Fifty years later, a danger in Vietnam persists: unexploded ordnance

DONG HA, Vietnam – Mr. Than was a poor teenager in 1991, scavenging scrap metal to sell. As his detector scraped the ground, it struck an unexploded bomb dropped decades earlier during this country’s war with the U.S.

The bomb exploded, all but killing Than. He lost one leg above the knee, the other below the knee and an arm below the elbow. Shrapnel scarred his face and impaired the vision in his right eye.

Twenty-six years later, with the help of a multinational effort called Project RENEW, Than is fitted with prosthetic legs, equipped with a locally made, one-arm-driven wheelchair, and supports a wife and two children brokering small-time cattle sales in his village near here.

Than’s experience helps tell the story of a decades-long effort to deal with the most significant, persistent, remnant of the Vietnam War: unexploded ordinance. U.S. forces dropped 7.6 million tons of bombs during the war, according to the government, far more than any previous war. Some 10 percent didn’t explode. Since the war’s end in 1975, 100,000 Vietnamese – mostly farmers and their children – have been killed or wounded when the ordnance, unearthed by scavengers like Than, exploded.

A U.S. Army vet from Georgia, Chuck Searcy, co-founded the effort in 2001. Today, Project RENEW spends about $24 million a year – much of it from the U.S. Department of State, but also Ireland and Norway – clearing unexploded ordnance, teaching children about the risks, and assisting victims like Than.

The project cleared 17,000 bombs last year, Searcy told a visiting group in Hanoi last month. More than one million bombs have been cleared, he said, since work began in 1976, by peasants poking the ground with long, bamboo poles.

“I expect some closure in the very near future,” Searcy said.

Now, is a good time to better understand the problem of unexploded ordnance. This is the 50th anniversary of the war’s deadliest year – 1968. Heroic, criminal and decisive events of the war occurred in 1968: the siege of Khe Sanh, the My Lai massacre and the Tet offensive. By year’s end, 16,592 U.S. military were dead, more than half of them U.S. Army infantry soldiers, trained at posts like Fort Benning.

Dong Ha is a good place to tell the story. This city of 70,000 is the capital of Quang Tri Province, along Vietnam’s north central coast, where the war’s fighting was fiercest. It’s the country’s most contaminated province from unexploded ordnance. Khe Sanh is just to the north, My Lai is just to the south. The pivotal battle of the Tet offensive was in the province’s center.

And, it’s a time and a place that resonates in Columbus. The 1st Brigade of the 1st Cavalry, trained and deployed from Fort Benning, led the defense of Quang Tri during the Tet offensive. Donald Rattan, the colonel commanding the brigade, was born at Fort Benning and raised in Columbus. Defeat of the force that assaulted Quang Tri, an Army historian says, proved to be “one of the most decisive victories” of the Tet offensive.

I spent a few days here recently, with Searcy and the Project RENEW staff, in this typical Vietnamese small city. The internet, smartphones and motor bikes occupy the young. Old women still sell fruit and vegetables on sidewalk mats, and old men still collect refuse in push carts. Honking horns are a constant.

Why aren’t we helping?

Searcy, 73, returned to Vietnam in 1995, a year after the U.S. normalized relations with its wartime foe. He helped Vietnamese with missing limbs find orthopedic devices, Searcy told the group in Hanoi.

“We kept reading about kids and farmers getting blown up by unexploded ordnance,” Searcy said. “Why aren’t we helping?”

Project RENEW emerged as the answer to that question. Vets Searcy knew – “rich guys,” he says – donated $500,000 for the start-up, providing Searcy could come up with a “realistic, pragmatic, way” to handle the problem.

To Searcy, that meant risk education and victim assistance, as well as bomb clearance.

As we walked through the Project RENEW offices, he introduced me to Nguyen Thi Dieu Linh, a key driver of the “realistic, pragmatic, way.”

An archeologist of bombs

Linh is like an archeologist. She doesn’t dig for antiquities, but bombs.

Linh, the only woman among Project RENEW’s leadership, is in charge of bomb clearance. Initially, the process was anecdotal: someone, usually a farmer, phoned in that he’d found a bomb. The project sent out a disposal unit to defuse or detonate the bomb.

Today, Linh says, the process is systematic. A non-technical survey team goes from village to village, asking small groups of villagers to tell them about possible bomb sightings. They also study a U.S. Air Force database documenting every bombing run of the war. Then, a technical survey team follows up, using magnetic metal detectors to scan, analyze and map 2,500 square-meter grids.

They search, in particular, for cluster bombs, the baseball-size bomblets that comprise about half of the unexploded ordnance in Quang Tri. “If you find one,” writes George Black, “you’re likely to find more.”

Linh says 72 million square meters of land in Quang Tri has been confirmed as hazardous. Disposal units, she says, have cleared bombs from about half. Project RENEW’s goal, Linh says, is to finish clearing Quang Tri by 2025, then moving on to another province.

A boy finds a bomb

Hai is an 11-year-old boy who was playing in a field near a workshop here that employs men and women blinded by exploding ordnance. They make and sell straw brooms, packs of toothpicks and joss sticks. Hai’s father, blinded in both eyes, works here.

Hai tells us he found a bomb, about eight inches long, in the field while playing. He said he didn’t tell anyone about it and, for all he knows, it’s still there. Searcy looked at Toan Bong Quang, the Project RENEW staffer with us that morning.

“No risk education at his school?” Searcy asked. “Why missed?”

There was no quick answer to Searcy’s question, but there’s good evidence that lots of children, and through them their families, are being reached. I rode along one morning with Nguyen Thanh Phu as he taught a class of second graders.

The school sits on Old Route 9, about 20 miles west of here, along a corridor that saw some of the war’s heaviest fighting: Cam Lo, Con Thien, the Rock Pile, Khe Sanh. The students, in their blue and white school uniforms, seem eager for Phu’s call-and-response lecture, the posters, pencils and notebooks he hands out.

Phu oversees 150 adults who bring “standardized messages, lesson plans” to elementary schools, music nights with teens, and soccer games. They target children of farmers and scrap metal collectors and dealers, Phu says.

Like teachers everywhere, Phu laments it’s “difficult to measure impact.”

But one measure counts the most: the number of people injured and killed when ordnance detonates. Some 8,536 Quang Tri residents have been injured or killed, according to the government, since end of war in 1975. In 2001, when Project Renew began its risk education program, 89 were injured or killed. Last year: two.

A teacher, not a victim

Ho Van Lai teaches at Project RENEW’s visitor center. Like Than, Lai lost parts of both legs and an arm, a thumb, and 80 percent of his sight, to a bomb. He was 10 at the time, playing with three cousins, hammering on rusted, pitted objects they found. Two of the cousins died, he said, when the fifth one Lai hit exploded.

Several days a week, Lai tours school groups around the visitor center, showing bomb casings they’ve defused or detonated, prostheses and wheelchairs they’ve made for victims, and charts and maps that show the progress of the project’s work.

Lai, now 28 and getting about “on just one crutch,” says he doesn’t want to be seen as a victim, but as a “normal, helpful person.”

Is he succeeding, I asked. Lai smiled. “Yes, I can do that.”

This story was originally published February 11, 2018 at 1:04 AM with the headline "Fifty years later, a danger in Vietnam persists: unexploded ordnance."