Tag: unexploded ordnance

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Q&A with Jerry Redfern – Boulder Stand

Photojournalist Jerry Redfern accepted the first place award for outstanding photography at the 11th annual Society of Environmental Journalists Conference on Oct. 17, 2012.

By Christi Turner
Oct. 17, 2012
Boulder Stand

REDFERN profileAlthough a self-described “straightforward journalist,” Jerry Redfern and his work are far from traditional.

Redfern’s intense, beautiful images from Southeast Asia are compiled in his upcoming book, Eternal Harvest: The Legacy of American Bombs in Laos, which documents what Redfern calls the most important environmental story he has ever done — and perhaps also the most dangerous. The striking images have won him the 2011-2012 Photographer’s Award for Reporting on the Environment from the Society of Environmental Journalists, which he received earlier this week.

Redfern has spent over 20 years in photojournalism, and over a decade of those working in close quarters with UXOs – or unexploded ordnances – in Southeast Asia. He frequently teams up with his wife and traveling companion, freelance journalist Karen Coates, to cover the stories they feel need to be told.  Redfern provided the images for Coates’ upcoming book, This Way More Better: Stories and Photos from Asia’s Back Roads.

As a Scripps Fellow at the CU Center for Environmental Journalism, a fellowship previously held by his wife, Redfern is adding new multimedia to his storytelling arsenal.  Pursuing a project to document, share and live-update the environmental health of the Rio Grande, Redfern hopes to culminate his fellowship with the design of a new mobile app for the purpose.

We recently spoke with Redfern about his extensive travels, his award-winning photographs and his ambitious project. READ MORE

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Life After Wartime – Sierra

During the Vietnam War, the United States flew 580,000 bombing runs over Laos—an average of one every eight minutes for nine years. Today, Laotians live and die among 80 million unexploded munitions, some of them valuable as scrap metal or turned into flower boxes, many of them as dangerous as the day they dropped from the sky.

By Karen J. Coates / Photo by Jerry Redfern
January/February 2011
Sierra

Bomb boatLaos is the most heavily bombed country on Earth per capita. Between 1964 and 1973, in a sideshow to the Vietnam War, the U.S. military dropped more than 2 million tons of explosives on this landlocked Southeast Asian country. It was a secret campaign, unauthorized by Congress. Laotians suffered the equivalent of one bombing raid every eight minutes for nine years. The people have never recovered, and neither has the land.

Up to 30 percent of the bombs that were dropped did not detonate on impact, and they remain volatile in the soil today. More than 50,000 people have been killed or maimed since the bombings began, with more than 20,000 of the casualties resulting from accidents after the war ended, according to a recent survey by Laos’s National Regulatory Authority for Unexploded Ordnance.

While munitions fell in hundreds of shapes, sizes, and varieties, perhaps most pernicious were the “bombies.” More than 270 million of these cluster submunitions were crammed into casings that opened in midair, scattering weapons across the land. They look like toys—yellow, green, brown, round like softballs or shaped like pineapples. Kids find them in the fields; villagers find them in the forests.

Today, unexploded ordnance contaminates nearly half of all arable land in Laos, according to the World Bank’s LaoPeople’s Democratic Republic Environment Monitor. Yet thecountry’s subsistence farmers need that land to survive: Nearly 70 percent of the population lives in the countryside, growing, foraging, fishing, and hunting. Almost every day, a Laotian is killed or maimed by unexploded ordnance. A thriving scrap-metal trade exacerbates the problem, since villagers dig for bombs. Metal sells for roughly 10 cents a pound; villagers can earn more from selling a big hunk of steel than they can from most other available work. READ MORE

 

 

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Bombs Threaten Lao Food Security – Rambling Spoon blog

By Karen J. Coates / Photo by Jerry Redfern
Nov. 9, 2010
Rambling Spoon

©2010 Jerry RedfernLaos is having its 15 minutes this week. As hundreds of foreigners gather in the capital for the First Meeting of States Parties to the Convention on Cluster Munitions, stories of unexploded bombs are pouring forth. And yet, it’s but a trickle considering the issue’s gravity. If you’ve followed Rambling Spoon for a while, you know this. You know that old American bombs still devastate Laotian farmers and their families. You know that bombs, on average, kill or injure one person almost every day in Laos.

But allow me my soapbox one more time, as I post a few more photos from our most recent trip this year. READ MORE

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Old Bombs Shatter Laotian Women’s Lives – Women’s eNews

War-era ordnance kills and maims hundreds of Laotian villagers each year. Eighty-five percent of victims are men, leaving numerous women to fend for their families..

By Karen J. Coates / Photo by Jerry Redfern
Aug. 22, 2010
Women’s eNews

Lao farming womanVIENTIANE, Laos–Five years ago, 24-year-old Yue’s husband, Lue Ha, hit a bomb while foraging for medicinal herbs in the jungles of northern Laos. The accident blinded him.

Since then, Yue, who only goes by one name, says, “Ooh, there are many things that have changed.” She feels “like two or three persons in one,” having to care for her husband and two young children. “The greatest difficulty is everything in the family became mine–husband’s job became mine. Children’s job became mine…I just tried to grow very little rice for the family. And I also did a little embroidery to sell and earn money.”

The couple could not maintain their farm, so Yue’s husband studied massage through an aid group in Vientiane, the country’s capital. Afterward, he opened a massage business in a tiny Phonsavanh apartment where the family of four now lives.

“Since I’m blind, it’s hard to earn a living,” Lue Ha said. He gets on average two customers a day who pay about $3 a session. “It’s not really enough because we have to pay for rent, electricity, water.” If no one shows up, “I don’t earn,” he said. READ MORE

 

 

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One Man’s Bomb is Another’s Garden Hoe – GlobalPost

In Laos, villagers turn American war scrap into inventive tools.

By Karen J. Coates / Photo by Jerry Redfern
July 28, 2010
GlobalPost

For GlobalPostVIENTIANE, Laos — A scorching sun settled across southern Laos, as farmers burned the land to make new fields.

A woman hacked at weeds with two young children in tow, the heat of a nearby fire caking her in a sweaty, sooty film. She paused a moment, wiped her neck, then hoisted her hoe. Sitting behind her thatched hut was the casing of a 750-pound bomb made at Pine Bluff Arsenal, Arkansas. Its label was clear: “Special firework. Handle carefully. Keep fire away.”

Laotians everywhere continue to unearth American bombs, dropped nearly 40 years ago. Today, wartime remnants spark some of the country’s most creative construction and engineering. Villagers turn scrap into tools and utensils — everything from bowls to buckets, boats, spoons, knives, hoes, troughs, ladders, planters, cowbells, stilts and pedestals for satellite dishes. READ MORE

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Pig Stories, Part 1

Free-Range Porkers in a Little Lao Village

By Karen J. Coates / Photo by Jerry Redfern
May 1, 2010
The Faster Times

This is the first story in a three-part series examining the lives and deaths of Asian pigs.

wanderingpig2-200x300Way in the northeastern reaches of Laos, along Highway 2E leading to Dien Bien Phu (think 1954, France and Vietnam), is a small village called Sophoon. Its people are a mix of the Tai Dam, Tai Daeng and Khmu ethnicities that populate the hills stretching from Vietnam in the east to Burma in the west and China to the north. Their homes are simple, mostly made of thatch and wood, with a few glass windows and concrete foundations. The residents of Sophoon live off the land, growing rice, corn and cassava in their fields and a smattering of fruits and vegetables in their household gardens. They raise chickens, ducks and pigs, all given free rein to cluck, quack and snort their way through the village at whim.

The reason my husband, Jerry, and I spent nine days in Sophoon had little to do with livestock (though my interest always turns to food and its origins, no matter where we are). We were there for the bombs. The undulating hills tracing the east-west highway through Phongsali province are littered with the remnants of the U.S. bombing campaign, which began in 1964, ended in 1973, and pummeled the country with bombing raids averaging once every eight minutes for nine years. Thirty percent of those bombs didn’t explode, and here they lay in the Laotian soil-as volatile today as the day they were dropped. In all the years since, not a single bomb-clearance team had removed a single item of unexploded ordnance (UXO) from Phongsali province until Jim Harris came along. This year, this one American brought one small clearance team to Sophoon and got to work, blowing up bombs.

Jerry and I followed.

We all camped in the local dispensary – slat beds, mosquito nets, cold baths with river water scooped from a basin – and ate the local foods prepared by two young women hired to cook. They worked adjacent the dispensary in a small hut with a flimsy door, frequently flung open by local pigs in search of edible loot. Come meal time, we always had a couple of dogs, a chicken and a farrowof grunting little piglets on the premises. Sometimes a fat mama sow would waddle through with fierce, glaring eyes and milk-filled udders swaying to and fro. READ MORE

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An Eternal Harvest – Georgetown Review

By Karen J. Coates / Photo by Jerry Redfern
Spring 2010
Georgetown Review

Eternal Harvest Georgetown ReviewOne Saturday afternoon in the brittle clinch of the dry season, my husband, Jerry, and I hike through the Laotian countryside with a guide named Manophet. We spot a boy on a barren hillside, his frame silhouetted against blue sky. He’s poised at an angle, aligned with the slope of the hill. He keeps a basket at his side, a shovel in his grip. He’s digging for ant eggs, for fishing bait. As he drives the shovel into the ground, I cringe and back away.

The boy knows the earth could explode beneath him. He knows this ground is covered in bombs dropped before he was born by foreigners who live thousands of miles away. He knows many of those bombs never detonated and that now, as he digs, the ground could blow. Jostled, jiggled, heated, tossed or moved in the currents of annual monsoons—it doesn’t necessarily take much to revive the life of a dormant bomb. Today many Laotian farm fields remain covered in unexploded ordnance (UXO). Fist-sized “bombies” lie a few inches below the surface. During the war, these little explosives were crammed into cluster-bomb canisters, 670 at a time. The canisters opened mid-air, raining bomblets across the ground.

Contamination and death are the natural course of life across Laos. Bomb canisters abound. They’re formed into fence posts and feeding troughs, they’re planted with pretty little flowers. They’re melted down and shaped into bowls and spoons. Laotians have lived with bombs for so long, their presence is no longer aberrant but simply ordinary. READ MORE (PDF)

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Danger Fields – Gourmet

Farming in the developing world is never an easy occupation, but for farmers in Laos there is a particularly grave complication.

By Karen J. Coates / Photo by Jerry Redfern
June 9, 2008
Gourmet

Danger FieldsJoy, a 36-year-old villager, works her way through a muddy Laotian forest of thorny rattans, machete in hand. “I was looking for food—bamboo shoots and vegetables—when I found the rocket,” she says. “I didn’t touch anything. I just marked the spot on a tree. This was the first time I saw unexploded ordnance (UXO) in the forest.”

The first time for Joy, but not for thousands of other farmers across Laos, where the land remains littered with explosives from the US bombing campaign between 1964 and 1973. In that time, the United States dropped 2 million tons of explosives over Laos in an effort to eradicate Communism and destroy the Ho Chi Minh Trail. Up to 30 percent of those bombs never detonated, for various reasons, and the Laotian soil remains contaminated today. There are no accurate death tolls, but villagers are killed and injured by ordnance every week. “Digging is dangerous,” says Jim Harris, a retired school principal from Wisconsin who spends part of the year in Laos working with the New Zealand–based Phoenix Clearance Limited, an ordnance removal company. While the entire world contends with rising food costs, Laotian farmers face the ultimate price: the danger of losing life or limb.

Joy leads a PCL team on a hunt for the rocket. “It was long like this,” she says, stretching her arms three feet wide. But when we reach the spot, it’s gone. READ MORE

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Up in Smoke – Rambling Spoon

By Karen J. Coates / Photo by Jerry Redfern
Feb. 7, 2008
Rambling Spoon

shaboomIt’s a thrill to blow up bombs – old bombs, evil bombs, from a war that ended decades ago but continues to kill today. This is what a couple of white phosphorous canisters look like when they’re up in smoke. A little Lao kid, no higher than my ribcage, recently found these toxic containers in his rice field. He and his buddy did the smart thing by telling Phoenix Clearance Limited (PCL). The next day, the canisters were gone. BANG! A little TNT, a lot of preparation, and the field turned just a bit safer.

I personally pushed the button on these canisters – what a liberating feeling. READ MORE

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Pumpkin Crisps – Rambling Spoon blog

By Karen J. Coates / Photo by Jerry Redfern
Oct. 22, 2007
Rambling Spoon

USA bomb

We sit near the Nam Phu fountain, eating a snack of fresh yogurt and sweet pumpkin chips with sesame. A man named Khampa takes a seat beside us. He begs us for food, then money. He has traveled to Vientiane from Savannakhet, presumably to make some money. I hand him the bag of pumpkin crisps and he clasps it with his upper arms.

Khampa has no lower arms. His right eye is botched, and he has scars on his neck. His right arm is cut clean, but the left is split in two. We ask him what happened, and he raises his shoulders.

“Pow! American,” he says.

“Leuk la but?” I ask. Was it a bomb?

“Yeah, yeah, yeah, OK,” he says, then continues his story in a quick, long string of Lao that I cannot fully understand. But it’s clear he is one of the country’s thousands of UXO victims, maimed long after the United States stopped pummeling the Laotian landscape with bombs. READ MORE