The chilling legacy of U.S. cluster munitions: We still haven’t cleaned up from a once-secret war in Laos.

I’ll never forget many years ago, lingering outside a disheveled medical clinic — more like a soiled clay hut with a few cots and a shelf of rudimentary medication — when the mother of a small boy, barely 6 years old, rushed inside screaming.

Not far away, her child had picked up what he thought was a toy dug into the earth. The rusted yellow Transformers-like object was an unexploded cluster munition that detonated when his tiny fingers graced the metal. His legs were gone, his body slumped forward in agony as shrapnel sliced his abdomen, and blood dripped from his dust-caked eyelashes. I will never forget how he yelped like a bird too shocked to cry, as his sun-golden hair fell into his wide eyes as villagers held his hand, trying to make him comfortable before he passed away in a slow and excruciating death. I will never forget how his delicate-boned mother wailed into the burning daylight, slamming her body into the hard ground in agony, so hard she could not breathe.

The thought of cluster munitions reared its ugly head recently with the White House’s decision to send the bombs as part of its most recent $800 million defense package to Ukraine. (Russia and Ukraine have already deployed the horrific munitions since Moscow’s invasion last year.) Such weapons, outlawed by most of the world, including America’s closest allies, come with significant failure-to-detonate rates and commonly claim the lives and limbs of children long after the dust on a battleground has settled.

I challenge anyone who supports the use of cluster munitions in the context of any war, anywhere, to walk into a makeshift hospital in a far-flung country and observe the impoverished children who have lost their arms and legs and eyesight and hearing, along with the piercing of their internal organs. I dare you to watch these tiny, confused souls struggle for every breath. Mind you, these are the ones fortunate enough to survive. And before you leave, stare into their broken mothers’ or fathers’ eyes and reflect on whether this is a winning proposition or anything akin to taking the moral high ground.

The 155-millimeter shell, which carries 72 armor-piercing, soldier-killing bomblets, can be fired from 20 miles away or dropped from aircraft. As the bomblets spread over a vast area, they also threaten non-combatants. Even more troubling is the notion that, according to the International Committee of the Red Cross, around 10% to 40% of the munitions fail — meaning they lie dormant and ready to explode long after their launch. This is why thousands of small, unexploded grenades can lie on the ground for years or decades before someone, commonly a child, accidentally sets them off.

One only has to look at Laos to understand the chilling spectrum of ramifications — yet most Americans don’t know much about this dirty little secret and have never even heard about the CIA’s secret air campaign in the tiny landlocked country throughout the Vietnam War. While most of us learn about this searing conflict in school, few textbooks detail much about what was done to the bordering nation of just 7 million.

To this day, Laos remains the most heavily bombed nation in the world per capita, and its people are still struggling with the ramifications of unexploded bombs dropped more than half a century ago.

Between 1964 and 1973, the U.S. dropped more than 2 million tons of bombs on the nation, including 270 million cluster munitions, according to the Lao National Regulatory Authority for Unexploded Ordnance, or UXO. That’s more bombs than fell in Germany and Japan combined throughout the Second World War. Many “bomblets” did not detonate at the time, thus entrenching into the earth only to kill and maim decades later.

So why Laos?

A 1962 Geneva agreement declared the small South Asian country as “neutral” and prohibited outside military involvement on its soil. However, as the U.S. war with its neighbor gained momentum, America and North Vietnam broke the rules.

For a decade, the CIA executed extensive aerial bombing campaigns over two-thirds of the country to decimate communist supply lines between Laos and Vietnam. U.S. military units were forbidden to speak out about the clandestine shadow conflict. This level of bombing is equivalent to one B-52 plane load of munitions released every eight minutes for a horrific nine years, according to Al Jazeera. The U.S. Congress never approved this long-running, covert operation, and many Laotians were not even aware of the damage done.

Today, the most underdeveloped and impoverished ethnic groups — especially minors and farmers — are most affected by this secret bombing offensive. In fact, Laotian children living in crushing poverty are often impacted by cluster munitions, drawn to their bright colors or resemblance to a windmill or robotic toy, a novelty in the sparse hinterlands.

Bomblets come in varied shapes and sizes and impact the human body differently, damaging a child’s smaller frame far more than an adult’s. In addition to scars or burns, metal fragments or shrapnel cause chronic pain or physical limitations for the rest of their lives. This further casts young victims into poverty.

Data from the Landmine and Cluster Munition Monitor shows that civilians account for 97% of all casualties related to cluster munitions. According to the global clearing initiative The Halo Trust, roughly 20,000 people — 40% of them children — have been killed or injured by cluster bombs or other unexploded items in Laos since the war ended.

More than 80% of Laotians rely on agriculture for their livelihood, which means farmers, too, are routinely slain and maimed due to America’s hidden shadow conflict. And others are so desperate to make ends meet they will scour for scrap metal to send for smelting over the border in Vietnam, where the remnants are transformed into rebar for construction. But that $30 or so earned from discovering a large shell comes with a heavy price.

For years, Washington refused to acknowledge, let alone clean up, the unfathomable excess of tennis ball-sized munitions. The U.S. refused to offer any financial assistance until 1993 and, for decades after that, committed a paltry sum to the cleanup effort of around $3 million per year.

In 2010, Washington bumped this up to $15 million annually. However, such a precedent finally changed in 2016 when then-President Barack Obama pledged $40 million for the fiscal year 2021 and $90 million over the ensuing three-year period, illuminating our “moral obligation.”

Even with more resources and an uptick in spending, analysts anticipate it could take innumerable decades before Laotian soil is free from bombs. For now, the nation has little choice but to live with the reality that it is a searing statistic.

The UXO has also severely hampered Lao’s economic development, with land surveys and clearing projects taking years and excessive amounts of money to complete, deterring foreign investment in the process.

As it stands, the U.S. possesses a no-longer-used stockpile of cluster bombs termed dual-purpose improved conventional munitions, or DPICMs which have been primarily used in the past as a deterrent around the demilitarized zone to stop North Korean forces from attacking the South. The U.S.-made bombs disperse submunitions designed to explode on impact, decimating everything in the vicinity of several football fields. The Pentagon last used the weapons in Iraq and claimed a dud rate of less than 3%. However, these weapons were fully phased out of use over seven years ago.

Cluster munitions are fervently outlawed by even the closest of America’s allies. In 2008, governments worldwide signed on to the Convention on Cluster Munitions, banning their use, production, acquisition, stockpiling, retention and transfer while also committing signees to clear known contaminated areas and provide medical care and economic support to victims.

While 123 nations have committed to the goals of the convention, the United States, Russia and Ukraine are among those that have not.

Since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, both sides have already used cluster bombs with chillingly high failure rates — with Ukraine relying on Turkish-provided munitions until the U.S. stepped in. According to Human Rights Watch, this has already led to dozens of civilian deaths and serious injuries.

I shudder when I hear the morally flawed argument that we should provide such bombs because Russia is already doing so. Is it acceptable to use suicide bombers because terrorist organizations fighting the U.S. do so? Is it OK to ram planes into buildings in revenge for the attacks of Sept. 11? Absolutely not.

And I can’t help but notice the hypocrisy. In 2017, former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations and now the USAID administrator Samantha Power took to Twitter to express outrage over then-President Donald Trump walking away from the Bush-era commitment to phase out the munitions. Former White House press secretary Jen Psaki once stated that Russia’s use of such weapons potentially constitutes a war crime. But since President Joe Biden’s announcement on the transfer of cluster munitions to Ukraine, there has been radio silence.

Of course, Ukraine is a sovereign nation that can choose what weapons to use to defend against Russia’s incursion into its territory, and we certainly should take action to help. Still, the United States can also exercise discretion regarding what weapons to supply. Ukraine intends to use these bombs on its own terrain, a sign of its very understandable desperation to win, but that doesn’t need to be the way forward. While regular landmines, as horrible as they are, can be mapped for clearance afterward, it is virtually impossible to know where the many bomblets land and which failed to detonate.

Let us remember that the effects of cluster bombs are not limited to wartime; they last for several decades after the war is over. And yet we never seem to learn from our mistakes. With the U.S.’s recent transfer to Kyiv, this is once again each and every one of us funding barbarity for years to come.

The fact that our leaders have chosen to share such a hideous weapon known for its indiscriminate carnage — which you and I paid for even as most nations have outlawed — is hard to fathom. No potential short-term gains are worth the damage inflicted upon civilians for generations to come.

And much like what happened in Laos, the burden is on us as U.S. taxpayers again — and will be for generations to come.

*This op-ed first appeared in the Dallas Morning News

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