Word: shrapnel
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...grew up in one. The peerless Burrows, who lived through London's Blitz, would surprise young U.S. Army photographers he worked alongside in Vietnam by always bringing pajamas to the front. The fearless Huet, who grew up in Nazi-occupied France, once returned to Saigon bleeding from a shrapnel wound but famously dropped off his film at his agency's office before seeking treatment. As a boy, Shimamoto watched American B-29 incendiary bombers weave through flak above nighttime Tokyo (a "beautiful sight," he recalled). Potter's childhood was a different kind of battleground. His mother overdosed on sleeping pills...
...years as a journalist I had never seen anything like this: a ragtag army with wailing families in tow, beseeching me to take news of their plight to the outside world. I walked among starving children, their tiny frames scarred by mortar shrapnel. Young men, toting rifles and with dull-eyed infants strapped to their backs, ripped open their shirts to show me their wounds. An old man grabbed my hand and guided it over the contours of shrapnel buried in his gut. A teenage girl, no more than 15, whimpered at my feet, pawed at my legs and cried...
...stump?his hand was removed in a 1974 jungle amputation. One of only four people in the village with some writing skills, he is a meticulous keeper of village statistics?there are 56 orphaned children, 40 widows and 11 widowers. By Moua's count, 30% of the villagers have shrapnel wounds. In 1975, when Vang fled Laos, Moua recorded his group at 7,000 people. Today there are only about 800 left...
...gunship strafed them from above. In all, 216 Hmong were killed. Such assaults can come at any time. Last August, a mortar round landed less than a meter from nine-year-old Yeng Houa's family dinner table, killing both his parents. Yeng survived, but I count 18 shrapnel scars on his legs, his jaw is broken and there is an infected sore on his inner thigh. Since the attack, he has not spoken...
...shot women and children from a distance of just five meters. Today, Bhun looks barely alive himself. Only two fingers remain on his left hand?he lost the others in a B-41 rocket attack that killed six of his fellow Hmong. His leg still bleeds from a suppurating shrapnel wound he received 13 years ago. One side of his face is a mask of melted flesh, with black sockets where an ear and an eye should be. "Everybody is dead," he says. "Sixteen people in my family are dead, all killed by the communists." In a heartbreaking refrain...