I was one of those Sally Struthers' babies in the Christian Children's
Fund brochures, a young child running around my village in Laos, barefoot
and naked, playing in the rice paddies. One afternoon I was playing
by a pond when I spotted a water snake swimming toward me hissing, as
if delivering a message. Running away, heart thumping, I heard
a distant buzzing sound from above. I saw an airplane and a small
voice told me that one day I would ride that iron eagle to America--a
place my sister Samountha had moved to some years before. I was
probably 6 years old. Tha
The entrance to Craters restaurant is guarded by a phalanx of bombshells, each as big as a man. Opposite, the Dokkhoune hotel boasts an even finer warhead collection. For tourists who have not cottoned on, the Lao town of Phonsavanh lies at the heart of the most cluster-bombed province of the most bombed country on earth.
The bombing was relentless. From 1964 to 1973, the United States dropped more than 2 million tons of ordnance on Laos. That's a planeload of bombs every eight minutes, 24 hours a day, for nine years. Laos has the unfortunate distinction of being the most heavily bombed country in the history of the world.
"In the area of Xieng Khoang, the place of my birth, there was health, good earth, and fine weather," one survivor, a 33-year-old man, recalls of that period.
Phonsavanh, Laos - The entrance to Craters restaurant is guarded by a phalanx of
bombshells, each as big as a man. Opposite, the Dokkhoune hotel boasts
an even finer warhead collection. For tourists who have not cottoned
on, the Lao town of Phonsavanh lies at the heart of the most
cluster-bombed province of the most bombed country on earth.
XIENG KHOUANG, Laos - Laotian children chase each other
through their school playing field, unaware of the 248 unexploded bombs
buried a few steps away -- the lethal legacy of a war that ended three
decades ago.
Remnants of the Vietnam War which ended in 1975
litter this tiny Southeast Asian nation, which became the most bombed
country in the world after US forces dropped planeloads of ordnance to
cut off Northern Vietnamese supply routes.
