Finding Killer "Dud" Bombs in Laos
David Tharp
The Nippon Foundation
The Nippon Foundation
Indepth Articles
[Jan. 11, 2008]
"Dud" being exploded
The Laotian farmer raised his axe to cut through what he thought was a tree root. Instead, he hit a rusted, unexploded U.S. air force bomb. The axe's impact triggered an explosion killing the farmer and four of his five children. This incident is not isolated. There are thousands of similar examples that continue to occur in Laos on a regular basis. If disturbed, these "dud" bombs can explode with murderous force. Even the ringing of a cell phone can sometimes set them off.
A total of 80 million bombs were dropped on Laos by the U.S. during the Indochina war from the 1960s to 1975. Military experts say that 10% to 30% of those bombs were duds that didn't go off at the time. They lie buried and rusting in fields, ponds, and hillsides over a vast area of Laos, especially along what was called the Ho Chi Minh Trail, a jungle route used by North Vietnamese to supply their troops fighting against U.S. and South Vietnamese forces.
Since the 1990s, teams of bomb disposal experts from several countries have assisted the Laotian government in finding, defusing, and destroying bombs as large as 3000 lbs. Additionally, they have been finding massive numbers of deadly anti-personnel cluster bombs, land mines, artillery rounds, mortar shells, and rocket propelled grenades.
One of these international teams of volunteer bomb disposal experts is the Japan Mine Action Service (JMAS), made up ex-Self Defense Force personnel. They work closely with a division of the Lao Ministry of Labor and Welfare known as UXO (Unexploded Ordnance).
Barrel full of rusting ordnance
In the past six years JMAS has also helped to train Laotian UXO bomb disposal units that include women trainees. Together the JMAS and UXO teams have found tens of thousands of unexploded bombs and various killer ordnances that subsequently have been safely destroyed in controlled, ear-splitting detonations. UXO teams alone have found and disposed of over a hundred thousand unexploded weapons.
JMAS's life-saving work is funded by official Japanese government developmental assistance, and financial support from The Nippon Foundation. If it had not been for this crucial support, more Laotians in rural areas would have been killed or badly injured.
Unfortunately, since the end of the Indochina War in 1975, many thousands of accidents have indeed occurred with exploding "dud" bombs, killing or maiming many men, women, and children. This threatening situation continues to lurk, just beneath the surface of good farming land, where sleeping bombs scare away many Laotians who would otherwise gladly use the fertile soil.
While Laotian government bomb disposal teams have become more proficient at their work, they still require outside expert support and funding. The Nippon Foundation funds this technical support and training with the aim of passing on these crucially needed skills to locally trained teams, who are building up their own self-supporting, national organizations.
JMAS volunteers, who refer to themselves jokingly as the "oyaji" (old men), maintain offices in Laos, Cambodia, and Pakistan (this office supports bomb clearance activities in Afghanistan), where they regularly search out unexploded ordnance in these countries and train local bomb-disposal teams.