A strike pattern is a signature of violence carved into the land--bomb
craters or fragments of explosives left behind, forgotten. In Strike
Patterns, poet and anthropologist Leah Zani journeys to a Lao river
community where people live alongside such relics of a secret war. With
sensitive and arresting prose, Zani reveals the layered realities that
settle atop one another in Laos--from its French colonial history to
today's authoritarian state--all blown open by the war. This excavation
of postwar life's balance between the mundane, the terrifying, and the
extraordinary propels Zani to confront her own explosive past.
From 1964 to 1973, the United States carried out a covert air war
against Laos. Frequently overshadowed by the war with Vietnam, the
Secret War was the longest and most intense air war in history. As Zani
uncovers this hidden legacy, she finds herself immersed in the lives of
her hosts: Chantha, a daughter of war refugees who grapples with her
place in a future Laos of imagined prosperity; Channarong, a bomb
technician whose Thai origins allow him to stand apart from the
battlefields he clears; and Bounmi, a young man who has inherited his
bomb expertise from his father but now struggles to imagine a similar
future for his unborn son. Wandering through their lives are the
restless ghosts of kin and strangers.
Today, much of Laos remains contaminated with dangerous leftover
explosives. Despite its obscurity, the Secret War has become a shadow
model for modern counterinsurgency. Investigating these shadows of war,
Zani spends time with silk weavers and rice farmers, bomb clearance
crews and black market war scrap traders, ritual healers and survivors
of explosions. Combining her fieldnotes with poetry, fiction, and memoir
she reflects on the power of building new lives in the ruins.
