Strike Patterns: Notes from Postwar Laos

By Leah Zani

From 1964 to 1973, the United States engaged in a covert air war and counter-insurgency programme against Laos. Ultimately it dropped two million tons of ordnance on the tiny Asian nation, killing a tenth of its inhabitants and leaving it the most heavily bombed country per capita in the world. Known as the Secret War, the conflict in Laos remains the longest and most intense air war in history, but despite its becoming a kind of model for modern warfare, it is not well-known – in part because its casualties and effects feel so remote. In Strike Patterns, the poet and ethnographer Leah Zani brings home – and down to earth – the aftermath of this war.

A strike pattern is a signature of violence etched into the land – as bomb craters, unexploded ordnance, the fragments left behind by war. Yet, as Zani movingly shows, the human consequences of war far exceed this zone of physical destruction. Through a collection of linked stories, Strike Patterns excavates the far larger human impact zone of loss, longing, fear and shared hope.

Our stories of war generally focus on the gore of the battleground – but what happens after the soldiers leave and the planes fly away? A half-century after the war, Zani tells the stories of Communist Party cadres, spies, shamans and ritual healers, ghosts, war scrap traders, farmers and explosives-clearance technicians whom she encounters in her fieldwork. Despite residing in a country pockmarked by bombing and with the daily threat of buried explosives underfoot, the people she speaks to find meaning and hope, leading lives delicately balanced between the mundane and the extraordinary. Combining rigorous ethnography and gorgeous prose, Zani paints a rich picture of lives lived in a land ravaged by a long-ago war.