25 Years After War's End in Vietnam, Laos Dealing with Unexploded Bombs
May 26, 2000 PAKSONG, Laos -- Standing in a crater a quarter-mile wide on this jungle plateau in southern Laos, Pong Inthisane takes stock of the day's work: two 500-pound bombs, 20 anti-tank rockets and scores of rusting mortars, all neatly stacked at his feet.
Glancing at his notepad as if referring to a familiar recipe, he inspects the wads of plastic explosive stuck like bubble gum to two of the bombs, and nods. It's time to blow them up.
"I can't remember how many times I've done this," said Inthisane, a 27-year-old de-miner with Laos' bomb disposal program, UXO Lao, as he heads to a bunker fashioned from logs and dirt.
For Inthisane, destroying the leftovers of war is a daily routine here in tiny Champassak province bordering Cambodia and Thailand.
Twenty-five years after the Vietnam War, Laos is still battling the insidious legacy of unexploded bombs. From 1964 to 1973 the United States dropped about 2 million tons of bombs along the North Vietnamese army's supply route known as the Ho Chi Minh Trail, in the jungles of eastern Laos. Bombing logs released in 1998 show an average of one planeload every eight minutes for nine years.
Up to 30 percent of the bombs did not explode, some because they were dropped at an altitude too low, others because they malfunctioned.
Since the war, the potentially lethal bombs have endangered people and crippled the economy by making some farmland useless.
Many bombs are small anti-personnel devices from U.S.-made cluster bombs. Millions of the tennis ball-size bomblets, known locally as "bombies," litter the countryside, along with munitions from nations that waged war in Indochina during the last 50 years.
Thonglay Thammavong, 46, discovered a "bombie" while digging a latrine behind his family's thatched hut in Sekong, near a junction of the former Ho Chi Minh Trail.
It was 1986, 11 years after the war ended. Thammavong, a diminutive man with graying hair, struck the ground with his hoe and dug until he saw a round object.
"It was yellow and round," he recalled. "It looked like a piece of fruit. I knocked it with a piece of bamboo, then I decided to throw it away."
When Thammavong cocked his arm to hurl the bomblet, it exploded. He was knocked unconscious for a few minutes.
"My family came to carry me to the hospital," Thammavong said.
"They cut my hand off," he said pointing to a nub just below his elbow, which he covers with a patch of black cotton.
Such incidents are less common these days, thanks to community awareness programs and the removal of bombs from populated areas by UXO Lao.
UXO Lao and UNICEF workers have visited hundreds of villages in this poor, rice-farming country, which is about the size of Britain, to alert people to the danger of the unexploded bombs.
UXO Lao was established five years ago with the support of a United Nations Development Program trust fund created to clear bombs. With about $12 million in equipment and monetary contributions from 11 countries, UXO Lao is operated by the communist Lao government and closely advised by international agencies, including UNICEF and six bomb clearance groups.
Twenty-nine foreign bomb-disposal experts advise 1,000 Laotians in nine of the country's 18 provinces. Within the next three years, the government hopes to withdraw most foreign advisers in the nation.
Many of the bombs were manufactured in the United States by Honeywell and have sophisticated fuses, some of which are still classified secret by the U.S. government. But Washington's position is that the unexploded bombs are not the responsibility of the United States.
"Just because we dropped the stuff doesn't mean we're going to go in there and clean it up," said a Pentagon official recently. "The cleanup of ordnance is the responsibility of the people who caused the conflict."
Exactly who started the conflict in Laos, a so-called "secret war" sponsored by the CIA and never officially recognized, remains a matter of debate.
Nonetheless, the United States has become UXO Lao's biggest supplier of training and equipment, such as trucks, mine detectors and computers.
From 1997 through 1999, the United States sent troops to Laos to teach de-mining at a UXO Lao training camp.
But some foreign advisers say the program was ill-advised because it focused on land mines, which make up only about 4 percent of the unexploded ordnance.
Joe DeVroe, a Belgian military bomb specialist and UXO Lao adviser, compared Laos to Belgium, where he has been a de-miner for the last 20 years.
"They'll have work for 50 or 100 years," he said. "We still find
ammunition in Belgium from the First World War -- more than 80
years later -- so why should it be any different in Laos?"
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