Lieutenant Colonel Shi Lu-kuang (施路光) recalled his efforts to clear mines from the nation’s outlying islands beginning in 2006.
Shi described how his years in a military mine-clearing unit in Kinmen County seemed dangerous to most — but not to him: “The more dangerous a job is, the safer it can be.”
Shi is now deputy head of the Army Demining Division, which was established in 2007 and comprised of voluntary military personnel admitted only after they consented to doing potentially dangerous work. Personnel were also required to provide consent from spouses, or if unmarried, parents.
“At that time, I kind of lied to my wife, telling her that it was good to work on Kinmen, a relaxing place,” said the 40-year-old, who has been involved in mine-clearing since 2006, a year before the division was established.
Shi’s wife did not know very much about mine-clearing at first, and Shi took the time to convince her the job is not as precarious as most would expect.
The most dangerous job brings the strictest of demands and safety procedures, he said.
Higher-ranking officers in the division meet every day from Monday to Friday to review the day’s work and discuss how to do it better the next day, he said.
“My wife has come to accept it and recognize it,” he said of the inherent risk faced in his job.
Shi came from the army corps of engineers, where he was trained in demining, but he had never had a chance to put his skills to use until he heard that the army was putting together a demining task force.
Kuo Tai-chu, 25, another member of the division, said the more a person knows about demining, the less worrisome it is.
“You see it as dangerous, but that’s because you don’t understand it,” Kuo said, recalling how he convinced his parents to consent to him joining the operation.
Kuo said he has removed hundreds of mines during his three-and-a-half years in the division.
However, the now-seasoned expert was nervous when he first started.
“I was very nervous. I had to be extremely meticulous, just like an archeologist [with a relic],” Kuo said.
It takes two weeks of basic training and four weeks of advanced training, including training in detecting and removing landmines, to qualify for the position. Training is followed by 256 hours of on-the-job practice in minefields.
“I was extremely nervous [during the training] when our equipment made a sound meaning a metal item had been detected,” Shi said.
However, the perceived mine turned out to be nothing more than a buried beverage container.
“It took me 40 minutes to calm down,” he added.
Kinmen and Matsu previously had extensive minefields along their coastlines, planted by the military in the 1950s and 1960s when tensions were still high with China.
When tension in the Taiwan Strait began to ease, the military drafted plans to clear the mines in the 1990s, Shi said.
Finding mines in Matsu, which like Kinmen lies only kilometers from the Chinese coast, was easier as most of them were planted on cliffs and still unmoved, Shi said.
The challenge was standing on the steep cliffsides while doing the delicate work.
Kinmen was a different story, since most landmines were planted on flat, coastal areas, Shi said.
Over time, mines drifted to new locations due to changing coastlines and tidal patterns.
Shi’s team discovered mines in some hard to imagine places — including, in more than one instance, a mine located directly on top of another mine.
However, supporting their claims of the safety is the Demining Division’s stellar record.
Shi said that none of its deminers have been killed or seriously injured on the job despite dealing with deadly weapons.
Official statistics show more than 123,400 landmines and unexploded ordinances have been removed from Kinmen and Matsu over the years. Now that the military’s largest demining operation has come to a close, 20-plus professional deminers will remain in Kinmen after April this year. Shi and Kuo hope to be among them.
“Every time we remove a mine, we reduce the risk on Kinmen,” Kuo said.
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
UNAWARE: Many people sit for long hours every day and eat unhealthy foods, putting them at greater risk of developing one of the ‘three highs,’ an expert said More than 30 percent of adults aged 40 or older who underwent a government-funded health exam were unaware they had at least one of the “three highs” — high blood pressure, high blood lipids or high blood sugar, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday. Among adults aged 40 or older who said they did not have any of the “three highs” before taking the health exam, more than 30 percent were found to have at least one of them, Adult Preventive Health Examination Service data from 2022 showed. People with long-term medical conditions such as hypertension or diabetes usually do not
Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching
POLICE INVESTIGATING: A man said he quit his job as a nurse at Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital as he had been ‘disgusted’ by the behavior of his colleagues A man yesterday morning wrote online that he had witnessed nurses taking photographs and touching anesthetized patients inappropriately in Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital’s operating theaters. The man surnamed Huang (黃) wrote on the Professional Technology Temple bulletin board that during his six-month stint as a nurse at the hospital, he had seen nurses taking pictures of patients, including of their private parts, after they were anesthetized. Some nurses had also touched patients inappropriately and children were among those photographed, he said. Huang said this “disgusted” him “so much” that “he felt the need to reveal these unethical acts in the operating theater