Stanford, CA: Redwood Press, 2022. xiii, 187 pp. (Illustrations.) US$25.00, cloth. ISBN 9781503611733.
Especially for those who remember the war well, it is easy to feel baffled by and then resentful of US military decisions during the Vietnam War. Over the course of the war, President Richard Nixon and his advisor Henry Kissinger tried to halt the spread of communism in Southeast Asia by expanding the American bombing campaign into Laos and Cambodia, to ostensibly target North Vietnamese supply lines. In the process we dropped over two million tons of ordnance on Laos, an amount equivalent to one ton per Laotian. One of the most unexpectedly devastating (and most ignored) characteristics of the gravity bombs we used was that they often did not work. Many of these bombs failed to detonate when they hit muddy, densely vegetated, or inundated surfaces, leaving a potentially lethal weapon in the soil for decades after the payload drop.
As Leah Zani shows in her new book Strike Patterns, these leftover bombs connect the local and the global. In the modern era of airstrikes and bombardments, it is as impossible to draw a sharp line between domestic and international politics as it is to understand the layered realities of Laotian daily life without understanding its language, religion, and conflict history. A cultural anthropologist by training, Zani wrote a book that refocuses history on first-person accounts. Because she draws out such intimate detail from her respondents, she faces a problem encountered by many qualitative researchers: vivid character portrayals make her respondents identifiable, even when names and locations are anonymized. So she made her book a work of ethnographic fiction—and ultimately an act of nimble storytelling.
Her narrator shares key biographical details with Zani: a doctoral student at a university in California, an anthropologist attuned to complexity, a daughter who traces her family history to a long line of pilots. The creative fiction format allows Zani to explore a variety of interpretations of US bombing—from the perspective of American veterans, anti-war protesters, and high school students learning about the Vietnam War to the Laotian bomb technicians and farmers who live in the blast zones, as well as the Western aid workers who consult for and direct the clearance operations. She offers vibrant portraits of them all, but there are two characters she places at the centre of the book. Channarong, a clearance technician with Thai origins, shares some of the narrator’s outsider, observer status. Chantha, her liaison from the international demining organization, serves as a host, translator, and friend, inviting the narrator to festival days at her neighbourhood temple.
The narrator’s own experience primes us to be alert and question our desire to usher formidable social problems toward easy resolutions. She describes the painstaking process of safely ridding lands of unexploded ordnance. Survey teams overlay a grid on a suspect landscape, and colour-code the cells depending on what the metal detectors find. Deminers differentiate bombs from scrap metal by the length of the pings from the machine. A separate team arrives to dig up and detonate the ordnance. They wear safety gear (kevlar vests, plastic visors, and face shields), but the outfits are designed for landmines, which were made to maim rather than kill. By contrast, the majority of the bombs here are cluster munitions, which explode at a different rate and are designed to fragment. In other words when a cluster bomb goes off, it releases dozens of steel balls in all directions, rendering any protection equipment superfluous.
The details also provide thinly veiled criticisms of development practices. The last third of the book focuses on the interactions between the Westerners who work for the international clearance organization and the community stakeholders. One chapter introduces Emilia, a foreign consultant for the international clearance organization. In order to release the cleared land back to the community, Emilia needs copies of property titles and signatures from the landowners and village chief. Yet this insistence to collect paperwork and not feedback paired with the belief that villagers need someone to tell them what is safe and what is not, both strike a dissonant chord for the narrator. The chapter leans into ambiguity and uncertainty, pushing against the demand for a tidy story about the triumph of rescue workers.
Zani writes as both an insider and an outsider, having spent so much time in Laos’ rural villages while understanding how differently she is treated as a white American. She also collects interesting and occasionally delightful facts about village life in Laos. In order to cook crickets, it is best to freeze them to death before frying. During lunch, deminers forage for wild foods, sharing pennywort and jasmine shoots with each other. When the narrator attends the Fireboat Festival with Chantha, she learns what particular colours symbolize (green for money, orange for death). Working in a community where its members are unfailingly polite to her, the narrator talks about how it is linguistically difficult to say no in the Lao language.
Fifty years after the Vietnam War tore a hole in Laotian society, the bombing continues to rupture rural lives. Strike Patterns brings precisely this insight to bear on the politics and village relationships in Laos, showing how unexploded bombs became crucial roadblocks to post-conflict recovery, transforming the lives, economic opportunities, and social structures of those living in old theatres of war.
Erin Lin
The Ohio State University, Columbus