THE METS AWAY IN LAOS
Slow Motion Genocide
Watch Your Steps, Folks
Ma’am, We’ve Been Commissioned to Concrete Your Rice Field…
By Doug Fine
“In this international game of political chess, there’s a new gambit…today in an age when nuclear devices largely cancel each other out, and conventional all out war will apparently become increasingly rare, new developments in small weapons and their use, may be one of the most important things going on in the world.” -Ed Pettit, reporting from Saigon, 1966.
Phonsavan, Laos
A blond, middle-aged Brit joined us at our table at the only bar in this Most Bombed Province in the Most Bombed Country in the History of Mankind, needing a drink. Turns out my first day in the region had been the worst day of his life. A tour leader to some of Laos’ oldest Buddhist sites, his caravan had passed a common site, about three minutes after the latest detonation. Two more kids had been blown apart by a U.S. cluster bomb called a BLU 26 (for Bomb Live Unit), for 23 years armed but dormant in a rice paddy along Route 7. It had just happened, in the village of Tat Chia, 11 miles from where we were sucking down Lao Brand beer.
“They were literally putting his pieces in a bag,” the sobbing Brit said of the boy who was lucky enough to be killed instantly. In his Landrover, he had been the first on the scene. One of the fathers was second.
There was more gallows humor than overt sympathy among the others at the table, also Brits, as they saw this all the time. They were former RAF explosives experts, now part of the non-profit Mines Advisory Group (MAG), which has it’s work cut out for it. “We could have this province cleared, in ohh…I’d say 1100 years,” said Paul Stanford of MAG. “Barring a new war.” It was an old one among his colleagues. No one looked up.
What WAS amusing to the MAG folks was my relating that a low level employee of the U.S. Embassy in Vientiane had told me that as far as s/he was concerned, the official U.S. policy is that “most of the unexploded ordnance left in Laos isn’t ours.”
MAG’s Steve Larson was working on the theory that perhaps the Chinese had been pirating the design and serial numbers on American munitions thirty years ago the way they now do with software.
“Might’ve been a misprint at the Russian factory,” Stanford proffered. “Arkansas, Leningrad…easy mistake.”
In fairness, I later asked another, more senior U.S. official to confirm the earlier comment, and was told, “Hell, if they weren’t ours, I don’t know whose they’d be,” but the MAG team and the locals who overheard us loved the initial assertion.
Nearly half of those blown up these days by bombs dropped on Laos every eight minutes for nine years (1964-1973) are children. Twenty-two years after a C.I.A. air war ended, a war so secret it made Kissinger’s bombing of Cambodia look overt, some twelve people (often farmers tilling rice fields) are still becoming separated from their bodies every month in Phonsavan’s Xieng Khuang Province.
Laos’ civilians had the misfortune to both be embroiled in a Communist-led civil war akin to the Viet Cong’s in South Vietnam at the time, and to be home to a good part of the legendary and crucial Ho Chi Minh supply route.
Before it was over, an amount greater than the bomb tonnage dropped in the entire European theater in World War II fell on a country the size of Great Britain with a then population of 4.8 million (now 4.2 million), leaving large parts of Xieng Khuang Province literally bombed into the Stone Age, sometimes more than once - not a building was left standing.
Here’s how Stanford describes the function of the tennis ball-sized BLU 26 bombie: “650 of these are dropped in a casing. Upon impact, razor-sharp shrapnel or ball bearings spray in all directions. Sometimes an incendiary device is added as well, causing the flesh to melt. It’s a very effective weapon when you don’t know who or where your enemy is: you can kill everybody.”
The problem is, for one reason or another, an estimated 10% of the 8 million cluster bombs dropped over Laos (the number is padded by U.S. bombers returning to Thai bases who dumped munitions randomly over Lao territory), failed to detonate upon impact. They’re still there, churned underground rainy season after rainy season.
How bad was the carnage and its debris? One U.S. official, a former police officer from the midwest now one of those gung ho narcotics removal guys, told me, “We can’t even talk about human rights anywhere in the world until we clean up our mess here.”
On the 1 1/2 hour bumpy drive from Phonsavan to one of two schools MAG is now methodically clearing, Stanford and I passed rice paddies growing around massive 2000 pound bomb crater ponds (which viewed from the air give the province a pockmarked moonscape appearance as one flies in and the pilot points out the abandoned secret CIA air base the way a Delta pilot might the Grand Canyon). 91 BLUs had been found at this Ban Naphong school so far, including five armed bombies found three inches under the dirt floor used inside the school for 15 years. During the ride I thought, here is field after field, school playground after school playground which hasn’t been cleared, and probably never will be.
And it didn’t work. The $2 million per day price tag for the Lao Theater didn’t even dent the Ho Chi Minh trail, and U.S.-supported forces lost the ground war. “Oh, we just traveled at night,” a small bespeckled man named Kham Pat told me. Although even his MAG bosses didn’t know it, this field supervisor informed me at the school yard after a gift of some American cigarettes loosened him up, that he was a Major in the Pathet Lao, (Laos’ Viet Cong) for 12 years.
Now, what I saw in Xieng Khuang is not about to make me question, without further research, the geopolitical realities of another Era in which I wasn’t even born. Who can say for sure, as it is often argued, whether a decision not to contain Communism in Southeast Asia might have resulted in bolder Soviet expansion in other parts of the world? North Vietnam, in fact, was violating the same Geneva Accord of 1962 that the U.S. was by messing with Laos’ “neutrality.”
I broached the question of resentment of Americans, since no one had really even taught me about this war in school, and in light of the fact that a bunch of American soldiers, this time officially and in uniform, were soon to move into Laos, to supplement MAG ordnance removal operations. The predominant position was summed up for me by a geriatric, French-educated man in a tiny village about six miles from Phonsavan.
“Your society is very young,” he told me. “Maybe 250 years. Ours has been here for 2000 years. We have fought the Thai, the Vietnamese and the Khemer, made peace with each, then fought each of them again. We were enemies with you once. We are friends now. One day we will probably be enemies again. Welcome to Southeast Asia.”
The next day I visited the surviving casualty, a 10-year-old ethnic Hmong boy (one more irony, as the Hmong were U.S. allies during the war), in Phonsavan’s hospital. Miraculously, it seemed he’d make it. BLU 26s usually don’t leave one to tell a tale. He was conscious, if not alert, although the X-ray made his back and lungs look like a jigsaw puzzle where the pellets had seared through him in several places as he ran from the danger he recognized in his soon-to-be-dead friend’s hand.
Feeling it a pitiful gesture under the circumstances, I gave the family crowded around the boy’s bed some canned fish and coffee, and understanding the word “journalist,” the mother asked me to photograph her son, and even offered me the only copy of his x-ray.
I asked her if, despite the known dangers and the education efforts of MAG, sometimes people in their village, as I had heard, seek out live ordnance to sell in market for purposes like ditch digging and fishing. “Yes,” she said, with a tone which explained that $2 for 40 kilograms goes a long way toward turning a subsistence farmer into a part time capitalist miner in a very risky quarry.
I was looking at a reality: the Vietnam War is still going on.
Strolling around Xieng Khuang later, watching every step the way one would in a dog park but with higher consequences (a very unnatural feeling, to be afraid to take one’s next step), I stopped at a cluster bomb casing (now a fence post) labeled “August 1972, Arkansas.” There were also some serial numbers. I was two years old. Safe on Long Island. Going out to Shea Stadium, home of the perennially hapless Mets. My mind took me to the summer of 1973, the year the Mets weren’t happless. In my family, this means a famous story which I know only through recounting. Late in a game we attended that year, superstar Willie Mays, playing in his final season, hit a long fly ball deep to center field . The only person in our section fooled by the perspective in what had otherwise been a very boring game, I alone evidently stood up and opened my mouth, prepared to express my exhilaration. Mays was put out well in front of the warning track, I closed my mouth without a sound, and sat politely back down.
Still staring at the casing, I started thinking about the legacy of a war conducted with unprecedented force by a republic without the knowledge of, let alone the consent of, the people financing it, and how perhaps the shrinking world would preclude any other such devastating secret. But my journalist mind knew better. Our wars are fought differently now - the Panamas, the Grenadas, the Desert Storms - and consent crafting is part of the formula. Furthermore, I couldn’t help but think of our current House Speaker’s response to a Congressman’s (Robert Torricelli) decision to inform the taxpayers who fund the C.I.A. that their money might have been going toward the murder of a U.S. citizen by Agency-trained death squads in Guatemala: Mr. Gingrich suggested Torricelli be suspended from the Foreign Relations Committee.
And as for the cluster bombs and land mines, after Laos, there is Bosnia, Angola, Rwanda. Let’s put it this way: the MAG staff know they’ll never be out of a job. There are enough anti-personnel weapons laid already today to kill every man, woman and child in Laos, twice. You can see them lying on the side of the road. “Sometimes I think it would be better to just lay concrete over the whole country, slap down some top soil and start over,” Stanford told me in his Land Rover with no smile.
And the future? Bombies and land mines are cheap and profitable. They work. Now there are untraceable plastic varieties as well. Among the world’s major producers, in UN-sponsored negotiations, China, the world’s biggest supplier, has proved the most humane, according to MAG officials, agreeing that the detonation capability of anti-personnel weapons should deteriorate after a mere five years. The U.S. proposed something like a century and a half (although in late March the Pentagon made a statement that it might reconsider its position). Neither figure makes any military sense, of course, as presumably the goal is to win a war. What victor would want to plunder a country full of live munitions?
Still, something forces me to write this story. And I believe I know what it is. When I asked the young boy in the hospital through my translator if he was in pain, he looked at me, opened his mouth, then closed it again, unable to speak.
He’d never been to Shea Stadium.
Postscript - My photos of the Hmong boy in the hospital confirmed my initial impressions. He looked as if he’d make it. I was wrong. I heard upon returning to Vientiane that he had died, probably from a lung infection.
Doug Fine’s print work has appeared in the Washington Post, Wired, Spin, US News and World Report and the Discovery Channel Online.