Village workers help U.S. Air Force members clear trees and
brush from a Vietnam War-era crash site in the Boualapha
province of Laos in 2007. Last week, delegates from dozens of
countries traveled to Beirut to talk about Laos, where decades
after the Vietnam War there are still an estimated 80 million
unexploded bombs scattered across fields and forests. Each year,
the live remnants of U.S. cluster bombs kill or injure 300
Laotians, many of them children. And the bombs are of particular
danger to farmers, who risk their lives every time they plow a
new plot. The delegates convened to try to persuade other
nations to join a year-old international treaty to rid the world
of stockpile cluster munitions. But the U.S., the nation that
rained cluster bombs on Laos so many years ago and, according to
some authorities, the largest producer of the deadly devices,
did not join the conference in Lebanon and has declined to sign
the treaty. —BF Liangkham Laphommavong has one of the world’s
most dangerous jobs. Her 9-yea