Strike Patterns: Notes from Postwar Laos

by Leah Zani

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 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.

Genres: Literature, Anthropology

183 pages, Kindle Edition

Published March 15, 2022

About the author

I am a public anthropologist and author. I write richly human stories about explosives, warfare, and the way we understand power.

I earned my Ph.D. in anthropology from the University of California, Irvine, where I studied the effects of air warfare in Laos. I trained as a researcher with the Human Rights Center at the University of California, Berkeley, in partnership with the Nobel Prize-winning Mines Advisory Group. I have presented my research in Laos to the United States Congress. I have written for Cultural Anthropology, Kenyon Review, Consequence, and SAPIENS, among others. I am the author of Strike Patterns, winner of the 2023 IPPY Gold Prize for Creative Nonfiction.

As a reader, my favorite books are intelligent, imaginative, and beautifully written. I read a lot of speculative fiction and nature writing. My favorite author is (of course) my fellow anthropologist, Ursula Le Guin.

Reviews

[Alex Alexander · Rating 5 out of 5]

If I could recommend a single book to every person I know it’s probably this one

[Liz · Rating 5 out of 5]

Leah Zani is a public anthropologist, who applies her understanding of cultural practices to learning about the after-effects of war, in this case the U.S.’s secret bombing campaign in Laos. ‘Strike Patterns’ relates her time traveling with international bomb clearance teams in the Laotian countryside, learning with villagers the techniques for making land safe to farm and build on. The book is sensitive and poetic in its descriptions of the land, the people, and particularly their spiritual and cultural beliefs. She argues that war is never really over for those on whose land it is fought, even for women and children. There is so much to this book, it is hard to put into words, but at a time when 16 months of Putin’s war against Ukraine has ruined a land mass the size of Austria, Zani’s work makes me wonder if humans even deserve the beautiful planet we live on.