Yes, you saw that right. At the night Market I saw a couple people sell items made from bombs that had been been found and still active. I bought some as souvenirs as it was great cause and then set out to find the museum and the story.
They had a variety of bombs. Fuses and the chemicals have been removed from them. This shows all the devices that were used by the US and the Russians to back who we wanted to make Laos “safe”. We were wrong. Communism is not an enemy and we destabilized a whole area just like we are still doing in the middle east.
It tells the story of how the operation in Laos was an unofficial one and therefore where and how bombs were dropped were not conformed to international law.
Laos was the most bombed country per capita during the Vietnam War, also known as the 2nd Indochina war. Primarily the bombing was to cut off supply lines for the north Vietnamese.
Cluster bombs shown below were used. When dropped, the outer part opened and hundreds of small bombs were scattered. 30% of all of these bombs did not detonate, falling into rice paddies, fields, and jungles. They are still active today almost 50 years later.
Every day, a person in Laos is killed or injured when one goes off unexpectedly. I saw a video of a family of 3 girls starting a fire to cook fish for their mother and there was a bomb below the dirt and it exploded. One sister was killed and the other lost part of her arm. They have other stories as well.
UXO goes on and uses devices to find possible bombs using landsat technology. Sometimes they can defuse and sometimes they explode it remotely. The scrap they use to make souvenirs and raise awareness. It helps find their mission. Their landsat images of bomb locations match the poorest areas of Laos. That is because they live in fear that they will accidentally step on a bomb, they cannot farm further out or dig deeper for crops. Those areas are given priority as kids have been injured trying to go to school, family to the hospital, and just living daily lives.
More information about the war.
Of course I bought an item here as well. In the elephant park in Chiang Mai, they rescued two elephants badly injured from mine and bombs.
It was very moving and being against our action in Vietnam and made me even angrier that a country was caught in the middle and still paying a terrible price.