Bounthanh Phommasathit remembers seeing the flurry of tiny bombs dropping on her village “just like snow falling” from the sky when she was a child.
This year marked 50 years since the U.S. stopped dropping cluster munitions on Laos, where she was born and raised, after a nine-year bombing campaign during the Vietnam War.
A cluster bomb can contain hundreds of smaller submunitions, known as bomblets, that are released mid-air as a shell dropped from an airplane high above its target area plummets to the ground.
Phommasathit, who fled Laos to the U.S. in the late 1970s and now lives in Ohio, recalls being
