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........

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