Why I Support Legacies

From the desk of Murray Hiebert

I hankered for an organization like Legacies of War decades before it was born.  

In November 1977, a little over two years after the war in Laos ended, a small group of foreigners living in Laos, including my wife Linda and me, were invited to visit Xieng Khoang province in northeastern Laos on the first trip to the area since the fighting stopped in 1975.  As our plane approached the tiny capital of Phonesavan, we saw dozens of bomb craters pockmarking former rice fields as far as our eyes could see.  

People who had fled to the mountains and caves to escape relentless U.S. bombing were slowly coming back. The only street in town had three small wooden stalls with meagre merchandise like wool hats, sarongs, pens, writing tablets, lettuce and small pieces of chicken.  The rough wooden guesthouse where we were housed had only one large room with a dozen or so small cots and a lone light bulb for light.  The group shared three crude stalls for bathrooms and washing from a bucket of cold water.  

The next day we were taken to a nearby village where returnees were trying to reclaim their lives. From the Soviet-era jeep that took us over a muddy rutted road, we had to walk on small, raised embankments between fields to the first house of cobbled together thatch, straw and scraps of wood. Our guides told us not to step off the narrow trail because little cluster bomblets the size of tennis balls were scattered around the fields.  We saw some sticking out of the ground as we walked – and prayed we would not slip.  

In front of the first house we met a small boy of 7 looking pained and anxious with a heavily bandaged stump of an arm.  A bomblet had exploded as he and his friends had played with a bomblet a few days earlier, shredding his arm just below his elbow.  Next door was a farmer who lost much of his leg a few weeks earlier when a bomblet exploded when he struck it accidently with his hoe as he tried to turn the soil to plant his next crop.  

Nobody knows exactly how many people have been killed or injured during the war backed by the United States on one side and China and Russia (then the Soviet Union) on the other.  The Mines Advisory Group (MAG), which has been working in Laos since 1994 to clear unexploded ordnance, estimates that about 20,000 people have been killed or injured since the hostilities ended.  Another five were killed and 16 injured last year, according to Lao press accounts. 

We had been working in Laos for two years with the Mennonite Central Committee (MCC), a relief and development agency of the Mennonite church in Canada and the United States, before we were able to travel to Xieng Khoang.  Since arriving we had done projects such as importing vegetable seeds after neighboring Thailand closed its border to Laos, choking off fresh Thai produce.  When we learned that almost all the water buffalo used as draft animals in Xieng Khoang had been killed by the bombing, we arranged to buy some 25 animals in southern Laos and arrange to have them walked about 600 kilometers north. It took about a month.

After we encountered our first bomb victims in Xieng Khoang, we knew as believers in non-violence that we had to do something. Trying to figure out what was the challenge.  We worked for a small organization, and the United States had imposed an embargo on Laos after the communist victory.  Realizing that the farmer had been injured by hitting the bomblet with a powerful stroke of his hoe, we struck on the “appropriate technology” solution of importing garden forks.  We hoped that as farmers turned their soil with garden forks, they would not set the bomblets off.

To import 100 of these tools into Laos required an export license from the U.S. State Department. It rejected our license request, prompting us to look to Congress for help in overturning the decision.  After many months, it worked and we were able to bring the garden forks to Laos.  Of course, we quickly realized Laos needed much more sophisticated technology and skill to tackle the massive and dangerous problem.  

Our MCC successors tried other technology such as devising a tractor with flails to detonate the unexploded ordnance, but this also was not successful.  In 1994, MCC started working with MAG to organize a systematic clearance effort to detect and detonate bomblets in Laos. The MAG team begins each project by using metal detectors and mapping tools to determine areas of ordnance contamination.  It then detonates the ordnance with explosives. In 1993, the U.S. Department of State began providing funds for ordnance removal.  The work is extremely tedious and slow.

Late last year I returned to Laos with a delegation including several former MCC workers in Laos and a group of Legacies of War supporters.  Many in the group visited an ordnance removal site in Xieng Khoang.  They witnessed MAG officials surveying a small field and detonating several small bombs.  

I have been back to Laos many times since the mid-1970s, but I was especially excited to visit last fall because it marked the 50^th anniversary since Linda and I had set up the MCC program in Laos, which continues today. My visit also marked the 48^th anniversary  since our first trip to Xieng Khoang where we witnessed the ordnance problem first hand.  We spent time after we returned to the United States talking to administration officials and congressional offices about the unexploded bomblet problem.

Our MCC successors continued to work on ordnance in Laos and in 2004 Legacies of War was formed to begin raising awareness in the United States, particularly In Congress.  Through these efforts, Legacies helped build congressional support for expanded funding for ordnance clearance.  Over the decades, the United States has invested hundreds of millions of dollars to tackle the ordnance problem left in Lao fields after U.S. bombers fell silent in the early 1970s.

Despite all of MAG’s efforts over the past two decades much work remains.  During my trip, I asked a MAG official how long it would take to clear all Lao fields of unexploded ordnance.  I was shocked by his answer: “500 years, maybe 1,000.”

That answer helps explain why I support Legacies of War.  We need the group’s help to convince Congress and U.S. officials that 50 years after the war ended, Americans still have work to do to help clear up the legacies of the fighting, so no more 7-year-old boys and Lao farmers get maimed or killed while going about their daily lives.