Tag: Explosive accidents

US has channelled millions to clean up UXO but farmers and children continue to discover unexploded missiles.

Ho Sy Bay, 62, was rummaging around in his garden in central Vietnam when he struck something harder than sand or soil. Cautiously, he brushed aside the surrounding dirt and realised he was staring at an unexploded missile.

Although Sy was unsure if the fuse was still intact, he picked up the bomb and placed it carefully in a thicket on one side of his vegetable patch.

“I found it last Thursday,” Sy told Al Jazeera on a visit to his home in Quang Tri province, adding that he informed local officials right away. “Sometimes I find other objects as well. After the war, I started working as a scrap collector and found many types of explosives. Back in 1975, when I was 20, I would find bigger explosives with metal detectors and sell them.”

Behind Sy’s house lie the shattered ruins of a church where North Vietnamese Army soldiers used to hide during the Vietnam War, making the building a target for successive bombing raids by the United States military, which backed the South Vietnamese government in what was then known as Saigon and is now Ho Chi Minh City.

“Around 1979, I found a body around here,” he said, pointing to an area of his garden where he found the remains of a Vietnamese soldier, which was taken away by the authorities.

The US carried out more than a million bombing raids during the 20-year conflict, dropping some 5 million tonnes of ordnance on the Southeast Asian country. About a third of the munitions, including cluster bombs, did not explode on impact.

It has now been more than 50 years since the last US soldier left Vietnam – on March 29, 1973 – but tens of thousands of explosives are still being found each year, often mere inches beneath the soil.

‘Reality of war’

In Quang Tri province, which was once divided by the demilitarised zone between North and South Vietnam and remains the most heavily-contaminated province in the country, there have been 3,500 deaths from accidents since the war ended. The last death was in 2022, when a bomb exploded in a farmer’s hands after he discovered it in a field and picked it up.

“After seeing so many accidents and doing scrap collecting work for a long time, I stopped,” Sy added. Yet despite his experiences, he is not angry: “I feel like everyone else… this is just the reality of war.”

The Mines Advisory Group (MAG), a United Kingdom-based NGO that has been working in Vietnam since 1999 and now employs 735 people in the country, came to remove the bomb in Sy’s garden after he called a local hotline.

Source : https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/6/26/50-years-after-the-vietnam-war-ended-its-bombs-continue-to-kill