https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v48/n04/letters

Adam Shatz refers to Richard Nixon as an ‘often monstrous leader who ... presided over bombing campaigns in Vietnam and Cambodia’ (LRB, 5 February). Laos is too often forgotten. Between 1964 and 1973, first Johnson then Nixon conducted the largest bombing campaign in history in South-East Asia. In Laos, a country of fewer than three million people, the US dropped more than two million tons of ordnance: 270 million bombs of almost two hundred different types, including cluster bombs, via 580,000 planeloads, an average of one planeload every eight minutes, 24 hours a day, for nine years. A third of the bombs failed to explode. Poor rural areas, where 70 per cent of the country’s population live by subsistence farming, remain minefields to this day. Unexploded bombs are inadvertently triggered by farm work, fires used for cooking, people walking or children playing (since 1975 nearly half of the twenty thousand casualties have been children). While the US is the main donor to the Lao National Unexploded Ordnance Programme, the $20 million or so it gives per year is inadequate to the task (it is estimated that since 1996 the number of unexploded bombs cleared amounts to between 1 and 3 per cent of the total).

The ‘secret’ war has long since not been secret, yet the fact that Laos is the most heavily bombed country per capita and that the bombing continues to cost the lives and limbs of the Lao doesn’t get the attention that might lead to more funding and a more intensive effort to deal with the danger. At least tourism is booming, so more people are seeing the rusted bomb casings villagers use as planters, signs, boats and ‘décor’; they can also visit the caves once used as bomb shelters and the country’s UXO-themed museums. But the war ended fifty years ago. Eighty million unexploded bombs remain in Laos.

Lee Gillette
Brussels