Durham; London: Duke University Press, 2019. viii, 171 pp. (B&W photos.) US$24.95, paper. ISBN 978-1-4780-0485-1.
In January 1961, President Dwight Eisenhower approved Operation Momentum, a covert military operation in Laos. It was designed to leave a light footprint: a few CIA officers would train and arm local Hmong villagers to fight the Pathet Laos, the Laotian Communist forces, and then they would vanish. Instead, what transpired was the largest CIA paramilitary operation in US history, a nine-year secret war over the Ho Chi Minh Trail. As Laos became a higher priority to US foreign policy (Eisenhower called Laos the “cork in the bottle”—the contents of that bottle being communist expansion across Asia—and allegedly spent more time discussing Laos than Vietnam in declassified records), the CIA’s program ballooned in budget and body count.
This secret infiltration escalated into a war fought primarily with bombs. By 1975, the US dropped 2,093,100 tons of bombs on Laos, which was one-third more tonnage than was released over Nazi Germany during World War II. This is the equivalent of one planeload of bombs falling every eight minutes around the clock for nearly a decade. Since the civil war ended in 1975, unexploded bombs have continued to kill: the death toll stands at 30,000 Laotian civilians and counting.
Leah Zani’s argument proceeds from a simple question: How have bombs become a part of Laotian life? She shows how, through the legacy of explosive ordnance, war can sediment itself into the layers of contemporary society. As a consequence, many forward-looking policies aimed at developing or modernizing the country, from economic liberalization to authoritarian consolidation, are taking place in parallel to an environment still haunted by its violent past. Zani’s process of answering her question incorporates creative forms of observation. She translates Laotian poems to ground her concept of parallelism. She writes her own award-winning field poems, which start each chapter. She conducts a sound ethnography of a supervised bomb detonation. She studies hauntings at a gold mine, and frames ghosts as social actors. And all of this is accomplished in a high-surveillance setting where soldiers patrolled the streets, enforcing a curfew for foreigners, and many respondents feared that she was an American spy.
The conflict between American military weapons and contemporary Laotian society shapes the book from start to finish. It shares this theme with Salvage: Cultural Resilience among the Jorai of Northeast Cambodia, a 2016 book by Krisna Uk also reviewed by Pacific Affairs. As Uk explains in her ethnography of Leu, a village that was formerly part of the Ho Chi Minh Trail, the US bombing was a traumatic historical event that tore apart local life and led to a fundamental reordering of previous political, economic, social, and religious systems. Uk explores two facets of post-war reconstruction: first, a subsistence-level existence leads some to engage in high-risk economic activities—hunting for bomb remnants for financial and spiritual gain; second, traditional rituals have incorporated reproductions of planes and weapons, demonstrating how the memories of war are passed down through cultural rites.
Zani’s case in chapter 2, the town of Sepon, presents an intriguing counterpoint to Uk’s remote village of Leu. Sepon serves as a district capital, and is only minutes away from a section of Route 9, perhaps best known for being the main route of the Ho Chi Minh Trail. During the US airstrikes, every building in Sepon was destroyed, and much of the land was ruined by defoliants sprayed from the airplanes. Today, Zani describes the new road (“paved, clean, well-marked” [71]) and the emergence of the town New Sepon, which derives its wealth from the mineral-rich mountains that surround the area.
Like Uk, Zani finds war materials incorporated into daily life and religious ritual: a temple bell made from a carpet bomb shell, craters used as trash pits. Despite the incoming flow of money and people, Zani observes the psychological devastation that still remains from the bombing at the Lang Xine gold mine nearby. Her chapter brings to light the mineworkers’ beliefs of the ghosts and spirits of those killed by explosive remnants of war. The land near the mine is heavily contaminated with unexploded bombs, and Zani focuses on the story of three brothers who tried to dismantle a general-purpose bomb, but died in the process. The physical obliteration of their bodies, along with the fact that they had no family nearby to conduct proper burial rights, doomed their spirits to wander as ghosts. This section is a fascinating example of how two worlds that typically operate in parallel—like life and death or historic violence and future prosperity—can intersect to haunting effect.
A thoroughly original work, Bomb Children is likely to become a useful reference for students and scholars alike, and indeed anyone interested in the social consequences of airstrikes. It is also an arresting personal account of the hazards of fieldwork in a highly monitored and dangerous country.
Erin Lin
The Ohio State University, Columbus