Imagine airplanes dropping bombs every 8 minutes, 24 hours a day, for 9 long years. This was the reality for Laos, a country scarred by a secret war most Americans never knew about.

My parents, age 14 at the time, were forced to endure the destruction and displacement of their community, its people and its religious sites. From 1964 to 1973, the U.S. secretly dropped at least 2.5 million tons of ordnance on Laos during 580,000 bombing missions, making it the most bombed country per capita in history.

Although I wasn’t born during this war, I inherited its consequences. As a child, I witnessed my father, a surgeon, operate on countless victims of unexploded ordnance accidents. One was my classmate, a five-year-old little girl. The imminent dangers forced my family to flee in 1990 when I was only six years old.

In 1971, the so-called “Secret War” in Laos was revealed to Congress, thanks to the courage of Fred Branfman and Bouangeun Luangpraseuth, who collected harrowing survivor testimonials. Yet it took two more decades before the U.S. began allocating funds to clean up its mess. In 1993, funding remained under $3 million, barely a drop compared to the $50 billion it had cost to bomb a neutral country against which we never declared war.

Today, millions of unexploded bombs remain, posing a deadly threat to children and their families. An estimated

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