Stephen Wilkes

“It speaks to the human spirit that someone can take something that’s awful, and was worse, and turn it into something that becomes useful. Because he didn’t just go and photograph them; he actually lived over there.”

— Larry Jens Anderson

This image of craters from U.S. airstrikes in Xiangkhouang Province in Laos is part of a series that appears in the August 2015 issue of National Geographic, as part of an article written by T.D. Allman.

The article and images can be found here.

The U.S. dropped more than 2 million tons of bombs on Laos from 1964 to 1973 during the Vietnam War. That’s equal to a planeload every 8 minutes for 9 years. How does a country recover?

— excerpt from “Laos Finds Life After the Bombs”