What a child’s drawing teaches us about war, then and now

Today marks 55 years since the powerful 1971 testimony that shattered official records of the U.S.’s involvement in Laos and upended the lies told to Congress by the White House. 

Republican Paul N. McCloskey Jr. and Democrat Jerome R. Waldie, alongside Bouangeun Luangpraseuth and Fred Branfman, who had interviewed more than a thousand refugees in Laos, revealed villages, homes, and schools pulverized by American bombs.

What made McCloskey’s and Waldie’s testimony especially solid was that they had gone to Laos themselves, meeting refugees and hearing first-hand how bombing had destroyed homes, schools, and entire communities. As a Republican and Democrat on a joint fact-finding mission, their shared conclusions carried unusual credibility and undeniable human reality.

It was this mounting body of firsthand evidence that led Branfman to declare, “There is a good deal of evidence to suggest that the United States has been carrying out the most protracted bombing of civilian targets in history.”

Laos is the most heavily bombed country per capita in history. From 1964 to 1973 in efforts to destroy traffic along the Ho Chi Minh Trail, the U.S. dropped at least 2.5 million tons of ordnance across 580,000 bombing missions over Laos. This is equal to a planeload of bombs every eight minutes, 24 hours a day for nine years. The bombings were indiscriminate and the overwhelming number of casualties were civilians. After the war, civilians have remained the primary victims of unexploded ordnance accidents, with over 60 percent of those harmed being children today.

As a child, I watched my father treat survivors of unexploded bombs, and my mother cared for families shattered by horrific accidents. Their work left a lasting imprint on me, shaping my understanding that war does not end with a simple declaration. It lingers in fields, schools, and homes. 

Today, part of my organization’s work is the Legacies Library, which serves as the keeper of “The Originals,” the only primary sourced documentation written or drawn by refugees who were fleeing the bombings firsthand. The drawings and narratives represent those who endured an air war perpetuated in secrecy. Drawn primarily in pencil, pens, crayons and markers, they are raw and stark, reflecting the crude events that shaped their reality.

Among the archives Legacies of War preserves is a 16 year old child’s drawing of a school under bombardment. The picture depicts a burning school building with airplanes flying above releasing more bombs. The inscription reads, “The school was hit and burned. There were many people in the school who died. But I didn’t know who because I wasn’t courageous enough to look. I was afraid that the airplanes would shoot me.”

These personal accounts by villagers should serve as a warning. Today, the narratives expressed in “The Originals” echoes what we are witnessing in warzones from Lebanon to Ukraine, where schools, hospitals, religious sites are bombed, families are forced to flee, and communities are erased. 

In February, a U.S. airstrike on Shajareh Tayyiba Elementary, a girls’ school in Iran, killed more than 100 children — another school reduced to rubble, another generation marked by war. The setting has changed, but the experience has not. Civilians pay the price while the war machine grinds on.

Branfman recorded villagers telling “every single one the same story” of devastation. They were not combatants but innocent villagers —faces, pain, loss. “We saw the terrible effect on the civilians,” McCloskey said on “Face the Nation.” “This is not collateral damage. This is destruction of human life.” 

Americans are told that the trillion-dollar Pentagon budget ensures their security, but its consequences are written in the lives of civilians abroad. What kind of security is this when children die at school, when families cannot safely farm their land? True security comes not from the machinery of war, but from diplomacy, civilian protection, post-conflict recovery, and peacebuilding — including sustained funding for humanitarian de-mining and survivor assistance.

Endless militarization and spending on destruction create cycles of suffering that reverberate for decades. On April 22, we remember the powerful testimonies of the people who endured America’s Secret War in Laos. They demand that we reject perpetual war and invest in civilian protection, reconciliation, and peacebuilding.

If we cannot see the humanity in a drawing of a school under fire, if we cannot hear the voice of a refugee describing nights underground, if we cannot carry the memory of girls whose lives ended in a classroom, we have forgotten what it means to be human. War does not protect us — peace does. Until we choose it, the ghosts of war will continue to haunt us.

Sera Koulabdara is CEO of Legacies of War and co-chair of the War Legacies Working Group.

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