From the window of our small plane, I catch sight of what seem to be sand traps in a golf course - a bizarre image, to say the least, among the parched ricefields of Xieng Khuang Province. But as the aircraft descends they turn out to be more in keeping with Laos's painful history: they are bomb craters.
Still barren after three decades, they are the stark legacy of the secret US bombing campaign that saw a mission every eight minutes, round the clock, for nine years during the Vietnam war and made this quiet Asian backwater the most bombed country in the history of warfare.
In Phonsavan, the new provincial capital (the old one was bombed out of existence), Union Jack stickers are plastered on shops, restaurants, gas stations and motorcycle taxis. The stickers come from the Mines Advisory Group (MAG), a British aid organisation attempting to clear the unexploded bombs which continue to kill and maim the people of this province. The flags and MAG logos warning against unexploded ordnance (UXO) are particularly abundant at the Sangah Restaurant in the main street. This is where - among bomb-identification charts, posters and death's-head stickers proclaiming "Danger: UXO!" - Paul Stanford, the MAG project supervisor in Phonsavan, and his colleagues can be found most evenings. Stanford is a veteran of wars from Cyprus to the Falklands, but what he has seen in Laos has shaken him more than even those bloody episodes: "I've seen more death here in the last two-and-a-half years than in my 22 years in the military. There's an accident with a bomb about once a week." He watches a pair of schoolgirls in the street cover their faces as a whirlwind of dust sweeps over them. "Just over a month ago seven children were killed by a single bomb in their village."
Nobody knows for sure the number of live bombs, shells, rockets and mines left on the ground in Laos, but it is agreed that millions upon millions of pieces of UXO infest the country. In addition to more than two million tons of bombs dropped by the Americans, there were also ground battles between the communist Pathet Lao, allied with the North Vietnamese Army, and the American-backed troops of the Royal Lao Army, itself supported by a hotchpotch of CIA-organised military outfits. As a result, Laos has the most severe UXO contamination of any country in the world and some 400 munitions-related accidents each year.
"We've found more than a hundred different types of ordnance from six countries," says Stanford. "The job of getting rid of it all is just massive." Since arriving in Xieng Khuang in 1994, MAG teams have destroyed just 60,000 pieces - less than the combined bomb load of a dozen B-52s.
The most common killers are US antipersonnel cluster bomblets the Lao people call "bombies". This childlike name is grimly appropriate: nearly half their victims - about 200 each year in Laos - are aged under 15. Roughly the same size as tennis balls, they were dropped in their tens of millions. The BLU-26, the most frequently encountered among 13 varieties of American bomblets found here, contains 100g of high-explosive and 300 ball-bearings embedded in its steel casing. Around 90 million of this type alone were dropped and up to a third remain unexploded.
As for figures on the other 12 types, Stanford says: "Pick a number. It was America's secret war and we can't get the information. The manufacturers Honeywell estimated a failure rate for these bomblets - that is, failure to detonate on impact - of 10 per cent. They've now admitted the rate may be much higher, 20 to 30 per cent. That leaves a lot of unexploded ordnance. An estimate of 100 million cluster bombs on the ground wouldn't be unreasonable."
Unexploded bombies infest rice paddies, forests, fields and even nestle under bushes, like lethal Easter eggs, in the centres of villages. In the village of Ban Don the next day, I am given a macabre tour by a dozen children. On an open patch of ground not far from the river we see the first bombie; in an irrigation channel at the side of a ricefield, another; a third lies under a pile of sticks. Embedded in a mound of earth is what the children call a "cap" - the fuse from a larger bomb, easily capable of blasting off a hand or foot.
These objects assert a deadly and unpredictable control over the land on which people must live and work. "There are 300 bombs around our village," says Bai, the oldest boy in the group. Ban Don has been visited by a MAG community awareness team, which spent nearly a week giving presentations and collecting information. Clearance teams have also been sent three times to dispose of buried UXO that has found its way to the surface of the ground. Yet bombies continue to come up, particularly after the rainy season.
Natural curiosity ensures a steady stream of young fatalities. In a country where per capita income is just £300 a year, any new "toy" is gleefully seized upon. In a grimy four-bed room at Xieng Khuang Provincial Hospital the following day, I find seven-year-old Du-li, the most recent casualty of inquisitiveness. "His friend Deng found a "ball'," says the boy's father, Seng-li. "He tried to bounce it and it blew up. Deng was killed instantly because he was right in front of the bombie. Du-li was lucky. He was only two metres away but Deng's body sheltered him from most of the shrapnel." Du-li is still wide-eyed with shock and just stares. "The doctors said he was going to die when we brought him to hospital. Look at this."
Seng-li pulls away a sheet to reveal a peppering of shrapnel wounds and a crude cholostomy bag taped to Du-li's abdomen. Fragments of the bomb passed through his kidneys. His patella is broken and part of his pelvis shattered. "The doctors think he might not be able to walk again. If he can, he'll limp for the rest of his life."
Du-li is the 13th bombie victim in Xieng Khuang in three months, according to Dr Somsavay Manipakone, the hospital director. Stanford estimates that only 10 or 20 per cent of victims survive. "Bombies are designed to kill, not just maim like the mines in, say, Cambodia. They'll blow a seven-year-old in half." The statistic is bleakly borne out in village after village on the road from Phonsavan to the Vietnamese border. Along this route bomb craters are more numerous than the ubiquitous bamboo shacks of the farmers.
In one village an entire family was wiped out. The young mother and her four children, aged between two and eight, were all killed by a single unexploded bomb while clearing grass in a field. Only six months earlier her husband had died after striking a bombie with his hoe in the same field. Another farmer died the same way in a field he had worked for the previous two years.
The steady loss of people in their most productive years keeps the small subsistence-farming communities, 85 per cent of the country's population, trapped in poverty. Infrastructure projects such as road-building and irrigation are delayed and suffer large cost overruns due to on-site UXO. Some land cannot be used at all as it is simply too risky.
"The teacher-training college had to be knocked down last year," says Stanford. "We were doing metal detection in the area and got strong readings from under its foundations. After the demolition we found 1,500 bomblets. They're everywhere. We recently dug up 450 mortar shells in a school playground. Fifty metres from this table we found a 500lb phosphorous bomb - big enough to destroy the entire town centre."
In its four years in Xieng Khuang, MAG has managed to clean up just 114 hectares in an area nearly the size of Wales, mostly schools and public land slated for development. It is hardly surprising that Lao people continue to clear their land themselves. Farmers often search for bombies and small shells by ploughing. Larger bombs are frequently dealt with by a village "bomb opener" who has perilously acquired some knowledge of disarming live ordnance.
Though this practice is frowned on by MAG and the government, villagers see it as a valuable community service. There is also a brisk scrap-metal trade in bomb materials.
Growing up in this environment, children get accustomed to handling UXO. With dismal inevitability this leads to more deaths as they confuse the harmless material they see around their homes with live bombs and shells. "Scrap dealers come here in trucks, looking for metal from the bombs," Soon (32), tells me. She lost her 13-year-old son in a bombie blast two years ago. "The kids used to collect little bombs in a plastic bag and bring them back to the village to sell with other bits of iron and aluminium they found in the forest."
"Even though we educate children about the danger, accidents keep happening," says Stanford. Our conversation is interrupted by the sound of a jackhammer. Water utility workers are digging in the main street. "Another letter to the governor," he says, exasperated. "They're supposed to OK work like that with us before they start. That land hasn't been cleared. They don't know what they might find.' MAG, he admits, cannot possibly keep up with the clearing and development of land around the province as the population returns to pre-war levels. "More people means more farmland is needed and villagers are forced to open up forested areas for cultivation. This land hasn't been used since the war and so the amount of ordnance there is pretty much as it was right after the bombing."
The US is conspicuously missing from the handful of western organisations which have followed MAG and set up bomb clearance operations in other parts of Laos. One source says this is because the Americans are afraid of fatalities among their own personnel. If so, it might explain why the US army, searching Laos for the bones of downed American bomber pilots, employs Lao civilians at 3,500 kip (85p) per day to dig the ordnance-infested ground.
"I don't think Laos will ever be cleared," Stanford says gloomily. "It's impossible to clear every village, every field or plot of land where someone wants to build a house. Even in Europe people still get blown up by second World War munitions. Well, the Americans dropped more bombs here than they did during all of that war. And in Europe we had well-financed, large-scale clearance immediately after it had finished. In Laos there aren't those kinds of resources."
The MAG operation has a budget of just $1 million a year. The American bombardment, by contrast, cost US taxpayers more than $2 million a day over its nine years. "We're completely dependent on donations. This year we've had money from the Swedish, Danish and Dutch governments. The Americans promised $100,000 for 1998 but we haven't seen it yet." A never-ending task, with a chronic lack of funds, in a country which has been turned into the biggest minefield in the world: a good recipe for disillusionment. Stanford says: "It'd be easy to let the whole situation get on top of you . . . but my feeling is that if I've saved one life, that's enough. That's what keeps me going."
What the people of this largely forgotten place must endure as they go about the dayto-day business of their lives is starkly exemplified on my last day in Xieng Khuang: a blood-soaked tarpaulin lying on the dusty ground outside the hospital. The latest victim of the bombs has just been admitted. A young man, digging post-holes for a new house, lost a leg and a hand in the blast and is unlikely to live.
