Phonsovan tries to clear debris of war

High among the opium fields of rural Laos, Khongsi is transforming bombs into pots and pans. As his young children scuffle nearby, he crouches over a blacksmith's forge, melting down a sheet of aluminium salvaged from a cluster-bomb container.

The flames are licking at the green paint and the United States Air Force insignia is bubbling in the heat. By tomorrow night, he will be cooking rice in a saucepan made from war scrap.

His thatched workshop in the remote village of Ban Knapsi is littered with remnants of the Vietnam War.

He uses a defunct 75mm shell as an anvil and the roof is propped up on four cluster-bomb containers. Outside, a dog sniffs at a pile of rusting mortar rounds, stacked in neat rows like fruit at a market.

"I can make anything from war scrap," he says. "I make knives for eating and spades for the farmers. I've even made a rifle for hunting. Almost every metal item in the village has been made from war scrap."

Such things are commonplace in Ban Knapsi. The cattle troughs, the fences, the stilts for the bamboo houses have all been made from war scrap. In a neighbouring community, the villagers keep a wing from a downed US fighter. "We are saving it for when times are tough," one says. "We could sell it, or we could turn it into tools for the fields."

The scrap is the legacy of the "secret war" staged by the US against communist units operating in Laos during the Vietnam conflict. More than two million tonnes of bombs fell on Laos between 1964 and 1973, more than half a tonne for every man, woman and child. By the time the US abandoned its embassy in Saigon three decades ago, neutral Laos had become the most heavily bombed country, per capita, in history.

The devastation was absolute. Buarsi, Khongsi's 74-year-old neighbour, recalls an image of Armageddon and tells how he was forced to leave the village when it was scrubbed from the map in 1969.

"It was like the end of all things," he says. "The place where our village once stood was empty, like the sky. It was a wasteland scattered with bombs and craters. We are still surrounded by the bombs. We get metal from some of them, and others kill our children in the fields. There is hope and there is despair."

Ban Knapsi is typical of villages across Laos' Xieng Khouang province. During the war, North Vietnamese troops poured into this part of Laos to support the country's communist insurgency, and the US bombers were never far away.

Walking around the village with the British landmine clearance charity Mines Advisory Group (MAG), villagers point out unexploded bombs. Some are in thick scrub, others protrude from sticky mud. One lies dormant in the centre of the village and everyday life goes on around it.

As technicians destroy the weapons, the explosions tear through the village, shaking clouds of brightly coloured birds into the air and sending ripples through the paddy fields.

But for many Laotians, this is the sound of hope. Since the end of the war, several people have been killed by unexploded bombs in Ban Knapsi. By the time the MAG technicians have finished, the village is a safer place.

IT IS it is from the air, en route to Xieng Khouang's provincial capital of Phonsovan, that the legacy of Laos is most stark. This is a beautiful but battered country, pockmarked with bomb craters and churned up by war. Vegetation fails to take in the sandy earth of the craters and, instead, flourishes in the displaced topsoil around the impact to leave endless strings of hollow green doughnuts.

Phonsovan is a new town and became the provincial centre after bombers annihilated the previous capital, Xieng Khouang City. Little more than a congregation of makeshift shacks, its dusty streets vibrate to a soundtrack of tinny karaoke and coughing, two-stroke moped engines.

At the hub of one of the most heavily bombed areas of Laos and despite legislation forbidding the "purchase or sale of war weapons", it is also at the centre of a lucrative trade in war scrap.

In the absence of much else to sell, many of the shops in Phonsovan peddle war scrap and hillocks of it stand on street corners. Xomsai has 15 tonnes of it outside his house.

In some regions, fuel tanks, discarded from US jets, are transformed into boats and buzz along the Mekong River filled with fishermen.

With many of the surrounding villages existing in near-prehistoric conditions, the trade in metal represents the dawn of a de facto Aluminium Age in Laos, a bizarre and unpredictable biproduct of one of the last century's most devastating conflicts.

"From one CBU [cluster bomb unit] case, I can make eight spades," a blacksmith says. "But I prefer to make knives because they sell for even more."

The bombs have become no less deadly - perhaps more so because of their salvage value.

Paul Stamford, a technical adviser with the Mines Advisory Group, explains that the prevailing attitude is that "men don't die. The reality is that they do," he says.

Since 1973, there have been nearly 2500 recorded ordnance accidents in Xieng Khouang province. And many accidents are not recorded.

Half of them were caused by people either handling or playing with unexploded weapons.

In the centre of Phonsovan, children play next to a pair of giant unexploded bombs. Daubed with the slogan "From USA", the bombs stand on their tails at the side of the road.

As yet another generation grows up with the reality of the war's aftermath, the bombs reflect a familiarity that is breeding a deadly contempt.

Just outside town, we pass a wooden shack, its makeshift porch supported by a 500lb bomb. The owner of the house, a former soldier named Thammavong, says she bought the bomb in Phonsovan for 40,000 kip (about $15) to "show my children the dangers of war".

Ironically, she cannot tell us whether the weapon is live. After a cursory investigation, it is discovered that it is and another red dot is marked on an already crimson map.

Further south, in the remote district of Samouai, bombing was concentrated along the Ho Chi Minh Trail, the name given to a series of infiltration routes used by the North Vietnamese Army to smuggle arms and troops into South Vietnam.

Between 1966 and 1971, 630,000 North Vietnamese soldiers passed along these trails and 1.1 million tons of US bombs fell on them. It is estimated that 300 bombs dropped into the forest for every infiltrator killed.

These days, the spit and sawdust village of Samouai is a pinprick in a sea of green. There is a government office, a bar run by the local police chief, and a dirt track used by the trucks that ferry in beer, Red Bull and contraband from nearby Vietnam.

But the surrounding villages, many accessible only by backbreaking trails through the thick forest, are fossils from the war.

Sections of the Ho Chi Minh Trail still exist nearby and the rusting hulks of North Vietnam Army tanks pepper the jungle, as do American jets.

US teams still scour the forests for them but many have vanished, swallowed by knots of vines, trees and bushes.

"One plane crashed a few kilometres north of here," one villager tells us. "It came in low and burning above the village. We ran to the wreck, but the pilot had gone. We only found his boots."

The border with Vietnam is unmarked and we have to constantly check that we haven't strayed between nations. "Imagine the trouble it would cause, if we accidentally crossed the border," says MAG technical adviser Paul Stamford.

"I don't think the Vietnamese would take too kindly to finding a British Land Rover full of explosives and radio equipment chugging through their territory."

In Kleng, a villager leads us to a cache of North Vietnam Army ammunition only 800m from the nearest bamboo house and uncovers hundreds of live mortar rounds.

He describes how he moved more weapons to pits in an attempt to clear the village and how he lost the fingers of one hand while shifting a tiny, anti-personnel bomblet. "I had no choice," he says. "We have to protect the children."

In the centre of the village, while huddles of children look on in silence, we find several 45-gallon drums filled with live 82mm mortar rounds, motors and fuel cells for rockets and AK-47s.

Most of the ammunition is live, but the drums are being used to support large baskets filled with drying rice. In a pigsty, beneath a pile of tools, we find petrol bombs in beer bottles dating back to the French colonial era.

Once again, scrap is incorporated into the village. In the bamboo school, ammunition cases are covered in children's drawings. Others have been fashioned into steps leading to the village meeting place. There is no end to the inventiveness with which they have been used, nor to the threat they represent.

ALTHOUGH the big bombs and the munitions left in the wake of passing troops offer the most obvious legacy of the war, the bomblets - which once filled the aluminium cases strewn across the village - pose the greatest danger.

Estimates suggest that 90 million of the orange-sized weapons were dropped on Laos. Between and 10 and 30 per cent failed to explode and now litter the countryside.

Some that fell on fresh shoots have even been carried up into the canopy on the branches of trees. The weapons are easily obscured, volatile and, because of their shape, particularly attractive to children.

"For a person to exist is something very difficult and complicated," said a doctor quoted in the press shortly after the Madrid bombings.

In Laos, where bombs dropped more than three decades ago continue to hold a population to ransom and where day-to-day subsistence relies on the farming of explosive fields, the words seem particularly poignant.

- INDEPENDENT