of Trump's 1/25/25 halt of US funds for landmine clearance. This order perpetuates US slaughter in SE Asia and guarantees even more death and maiming.
LAOS 2006. As the years passed and the men who dropped the bombs expired in their beds Laotians continued to die from U.S. unexploded ordnance (UXO). (See note on Kissinger below.)*
Since the end of the Vietnam War, the millions of yellow cluster bombs that litter Laos have claimed more than three times as many dead as the 9/11 attacks. Typically, the victims are farmers trying to eke out a living and children who are attracted by the bright gold balls.
Thanghon is one of the “lucky” thousands who survived an encounter with one of the anti-personnel weapons. She talked through a translator in Vientiane, the backwater capital of a backwater country that lies curled like a sleeping cat along the Mekong River.
She was working on the family farm, when her a hoe struck a quarter-century-old “bombie.”
“Two of my friends died," she said. “I came to Vientiane for the amputations. It took three days and two nights by bus. I was at the point of death.” Thanghon, 40, lost both her legs and the use of one hand.
A member of the Liu minority, she grew up in a small village in Phongsali province. From 1964 to 1973, the US bombed the area as part of its illegal, “secret” war to disrupt the Ho Chi Minh Trail and undermine the Viet Cong supply route into Vietnam. The US campaign was, of course, not secret from its main victims: impoverished civilians.
During those nine years, Laos, a country the size of Oklahoma, absorbed 2 million tons of US bombs, more than all the munitions dropped on Germany during WWII. On average, a planeload of bombs rained down every eight minutes, around the clock.
The ironically bad news is that up to a third of the fragmentation devices failed to explode. Instead, they turned Laos into an obstacle course where death and dismemberment is the penalty for one wrong step or misplaced hoe. Anything—or even nothing —can set off the bombs.
The country’s scarcity of arable land and abundance of poverty drove a rise in accidents. Desperate to grow food in fertile but mine-laced fields, farmers weighed certain hunger against incalculable risk.
Unscrupulous scrap metal dealers from neighboring Vietnam cashed in. Dealers enticed Laotians to hunt shrapnel and bombs by lending or renting them metal detectors. People who earned a few hundred dollars a year farming gambled life and limb for the extra income.
In 2005, Laos was a poor country with an inadequate health system and an average life expectancy of 59 years. Disabled people had few options unless they reached Vientiane’s National Rehabilitation Center, a dusty complex of rustic buildings on the edge of town. It survives on a trickle of domestic and foreign funds, but the US, which caused most of these injuries, has done little to redress the damage or prevent more. In a post-Cold-War world, Laos is an inconsequential anachronism with little strategic value and less oil.
I asked Thanghon if she was angry at the people who dropped the bombs.
“No,” she says. “We don’t hate them, but don’t understand why we were fighting. It is our bad luck to be bombed.”
Bad luck may explain a particular victim, but had little do with Washington’s decision to bomb a neutral country. As part of a Cold War strategy, Presidents Kennedy and then Nixon pursued the Laos campaign in secret, without the consent of Congress or the US people. In addition to the bombies, U.S. planes dropped napalm and dioxin—chemical weapons that persist today, poisoning land, water, and people.
The Geneva Conventions banning chemical weapons was only one legal nicety Washington ignored. The other was the war itself, which violated international laws prohibiting attacks on neutral countries. A member of the committee that impeached Nixon, Elizabeth Holtzman, argued at the time that the secret bombing campaigns should have been high on the list of Nixon’s impeachable crimes. Wary of turning the impeachment proceedings into a forum on the war, the committee omitted the issue.
That failure of Congress and the courts to stop an illegal war and to hold a president accountable for war crimes resonates today, not only for Thangnon and Laos’ current and future casualties, but by reinforcing an expectation of impunity
I wanted to help Thanghon, who would soon be healed enough to travel back to her village, but with no way to support herself. Through a translator, I asked what she would do, how she would survive without a family or support. “I want to become a seamstress,” she said.
I went to the market the next day with one of the rehab center staff to buy her a sewing machine. But once there, we realized her village had no power, so an electric machine was impossible, and since she had no legs to run a pedal machine, that too seemed unworkable. The children in the village can be her feet the staffer told me. So I bought the manual machine for the staffer to deliver.
* A key man in advocating and guiding the slaughter, courtier-sycophant and war criminal Henry Kissinger, did in fact die in his bed. But not before he celebrated his 100th birthday, and one of the people paying court at the party was human rights celebrity Samantha Power, who built her career on a book exploring and condemning genocide. WTF.
*The death toll from UXO:
Vietnam 44,000 killed, 60,000 injured; millions of acres — nearly a fifth of the country — still contaminated as of 2023.
Cambodia more than 65,000 dead.
Laos: 22,000 dead.
Terry, your photo and commentary presentations are very powerful. I am wondering how we can extend the reach of Opposable!?
Thank you. This isn’t said and shown often enough.