Obama pays tribute to Laos’ victims of bombings by U.S.

Tribune News Service

Eightyear-old Thoummy Silamphan wanted bamboo shoots for his family’s soup, so he went into a field near his village, spotted some good ones and started digging in the soil with his hands.

What he also found that day 20 years ago was an American bomb left over from the Vietnam War era that had fallen from the sky but never detonated. It exploded, obliterating his left hand and knocking him flat into the field of shoots until neighboring farmers carried him to safety.

“I knew about the bombs,” he said this week, “but I didn’t have a choice. We have to go out into the fields anyway.”

On Wednesday, Silamphan went to the center here where other survivors are treated for their wounds to meet the president of the United States, five decades after the U.S. dropped 270 million cluster munitions on Laos to cut off enemy supply lines to the Viet Cong in a CIA-run operation that was kept secret from Americans.

President Barack Obama did not apologize for the bombings that left an estimated 80 million baseballsized undetonated explosives all over Laos. But as the first U.S. leader to visit the country and pay tribute to victims of the so-called bombies, he acknowledged them in a way that no predecessor had.

“We’re a nation that was founded on the belief in the dignity of every human being,” Obama said. “That belief has to lead us to value the life of every young Lao boy and girl, who deserve to be freed from the fear of the shadow of a war that happened long ago.”

The visit was part of a legacy-of-war tour that Obama has been making to Vietnam and Japan this spring and now to Laos. “Confronting history,” Obama calls it.

This stop carried its own variety of sorrow, as many of the 20,000 people killed or wounded by the ordnance were children.

For years after the accident, Silamphan felt shame about his missing hand. For a while, he refused to go back to school.

Eventually, he met an older boy who was also missing a hand, and he urged Silamphan to return to the classroom. The bomb had taken his hand, the boy told Silamphan, but it shouldn’t take his life.

Silamphan went on to study business and earn a master’s degree. Now 29, he runs the Quality of Life Association, a foundation that helps survivors get treatment, prosthetics and social services.

In Laos this week, Obama announced the U.S. will provide $90 million over the next three years for finding the munitions and clearing them out, an increase over the $3 million yearly commitment in place when Obama took office.

Silamphan only hopes the U.S. effort will aid victims. “We can’t forget what they’ve been through,” he said.