vietnam war still making news.........from irrawaddy.........
"It should have been one of those rite-of-passage days for any teenager. On their way to school to collect exam results, Phongsavath and two friends noticed an unusual-looking round steel object in the grass nearby.
“We picked it up and passed it among us, wondering what it was and looking close,” Phongsavath recalls, a wry half-smile breaking, as if to belie the gruesome tragedy that followed.
“I tried to open it,” he says, half-laughing at what in retrospect he says was childish curiosity on the part of him and his school-pals.
“We looked at it, we passed it around,” Phongsavath recalls. “I tried to open it, but then it blew up,” he says again, losing his hold on his white cane as he speaks. “Now as you see, I have no hands.”
Laos is said to be the world's most-bombed country on a per-capita basis, with unknown numbers of unexploded material littering the countryside, a legacy of the Indochina wars of the 1960s and 1970s.
Laos, officially knows as the Lao Peoples' Democratic Republic, experienced what is described the heaviest aerial bombardment in history when the US Air Force flew 580,000 bombing runs over Laos between 1964 and 1973, targeting the North Vietnamese Ho Chi Minh trail, which looped through Laos, as part of the perhaps-misnamed Vietnam War:.........LINK
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