It is a low, unassuming building. Vientiane leaves it there, in an area that is both peripheral and central at the same time, far enough from the flow, close enough not to be ignored. You reach it only with your own steps. A few minutes from the main road. There are no shortcuts.
And perhaps that is only right: those steps are the only warning you allow yourself.
Once you step through the small sliding door, you ask for permission to enter. The first thing you perceive is silence. A silence that is chosen, constructed, yet natural. A place that does not raise its voice, does not seek effects, does not grip you by the throat. No drama. No rhetoric. It places you before a simple truth, almost banal and for that very reason unbearable: time does not heal everything, if what you have left in the ground continues to explode.
A legacy that cannot become the past
Between 1964 and 1973, during the Indochina War, in what came to be known as the Secret War, a quantity of ordnance was dropped on Laos that is still difficult to imagine today. According to estimates that are still widely cited, it amounts to over two million tonnes.
Said like this, it remains a number. Two billion kilograms.
A number too large to fit in the mind. And so it slips away, and its real scale risks becoming abstract, distant, almost harmless. Then you reach the point: a significant portion of those ordnance has never exploded.
And what did not explode then did not remain in the past. It is here, in the present.
Laos is often described as the most heavily bombed country in the world per capita.
But statistics alone explain nothing. They are only a label, not a life.
Real life, instead, is the invisible geography contained within that statistic: fields left unploughed, paths avoided, children taught what not to touch. Rural communities living with a practical, everyday question that should not exist: does this land truly belong to me, or does it still belong to the war?
The “bomb” as an everyday object
Inside the COPE Visitor Centre in Vientiane, you realise that, unlike many other places of memory, here the object is evidence. It is a trace. It is consequence. This is not a museum in the classical sense. It does not display, it shows, and it proves. And it does so without raising its voice.
In the silence of ordnance still waiting in the ground, and in the blast of those that have already exploded. Legs, hands, bodies. Lives.
It is the point of contact between two worlds: that of memory and that of everyday life. Its mission is concrete, and consists in supporting access to physical rehabilitation services in Laos for people with motor disabilities. Everything else, the context, the history, the reasons, comes down on you like a dull noise, without the need for shocking images. And as you wander inside that single room, the same sentence keeps returning to your mind: war does not end when the bombs stop falling.
Handmade prosthetics forming a reality that carries weight, yet still tries to stand upright. Cluster bombs, suspended, multiplied, almost forming an artificial sky. This is not the spectacle of horror. It is something harder to digest. It is normalisation. Ordnance designed to open and disperse. A technical, serial, anonymous gesture. A geometry that, when it remains beneath the ground, becomes destiny. And then you understand that the term post-war here carries a different meaning. It is not an after, but a during, one that has now lasted for decades.
Numbers that never bring a story to a close
Incidents caused by unexploded ordnance continue to occur even today. Even when they appear “few” on a global scale, they are still too many for a country that has already paid the highest price for an absurd war, in its reasons, dynamics, and proportions. The point, however, is not to update a tally, but to understand the nature of these wounds. Because this is not only about death or survival, but about mobility, work, education, independence. It is about the future. And about freedom.
And this is where COPE becomes essential, because it does not limit itself, as so often happens, to commemoration, but holds together the missing part of the word Reconstruction, in a foreign war that ended more than fifty years ago.
Repairing the future, one body at a time
COPE works on what is often left outside the narrative: life after. Prosthetics, orthotics, rehabilitation, care. A network that allows those who have lost a part of themselves to regain the possibility of moving through the world, physically and socially.
The question that remains open
It is impossible to come away from this story without asking: who should be on the front line?
Today, the United States, as the primary responsible party, are also among the main international donors to the UXO sector in Laos, with contributions amounting to hundreds of millions of dollars over several decades, and programmes dedicated to clearance, risk education, and victim assistance. This fact exists, it is real, and it is right to acknowledge it.
But the question that remains open, though moral in nature, is not cancelled out by economic figures alone. It instead becomes a question of proportion: is it enough in relation to the scale of the problem? Is it enough in relation to time? And above all: is it enough in relation to what this ongoing contamination continues to prevent, development, safety, the freedom to live one’s own land?
Fifty years on, with all the technology available, Laos remains one of the countries most contaminated by cluster munition remnants.
And this, on its own, is a sentence that should not exist.
A conclusion without rhetoric
This place, a small room behind a small sliding door, does not ask you to cry. It asks something far more difficult: to remain present.
It makes you understand that war is not an event that ends with a signature or a date in schoolbooks and newspapers. War persists, sometimes silently, through a small object in the ground, a wrong gesture, a field left uncultivated, a missing leg, a prosthesis that sets a life back in motion. Even though there are those who have chosen to take responsibility for it. Those who repair. Those who rehabilitate. Those who stitch back together, not history, but the possibility of living, we cannot look away.
War does not end when the bombs stop falling.
It ends when the land ceases to be an enemy.
And when memory stops being an exhibition and becomes, once again, a responsibility.
You slide that small door open again and walk away from that silent place just as you found it. A cigarette, and the temptation to file everything away as a chapter that belongs to Laos, one of the many appendices of the American war, as they call it here, in Indochina.
Then the numbers return. And a detail shifts the perspective: Laos is not an exception.
In 2026, contaminated land still exists across around sixty countries and territories. In wars that are still ongoing.
Languages change, but the problem does not.
And the question remains.
