Tale of Wonder ( Next, Feats of Might!)

The girls squat and clatter the dishes into the tub in the shade of the big tree, tree dripping with green and casting a wide cool shadow. They laugh and talk in self assured, familiar tones as they scrub and dunk the plates, a little hair falling from their brow, a soapy hand to brush it back. They listen to love songs on a shrill little handheld, and their jeans are rolled up but wet anyhow. And swaying in my hammock I put Steinbeck down carefully, and the crickets kick up when cause a cloud has blotted the stark mid-day sun for a moment. Reading John's indignation and the crickets and the girls around the tub fill up my heart so much so that something held in check burns in the back of my skull. I just feel so full up. I think I'll just spend the day this way. John knows me well and I feel at ease with him like the old wicker chair, and I think little by little I know him, even four decades between us now we may feel at the hidden corners of each other mans soul, so powerful are his incantations that this magic is possible.

At the lectern, I can see his proud serious eyes as he addresses the Nobel academy; ..."Having taken God-like power, we must seek in ourselves there for the responsibility and the wisdom we once prayed some deity might have..."

The girls are gone and tub has been tipped over to weak torrents on beetles and battalions of ants.

Never seen so many butterflies...

Raining again

Phansavan is a few straight lines in a plain that reaches out to soft green hills. On these few straight lines are a couple hundred concrete cubes; restaurants, guest houses, mechanics dens, pharmacies and places that stock sandals and machetes. It's here that I began to see more and more of my kind. It's also here that I saw 2000lb shell casings standing rusted in front businesses, or missiles suspended on chains, painted in red "good, cheap food". In a restaurant called craters I eat the fist meal in four days that was not a heap of rice or noodles. Bombs large and small lined the eatery and photos of blasted circles of red on the green slopes, perfectly symmetrical in the destruction.

Instinctively I'm drawn inside, the skull and crossbones, the enormous bomb casings, now just heavy-as-hell scrap. I'm drawn inside and stand facing a display of missiles and bombs, rusted and defunct, and fist-sized bomblets that the cluster bombs released; 300 each. Like an evil flower the cluster bombs split a few hundred feet above the ground; heavy with seed and pregnant with possibilities. But as the bomb spores fall in a 100sq meter radius the possibilities are mostly of dying or being taken to pieces.

Pictures of armless pheasants and men digging around the flanks of an unexploded missile, 30 years dormant.

A little man walks out from the office space, this is the Mine Advisory Group Phansavan office and he was about to take his dinner, but now he smiles to himself, looking at the bombs in mild interest.

Xieng Khonang is on of the most heavily bombed provinces in the most heavily bombed country in the world. At least two million Tones of ordinance was dropped on Laos between'64-'73.

1 metric tonne= 2205 lbs

2 million metric tonnes= 4,410,000,000 lbs

I just have to stand here for a minute and bite my lip thinking about 4.5 billion lbs of bombs, what that might look like. How that's even possible? Something rushes into my head and I'm not really reading anymore, just staring.

It is estimated that up to 30% of this ordinance did not detonate. Decades later, unexploded ordinance (uxo) still contaminates rural areas in over half the country.

Thirty years after it was dropped, digging up a new crop it exploded and killed her four children and husband, it was under the corn. 2,000 lbs shell casing go for $60 at the scrap yard, a blessed fortune, but can you believe they give $100 if it still has the powder! Can't cultivate uncultivated land, dig for new roads, pipes, swing a machete, run in a field.

I don't feel good.

we did this

And now I'm here and what, I'm just supposed to look at displays and, oh, yes, hmmm, very interesting. No this dredges up something sick and shameful in my soul, I can't understand it, the 4 billion lbs of bombs, I'm trying to rationalize it but it avoids me. This country that has showed me nothing but kindness...

"It's estimated that the United States dropped 1 plane load of bombs on Laos, every 8 minutes for 9 years.

"Excuse me, where you from?" I didn't really notice him sidle up to me; I busy busiest trying to grabble with this awful thing wrapped around my head.

"Ah, " I scratch my eye, and look somewhere. I'm really tired, it's like this load, and all at once I feel it, all 4 billion lbs.

"Aah, um, Ameri-"

He gives me some space while I try to get a hold of myself; he has seen this many times, but usually vets and stuff. Or sometimes people laugh.

I'm tired and the bus ride with the gun and I miss my People but something bigger crawled out of it's cave and bent me low, a kind of universal sadness that is so big it only touches you a little here and there along the way.

"It's ok." he says