Bomb Harvest

Kim & Sylvia with a 1000 pound bomb

Bomb scrap dealers

It took a year of raising finance, research and gaining permissions from the bomb disposal organisations Mines Advisory Group and UXO Lao and from the Communist government in this country which has been quite closed to the media. And a good 6 months of trying to find someone who would insure us for an extended shoot around live bombs. But we eventually go the go-ahead, with an unprecedented 2 months on the ground with the bomb disposal teams, following every stage of the process right over the bombs.

But it was never going to be an easy one.

Laos – Ta Oi, a remote area of the Ho Chi Minh Trail: quite possibly the most bombed place on the planet.

Hot enough to cook an egg on a bomb (42 degrees most days), dripping humidity, leeches, malaria, limited food and drinking water, no phone or email access and a good day’s drive from medical services was the beginning of the practical phase of “The Big Bomb Project”.

Having a Lao to English translator was not enough as Ta Oi has its own dialect so we had to have two translators whilst trying to piece the story together. We were to quickly learn that in this remote area people, were seeing a film crew for the first time - so a lot of bonding with village chiefs and rice whiskey became an essential part of the shoot. We were also to learn that the Ta Oi people believe in tribal curses and black magic - that the ghosts of their dead accentors, mostly killed by bombs, lived in the trees in the forests. This was to spook some of the young Lao bomb disposal trainees – as if dealing with huge live aircraft bombs for the first time wasn’t enough.

Some of the bombs would only need a knock or an electrical impulse (eg from a mobile phone) to set them off and we often had to urgently turn off our radio microphones as they could spark that lethal electrical impulse to the fuse of a bomb.

During detonations razor sharp bomb shrapnel can fly out to up to a kilometre away so to film these explosions with close-up impact we had a special explosive-proof casing built by a military engineer. The casing also had to be depressurised as the explosive ground wave of a bomb can suck the guts out of anything in its path.

Most frightening of all was the risk that there were what the Lao people call “bombies” around – cluster munitions, the size of a tennis ball and filled with over a hundred ball bearings (like bullets) around explosive. These were dumped in their millions by the US and because of their small size are hard to see. Kicking one could detonate it. The large aircraft bombs (500 to 1000 pounds) were in a way less frightening because if one of those goes off, everyone around it is just evaporated in “pink mist”, as the bomb disposal technicians say. It’s instant and you’d have no hope of survival, which was strangely comforting!

It was the hardest shoot we have ever done by far but in the end we were able to leave that horrific situation where as the Lao people will go on living with the legacy of the US “Secret War” for hundreds of years to come.

Special thanks to Laith Stevens and the people of Mines Advisory Group (MAG) and UXO Lao for allowing us such incredible access into this extraordinary world - an experience which will never leave us.

Laith Stevens was nominated for Australian of the Year, 2009.