From the desk of Ret. Ambassador Wendy Chamberlin
Fifty-two years after the bombing stopped on Laos, the people of Laos continue to face the massive task of clearing farmland, forests, even schoolyards, and roadways of unexploded ordnance. Today, dangerous explosives still lurk in the muddy rice paddies. From 2013 to 2023, 440 casualties were reported, resulting in 114 deaths, many of whom are children. Advocating to remove these deadly hazards is the mission of Legacies of War.
My introduction to the Lao people and the dangers of unexploded ordnance (UXO) goes back half a century ago. From 1971 to 1973, I was a volunteer teacher with the International Voluntary Service (IVS) at what was then called the National Pedagogical College on the outskirts of Vientiane in Dong Dok. Literacy rates were low in Laos, particularly in rural areas. The U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) primarily funded the IVS program to train teachers. Then, as of now, the best way to teach education is through practical experience in the classroom. Four afternoons a week, I loaded promising Lao teachers into a van to take them to the Lao Orthopedic Hospital, where they instructed amputees to read and write in their language.
The literacy program was valuable on several levels. My students looked forward to the afternoon excursions into town. Many came from rural villages and still had relatives who farmed UXO-polluted land. This was personal to them. Working with amputees, who ranged in age from seven to seventy years old, was profoundly moving. Some of the amputees made progress in reading and writing. Others, the older ones, found it taxing but looked forward to engaging with their youthful instructors. All found it a welcome break from the monotony of waiting for their artificial limbs to be made.
My tenure as an IVS teacher coincided with some of the heaviest bombardment of Laos. Working with the amputees on a people-to-people scale made me a witness to the consequences of war. All the while, sorties of B-52 bombers continued to overfly Laos from air bases in Thailand, dropping heavy munitions on the caravans of North Vietnamese communists transporting war supplies to the south along the so-called Ho Chi Minh trail. Large portions of the supply route passed through the dense jungles and rugged mountains within Lao territory. Spraying bomblets on large tracks of farms and forests was an effort to deny the North Vietnamese access to Lao porters and food supplies. Another aspect of this strategy was to relocate whole villages to the lowlands. Sometimes, I accompanied my students to nearby forests to help the newcomers clear land. I saw firsthand the hardships highland tribal people accustomed to cooler climes faced when transported to steamy, mosquito-infested lowlands. As the Lao would say, “When the elephants fight, the grass gets trampled.”
The bombing ended as I left Laos in 1973. I returned to Vientiane in 1976, then as a first tour Foreign Service Officer at the American Embassy. Much had happened during the three intervening years. The war ended. The Pathet Lao established the Lao People’s Democratic Government in Vientiane. Thousands of my fellow American citizens left, and the once sizeable U.S. presence in Laos was reduced to nine. I was one of them. Our mission in Vientiane was simple -- to remain. We were the only U.S. diplomatic mission still open in Indochina.
Western diplomats lived under restricted conditions during those early days. We could only travel within a six-mile radius of the Mekong River. Engagements with Lao officials were limited, and contact with private Lao citizens could endanger them. Many of my former students fled to Thailand across the Mekong River or were whisked off to the former Pathet Lao capital in Phongsaly for “reeducation.” Long dependent on imports from Thailand, Vientiane markets emptied, resulting in food and medicine shortages. I no longer had contact with the Orthopedic Hospital, but I could see that farmers and children in the countryside were still being maimed by unexploded ordnance in great numbers. The new government had few resources to deal with the injuries.
By the time I returned to Laos for a third time, from 1996 to 1999, as the American Ambassador, the situation had significantly improved. In 1996, the United Nations Development Program established UNDP-UXO to fund the removal of cluster bombs, educate the public about the dangers, and train Lao personnel to manage the country-wide effort. The United States was one of the first contributors. Over the past several decades, the U.S. has remained one of the most generous supporters, with an accumulated contribution of just over $400 million. UXO-Lao expanded operations countrywide to become one of the country’s largest employers of local citizens. Its outreach program in schools and villages alerts people to the dangers of handling lingering cluster munitions. Teams of trained Lao deploy to remove and safely detonate ordnances. Specialized non-governmental organizations (NGOs) like Mines Advisory Group (MAG) help clear school yards, rice paddies, and public places of bombs buried in the ground. Millions of cluster munitions have been removed.
The job of protecting people from unexploded ordnance is still ongoing. An estimated 270 million cluster munitions were dropped on Laos. It may be years before people can safely plow farmland and know that children will not be curious about pieces of iron they encounter in the forests. Organizations like Legacies of War will continue to play essential advocacy roles.
