200 years to go before Laos is cleared of unexploded US bombs from Vietnam war era

Thanksgiving is an American tradition that is unknown in most of the world. Fifty years ago, however, it landed in Laos, the small, impoverished Southeast Asian nation that was to become perhaps the longest-suffering casualty of the United States’ war in Vietnam.

Thanksgiving is held on the fourth Thursday in November. In 1968, that fell on November 28, and on that day, at the height of the war and on the orders of president Lyndon B. Johnson, turkey dinners were helicoptered in to American soldiers who were on a mission to sever the Ho Chi Minh Trail – the network of paths and tracks that constituted North Vietnam’s military supply lines to the south of the country – that ran through eastern Laos.

LBJ’s festive dinners were flown in at the same time as the US began dropping millions of bombs on the trail, which it had already been targeting for four years. Half a century later, Laos is still dealing with the deadly legacy of that bombing campaign, which left an estimated 100 million pieces of unexploded ordnance on the ground.

On a dusty dirt road near the sleepy southeastern Laotian town of Xépôn, just 20km from Route 909, which follows one of the Ho Chi Minh Trail’s main arteries, and 46km (29 miles) from the border with Vietnam, the day begins with a warning.

“Minh, remember, no metal,” says Calum Gibbs, a burly young Scotsman and an operations officer with the Scotland-based Halo Trust, one of several NGOs helping to clear up unexploded munitions left by the nine-year US campaign of aerial attacks on Laos, which ended in 1973. “There’s metal in your tape measure.”

Minh is a lean Laotian man, his skin like leather, trained by Halo as an unexploded ordnance (UXO) disposal expert. He sheepishly hands his tape measure to colleague Gah, then disappears into the forest to re-examine a bomb found by villagers. A Halo team has already tried, unsuccessfully, to destroy the weapon.