An American bomb detonates on Laotian soil. Thirty years later, a villager exhumes the pieces and delivers them to a scrap metal yard. There they sit in a heap until Lee Moua, a Hmong man, plunks down a little money for a mangled chunk.

He takes the metal to his homemade blacksmith shop in a parched backyard among pineapples and sugarcane. He fires a bed of coals, working beneath a rusty roof on a bamboo frame. His bellows are made from a parachute flare canister, his anvil is an artillery shell driven into a stump. Moua heats and pounds his bomb fragment, toiling most of a sweltering afternoon.

When he finishes his work, he has a silvery object, straight from a blistering fire. Its blade is wicked sharp, capable of practical things. It is a simple creation really: a garden hoe.

Between 1964 and 1973, the United States pummeled Laos with bombs, 580,000 sorties, an average of one raid every eight minutes for nine years. It was a secret war, an offshoot of Vietnam, directed at the Ho Chi Minh Trail. The US government bombed these central plains of Xieng Khouang province to smithereens, killing soldiers, farmers, children. At least 350,000 Laotian civilians died; some estimates are much higher.

People still die every week. By some estimates, up to 30 percent of those bombs never detonated, and they remain embedded in Laotian soil. Farmers die while plowing their fields. Women die while tending their yards. Children die while playing with little objects they pluck from the ground – cluster bombs, which were packed by the hundreds into canisters that opened midair, raining fist-sized “bombies” upon the earth. Today, every day, Laotians uncover those little bombs from roadsides, schoolyards, farm fields and village homes.

Laotians try to make use of all that perilous scrap. They risk their lives collecting metal. They sell it. They fashion the pieces into constructive objects.

Many Hmong who resettled overseas after the war still like to use traditional gardening tools, so they place orders with Lee Moua.. He smiths knives and hoes for twenty or thirty dollars. For fifteen dollars more, he wraps them up and mails them to the United States. Bit by bit, bombs travel back to America to help vegetables and flowers grow.