One day in 2004, Houng Phommachak and two friends ventured out to the countryside near their village in northeastern Laos in search of scrap metal to sell, to supplement their families’ meager rice-farming incomes. They came across a piece of metal half-buried in the ground and set about digging it up.
The three friends recognized it as a piece of an old bomb casing, and assumed it was no longer dangerous. They were wrong.