Enjoy the short trailer of this documentary by following the link below:

 http://www.bombharvest.com/ 

Imagine there was a new Unabomber at work in the US, sending letter bombs out across the nation. Now imagine there was one in every state, so that 164 letter bombs went off in one year, killing 36 people, 15 of whom were children. Would that make headlines?

That was the number killed by unexploded ordnance in Laos in 2005. Almost all of the ordnance in Laos is American, left over from the secret air war of the late '60s and '70s. The US dropped almost 2 million tonnes of bombs in nine years, trying to stop the flow of troops and munitions from North to South Vietnam via the Ho Chi Minh Trail.

They didn't stop it, but they did make Laos the most bombed country on earth, per capita. The problem 35 years later is that up to a third of the bombs didn't go off. Not only was it illegal and immoral, it was incompetent.

Bomb Harvest, a cool-headed Australian documentary by Kim Mordaunt, is about the clean-up, which is so slow and underfunded it will take 100 years. The US is the biggest donor among the 10 or so countries helping. According to Landmine Monitor, the research arm of the International Campaign to Ban Landmines, the US gave about $US3.2 million in 2005. Each year of the Laos bombing cost the US more than $US1 billion.

The film is about the Big Bomb Training Project, funded by the US State Department but managed by the Swiss Federation for Mine Action and the British-based Mine Advisory Group.

The aim is to train local bomb clearance teams for each province in Laos. The film follows a class from blackboard to jungle, as they learn the most dangerous trade in Laos. Their main teacher is a big boofy Aussie bloke called Laith Stevens. He learned the bomb-clearing trade in the Australian Army. Both of his brothers are unexploded ordnance experts as well, which he admits makes his parents a bit nervous.

Stevens is a gift for the filmmakers - a laconic bushman type who's immensely good at his job but modest, likeable and funny in two languages. Mordaunt and his wife, producer Sylvia Wilczynski, follow him and his team on a series of expeditions, mostly in the southern provinces, to remote villages where the war is still close to the surface.

There are 500-pound bombs sticking out of paddy fields and waterholes. Empty shell casings are used to hold up houses or grow herbs in, and old and young men hobble about on home-made prosthetic legs. These people are so poor they will risk picking up a piece of ordnance for its value as scrap metal. The dealers come from Vietnam to buy whatever the villagers bring in from the forest. A big bomb can be worth up to $US20, a small fortune.

Children do a lot of the foraging and the dying. If you've ever wondered what a child looks like after one of these things goes off, the film will enlighten you. It might also enrage you.

-- Edited by samakomlao at 08:36, 2007-11-11

-- Edited by samakomlao at 08:37, 2007-11-11