From 1964 to 1973, the US dropped more than 2 million tons of bombs on Laos — about as many as there were people in the small Southeast Asian country. More bombs were dropped on Laos during the Vietnam War than on Germany and Japan combined during World War II. It made Laos — per capita — the most heavily bombed country in history.
The clandestine nature of the war was inherent in its design. The CIA secretly carried out the bombing in its attempt to destroy the communist supply lines between Laos and Vietnam. Although the “secret war” in Laos was eventually exposed through a Congressional hearing in 1971 and subsequent media reports, its magnitude and devastation remain invisible to much of the American public.
“It wasn’t called America’s secret war for nothing,” said Aleena Inthaly, chief of staff for the Legacies of War advocacy group. “I talk to people who grew up in the US and have no idea.”
That lack of public awareness was what drove Legacies of War’s recently launched virtual library. The organization’s employees and administrators have sifted through a wide variety of materials to compile a collection of books, films, documents and other resources that together provide a more complete picture of what happened in Laos.
By making the history of the secret war in Laos more accessible, the organization hopes not only to bring awareness to the bombing, but also to draw attention to the damage that has yet to be repaired.
The library records countless sides of the war
The idea for the library came about in 2020 after Sera Koulabdara, executive director of Legacies of War, and Jessica Pearce Rotondi, a journalist and author, started chatting on social media.
Rotondi has a personal connection to the secret war, which she explored in her memoir “What We Inherit: A Secret War and a Family’s Search for Answers.” After her mother’s death, a box of letters and CIA documents led Rotondi to unravel the family mystery surrounding her Uncle Jack, who disappeared during the war in 1972. As she noted in the book, her journey through Southeast Asia brought her closer to her. deceased mother and eased the toll the clandestine war took.
As Koulabdara and Rotondi discussed the diverse experiences of those affected by the war, they decided to build a library that could capture this range of perspectives, Rotondi said.
The Legacies of War team began assembling books, articles, documentaries, and reports, each telling a piece of this history. It was especially important to them that the library contains materials that are accessible to people of all ages and learning styles, Rotondi said.
“We really wanted to make sure that this library wasn’t just a hyper-academic thing for students doing one type of research,” added Rotondi, who serves on the Legacies of War board of directors.
Books in the library include Joshua Kurlantzick’s “A Great Place to Have a War: America in Laos and the Birth of a Military CIA,” detailing the CIA’s involvement in the war, and Pao Lor’s “Modern Jungles: A Hmong Refugee’s Childhood Story of Survival”, a first person account told from the perspective of a 5-year-old boy.
Perhaps the most prized part of the collection, however, is a treasure trove of drawings by refugees who experienced the American bombings firsthand. The hand-drawn illustrations, collected by American activist Fred Branfman during his visits to refugee camps in the 1970s, show the horrific ways villagers saw their neighbors and relatives murdered.
“We’ve gathered, I think, a tremendous amount of information that just wasn’t in one place before,” said Mike Burton, who served in the United States Air Force during the war and is now board chairman for Legacies of War.
While the library is currently focused solely on the secret war in Laos, Legacies of War hopes to expand those resources to include the bombing campaigns in Cambodia and Vietnam.
Advocating hope that awareness leads to action
The secret war in Laos is more than an unfortunate chapter in American history – its repercussions live on to this day.
Of the more than 2 million tons of cluster munitions dropped on Laos, an estimated one-third never exploded. Many of those unexploded weapons, including bullets, grenades, grenades and land mines, can still explode, posing a risk to the people of Laos.
According to the Landmine and Cluster Munition Monitor, an estimated 50,000 people in Laos have been injured or killed by those unexploded weapons since 1964, many of them children. For decades, Legacies of War have lobbied for federal funding to help clean up those remnants. According to Legacies of War, the US began providing aid for the clean-up efforts in 1993 and significantly increased funding from 2010 as a result of advocacy efforts. During his 2016 visit to Laos, President Barack Obama announced that the US would provide $90 million in funding over three years.
The organization hopes its new library efforts can help maintain that momentum.
“Once someone knows about the war, when you read that report firsthand, when you see those numbers, you can’t look away,” Rotondi said.
As the Russian war in Ukraine has already led to the clearing of unexploded ordnance and mines dropped by Kremlin forces, and as explosive remnants continue to pose a threat around the world, the Legacies of War team wants to make sure make sure what happened in Laos isn’t. it may happen again.
“Hopefully this also serves as a reminder that cluster munitions are being used around the world,” Inthaly said. “It’s a problem, and they shouldn’t be used. Period. Because 50 years later, we’re still cleaning them up.”