Reaping What’s Been Sown

Viengkeo Kavongsone had lived in fear of such a catastrophe all his life – in the jungle, in the paddy fields, on the mountain – but never in his own back yard. It was late afternoon when it happened, and his wife, Van, and three young children were at home in their village in the province of Xieng Khouang in northern Laos. They were clearing the ditch that drains rainwater from their little wooden house.

The tin shovel scraped upon something hard and metallic – and that was the last thing they recalled.

The explosion peppered shrapnel into the legs of Van and her six-year-old daughter, Phetsida. The oldest boy, Soulideth, took the blast in the face and may lose his sight. Closest to the explosion was the youngest boy, Bounma. “He was the littlest,” his father said as he stood by the hospital beds of his wife and surviving children, “and he was right next to it.” The blast threw the child six metres (20ft) out of the ditch, and he died immediately – the latest victim of a spectral war that came to an end a generation before he was born.

The South-East Asian nation of Laos is not a country in conflict – in fact few places in the world are so torpid and peaceful. The weapon that killed Bounma was a tennis ball-sized pod of ball bearings that fell to earth when Lyndon Johnson was US President and the Beatles were at the height of their powers.  The Times online (UK) here