D uring breaks in clearing explosive ordnance from the former battlefields of Laos, bomb technicians commonly forage for wild foods. A half-century after the Vietnam-American War, these battlefields are rarely "wastelands," but more frequently rice fields and orchards, markets, and schoolyards. These contaminated grounds are fertile; numerous wild and cultivated foods grow here, including bitter herbs, ginger, limes, and chilies. The older craters, especially, shelter young plants and saplings. As this account of foraging suggests, contaminated sites are not experienced by those that inhabit them as wastelands apart from everyday life. Military waste may be better understood as a kind of surreal substrate to everyday life. Beneath this rice field, the war. In Lao, the linguistic classifier for bombs is nuoy, the same as the classifier for fruit. Bombs are often called by the names of the fruits they most resemble: a BLU-3 cluster submunition, which is yellow and sits upright on a flat base, with a large spray of metal fins, is known as a "pineapple bomb" (laberd mak nad) (see fig. 1). A rocket-propelled grenade, which is long and thin, is known as a "cucumber bomb" (laberd mak dtaeng). And on through the inventory of local fruits and found ordnance. Technicians may spend all day collecting pineapple bombs for demolition and break to forage for pineapples during their lunch. A bomb technician once asked me, in all seriousness, whether the American military had studied Lao native fruits in order to design their bombs to "look like fruit, so we will pick them up." A half-century after war, these former battlefields may be understood as "bomb ecologies," zones in which war profoundly shapes the ecological relations, political systems, and material conditions of living and dying. 1 Villages in the most contaminated 1. Zani, "Bomb Ecologies?"
