Strike Patterns

B ased on Zani's fieldwork in Laos from 2012 to 2015, Strike Patterns is a work of ethnographic fiction that is part ethnography, part novel, and part personal memoir.Its goal is to paint a portrait of Lao people coping with the after-effects of the Vietnam-American War, or more specifically, the CIA's "secret" air war over Laos that made it the most bombed nation per capita in the history of the world.Zani, an anthropologist and author of the 2019 ethnography, Bomb Children, chooses a fictionalized account for this book.It reads similar to a movie that is "based on a true story"-one suspects that the people and events are roughly real but rewritten into a work of fiction both to disguise their identities for reasons of confidentiality and personal safety, and to provide a non-academic format in which to convey the story of post-war, ordinance-contaminated Laos to a broader audience.In Zani's own words, the novel aims to employ the powerful "empathetic registers of literature" to convey her ethnographic research through creative methods that "compel ethical action" (vii).Zani notes that in her 2019 ethnography, she was unable to tell personal stories due to the risks of writing about real people living within the authoritarian Lao state; Strike Patterns is therefore her solution to writing a more emotionally powerful, personalized account-fictional yet grounded in ethnographic research.Cluster munitions, and the unexploded (or ready-to-explode) ordnance they leave behind, are deadly for decades after their initial use in war.In Laos, cluster bomblets litter the countryside almost 50 years after the end of the war; in other nations, they continue to initiate this journey of decades-long contamination today.From 1964 until 1973, the United States dropped more than two million tons of ordnance over Laos, bombing especially the communist side's Ho Chi Minh Trail, which brought supplies from North Vietnam through Laos to the

Genealogy · History · Southeast Asian Sociopolitical Studies