The Bomb Squad

If someone had told me I was going to spend a week with a bomb disposal team, I would never have believed them. I was really excited about the project, but I also thought, ‘This is dangerous, what the hell am I doing?’ I’m a mother with a little kid; something could go wrong. Cluster bombs are spread widely around the countryside, as are landmines. Once we even saw a ‘bombie’ rolling around in a school yard.

- Lottie Davies

TESSA BUNNEY has recently returned to the UK after spending four years in south-east Asia, where alongside other projects, she photographed the women of UTC6, an all-female bomb disposal team based in Xieng Khouang, Laos. It’s one of the most badly affected provinces in a country riddled with live bombs, more than 40 years after the Vietnam War.

Bunney’s interest in people and the land compelled her to investigate the huge task facing the country; ridding itself of some 80 million items of unexploded ordnance (UXO).

“Nearly everything I’ve done in the last 25 years has been about landscape, and how we use it in different ways,” she says. “My time in Laos was spent doing stories about how people survive as subsistence farmers, how we as human beings use the land.” The presence of UXO makes subsistence farming a dangerous occupation. During the war, more than 270million cluster bomb sub-munitions, aka ‘bombies’, were dropped on Laos. Since 1975, some 20,000 people have been killed by them.

Bunney’s photographs show a line of bomb casings working as a fence, and a half shell-casing used as a cattle trough. “People were so desperate for money that they would look for bombs and try to dismantle them to get the dynamite out and sell the scrap metal,” she reveals. “For 20 years, everyday life in Laos was extremely risky.”

Much that was visible has now been dealt with by NGOs and government clearance teams, but most remaining UXO are now underground, and farmers working the land still come across bombs just under the surface.

Bunney explains that as well as the obvious danger of wandering around a bomb field, Laos is not an easy country to work in. In the 2016 Press Freedom Index it ranks very poorly; the Communist government exercises tight control.