Something resembling a broken green plate suddenly catches US Staff Sergeant Mike Overton’s eye.
“I need you to back up,” he quickly warns a reporter.
In Vietnam’s Quang Tri Province, which a survey found to be 80 percent contaminated with unexploded munitions from the Vietnam War, Overton has just discovered another potential threat.
Overton, 28, a veteran of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, quickly determines that the remnant of a Russian-style Claymore mine, packed with ball bearings, no longer poses a danger.
It was lying atop Hill 881 South, a Vietnam War battlefield still littered with an assortment of ordnance including rifle ammunition, mortar and anti-tank rounds, grenades, and remnants of missiles.
In Quang Tri Province none of this is unusual, says Chuck Searcy, country representative for the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund.
The fund sponsors Project RENEW, a group which has spent years trying to protect Quang Tri residents from the leftover explosives known as UXO (unexploded ordnance).
The UXO problem, which exists throughout Vietnam, is at its worst in Quang Tri, along the former Demilitarized Zone that divided then North Vietnam from the US-backed South. The area was heavily bombed and fought over, and now is increasingly popular with tourists.
Since the end of the war in 1975, 2,774 people have been killed and 3,986 wounded by UXOs and landmines in Quang Tri, said a detailed survey released last year.
Casualties have fallen dramatically in recent years, but they still occur. Ho Van Nguyen, a father of six, died in February while cutting weeds on his slash-and-burn farm. He apparently struck a cluster munition, said Project RENEW, one of several charities addressing the legacy of war debris in the province.
More than a third of the land in six provinces of central Vietnam, including Quang Tri, is contaminated with UXOs and landmines, said the survey released by the Vietnam Veterans of America Foundation and Vietnam’s Ministry of Defense.
It said more than 80 percent of Quang Tri is affected, and unexploded bombs create fear among residents, hindering economic development.
Local people are “afraid to farm up there” on Hill 881 South, said Le Huu Hanh, 64, who served with North Vietnamese forces in that area during the war.
Hanh overcame his fear of the leftover munitions and returned in May to try to help US military investigators pinpoint the site where remains of a US Marine could be found.
To safely clear the way, Overton, a US Air Force explosives ordnance disposal technician, was part of that team from the Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command (JPAC). The unit investigates US missing-in-action cases and recovers the remains of those it finds.
Just as the team and its Vietnamese liaison officers reached the top of the hill, Overton found a grenade and three mortar rounds.
Other war debris lay in plain view among scattered pine trees and bomb craters.
“Forty millimeter,” Overton said, pointing at one decaying projectile beside an overgrown foxhole.
Overton concluded that none of what he found posed a threat, but he left markers around all the ordnance.
Project RENEW, working with Norwegian People’s Aid, has set up special ordnance disposal teams that respond to those alerts from the public. They have been called out 1,000 times in the past couple of years to safely remove and destroy more than 3,000 pieces of ordnance, Searcy said.
In April the government approved a plan which aims to clear by 2025 about 1.3 million hectares, 20 percent of Vietnam’s contaminated land.
That would cost more than 34 trillion dong (US$1.83 billion), Vietnamese officials have estimated, with funding from local and international sources.
It will be much easier for Vietnam to attract more international funding if it signs the Convention on Cluster Munitions, which prohibits all use, stockpiling, production and transfer of the weapons, Searcy said.
Under the global convention, which comes into force on Aug. 1, parties with contaminated areas are entitled to financial and other assistance to clear them, and are required to do so within 10 years.
Neighboring Laos, the world’s most heavily-bombed nation, was among the first to sign the document. Vietnam says it is “in the process of studying questions linked to participation” in the pact, whose humanitarian objective it supports.
Archeologists in Peru on Thursday said they found the 5,000-year-old remains of a noblewoman at the sacred city of Caral, revealing the important role played by women in the oldest center of civilization in the Americas. “What has been discovered corresponds to a woman who apparently had elevated status, an elite woman,” archeologist David Palomino said. The mummy was found in Aspero, a sacred site within the city of Caral that was a garbage dump for more than 30 years until becoming an archeological site in the 1990s. Palomino said the carefully preserved remains, dating to 3,000BC, contained skin, part of the
‘WATER WARFARE’: A Pakistani official called India’s suspension of a 65-year-old treaty on the sharing of waters from the Indus River ‘a cowardly, illegal move’ Pakistan yesterday canceled visas for Indian nationals, closed its airspace for all Indian-owned or operated airlines, and suspended all trade with India, including to and from any third country. The retaliatory measures follow India’s decision to suspend visas for Pakistani nationals in the aftermath of a deadly attack by shooters in Kashmir that killed 26 people, mostly tourists. The rare attack on civilians shocked and outraged India and prompted calls for action against their country’s archenemy, Pakistan. New Delhi did not publicly produce evidence connecting the attack to its neighbor, but said it had “cross-border” links to Pakistan. Pakistan denied any connection to
TRUMP EFFECT: The win capped one of the most dramatic turnarounds in Canadian political history after the Conservatives had led the Liberals by more than 20 points Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney yesterday pledged to win US President Donald Trump’s trade war after winning Canada’s election and leading his Liberal Party to another term in power. Following a campaign dominated by Trump’s tariffs and annexation threats, Carney promised to chart “a new path forward” in a world “fundamentally changed” by a US that is newly hostile to free trade. “We are over the shock of the American betrayal, but we should never forget the lessons,” said Carney, who led the central banks of Canada and the UK before entering politics earlier this year. “We will win this trade war and
Armed with 4,000 eggs and a truckload of sugar and cream, French pastry chefs on Wednesday completed a 121.8m-long strawberry cake that they have claimed is the world’s longest ever made. Youssef El Gatou brought together 20 chefs to make the 1.2 tonne masterpiece that took a week to complete and was set out on tables in an ice rink in the Paris suburb town of Argenteuil for residents to inspect. The effort overtook a 100.48m-long strawberry cake made in the Italian town of San Mauro Torinese in 2019. El Gatou’s cake also used 350kg of strawberries, 150kg of sugar and 415kg of
RSS