The place that I am going is unfortunately the location of many, many UXOs. I’m not worried, I’m not one to wander off the beaten track (literal beaten track, the proverbial one is where I live:). Here’s a exerpt from an article by ANTS BOLINGBROKE-KENT.
The statistics relating to America’s bombing of Laos defy hyperbole. In their efforts to cut the trail, the U.S. flew 580,000 bombing missions, dropped over 2 million tons of ordnance and gave Laos the deadly accolade of being the most bombed country in the world. The legacy of this still exists today: 50,000 people have been killed by UXO in Laos since 1964 and around 200 people still die every year.
This was a key aspect of our story, and near Sepon, Laos, we filmed a private UXO clearance team run by the MMG Sepon Mine. The team leader was a Swedish ex-special forces giant of a man called Magnus, cooler than a winter’s day in Magadan and harder than Rambo on steroids. Magnus has worked in every bombed hellhole on the planet, and his geographical resume reads like an FCO warning list: Sudan, Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran, Bosnia, Kosovo. “Sudan was terrible,” he admitted, “but this is still the most bombed place on Earth.” Just that day his team had uncovered two live 750-pound bombs and a phosphorus bomb within feet of the main road to the mine.
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