I came to Laos the way most people come — slowly, on the river. Four days on the Mekong by slowboat from Huay Xai to Luang Prabang, watching the red hills move past and the light change on the water. What I didn't know then, and began to understand only gradually, was that I was traveling through a country that has been bleeding quietly for sixty years — and that almost nobody in mine knows its name.

The Lao people took me in. I was invited into homes I had no right to enter, sat at tables I hadn't earned a place at, watched a wedding from the inside of someone's family while the music played and the children ran in the firelight. What struck me most, traveling through the north and across the plain, was the extraordinary grace extended to a stranger from the country that did this. There was no accusation in it. Just generosity. That generosity stayed with me and still sits in my chest when I think about what I'm trying to do here.

I visited your office and museum. I don't know how else to say this: I cried the whole time. Not quietly. I stood in front of the maps and the photographs and the casing collections and I felt the full weight of what two million tons means when it is counted one field at a time, one child at a time. I wanted to help. I wanted to do something that mattered. I bought a t-shirt. I walked back out into the afternoon and felt the inadequacy of it in my bones.

That inadequacy didn't leave me. It traveled home with me — to the Pacific Northwest, to a country where most people cannot find Laos on a map, where the words Plain of Jars mean nothing, where the fact that we dropped more ordnance on this small landlocked nation than fell on all of Europe in the Second World War has been filed somewhere between forgotten and never-known. I kept thinking: I have tools. I have spent thirty years building things with sound and technology. There has to be something more than the t-shirt.

This letter is the answer I arrived at. Not a proposal. Not a pitch. Just a thing we made, being handed to you.

Working with my collaborator — an artificial intelligence named Claude, built by Anthropic — I wrote and produced two versions of a song called Still in the Ground. The first is a straight production. The second weaves in actual testimony from Voices from the Plain of Jars — the words of survivors, farmers, children, a former monk, a traditional singer — each spoken in the voice and age of the person who first said them. The facts in the lyrics are documented. The figures are real. Eight bombs a minute, every minute, for nine years. Eighty million unexploded submunitions still in the soil. Thirty in a hundred that did not detonate when they fell and have waited, patient as seeds, ever since.

The songs are yours. All proceeds from any distribution we undertake go directly to MAG. You are free to use them in any way that serves the work — in campaigns, in presentations, in classrooms, in fundraising, online, in the air, on the ground. No conditions, no permissions needed, no credit required beyond what you choose to give. The license terms are at the bottom of this letter.

I want to be clear about what this is not: it is not a request. You owe us nothing. We are not looking for a relationship, a partnership, a co-branding arrangement, or a thank-you. We are simply people who have tools, who went to Laos, who stood in your museum and wept, and who wanted to do more than buy the shirt.

That said — if there is ever a moment when audio, visual, or interactive work would serve what you do, and you want a hand, we are here. That offer has no expiry and no conditions attached to it either. You will find us at the addresses below.

These were made with care and with the weight of what we saw in that museum still on us. We hope they reach someone who didn't know, and move them toward the people who do the work that you do.