A full 40 years after the last bombs fell on Laos, a quarter of the country’s villages remain contaminated by a diabolical array of unexploded ordinance that continues to take lives and maim the unwary. The weapons contaminating the countryside include large bombs, rockets, grenades, artillery shells, mortars, landmines and cluster bombs dropped or thrown in the US air campaign, which lasted from 1964 to 1973 in an effort to close down the Ho Chi Minh Trail, a network of tracks by which the North Vietnamese Army transported men and munitions to the south.