The Vietnam War Is Still Killing People

[rug]

Mine-clearing operations in Vietnam in 2005. Since the end of the Vietnam War, in 1975, more than forty thousand Vietnamese have been killed by unexploded ordnance. PHOTOGRAPH BY PATRICK ZACHMANN / MAGNUM

By George Black, May 20, 2016

On Saturday, President Obama will set out on a trip to Vietnam, for a visit that’s being billed as looking forward to the future rather than back at the bitter history of the past. On the same day, a funeral will be held in Quang Tri province for a man named Ngo Thien Khiet.

Khiet, who died at the age of forty-five, and who leaves behind a wife and two sons, was an expert on the unexploded ordnance, or UXO, left over from the Vietnam War. He was particularly skilled at locating, removing, and safely destroying cluster bombs found in the farm fields of Quang Tri, an impoverished agricultural province that straddles the old Demilitarized Zone, or DMZ, which once divided North and South Vietnam.

Quang Tri is a place of great natural beauty, a narrow strip of land that stretches from the curving beaches and breakers of the South China Sea, in the east, to the misty, forested mountains along the border with Laos, in the west. Perhaps no other part of the country suffered more grievously during the Vietnam War. More ordnance was dropped on Quang Tri than was dropped on all of Germany during the Second World War. The province was also sprayed with more than seven hundred thousand gallons of herbicide, mainly Agent Orange. The names of battlefields like Cam Lo, Con Thien, Mutter’s Ridge, and the Rockpile still give American veterans nightmares. The seventy-seven-day siege of the Marine base of Khe Sanh, in Quang Tri, so obsessed Lyndon Johnson that he kept a scale model of the base in the White House, and demanded daily updates on the course of the battle.

For the eight years before his death, Khiet worked for a nongovernmental organization called Project renew, which is based in the provincial capital, Dong Ha. The organization was founded fifteen years ago by a group of foreigners, including an American veteran named Chuck Searcy, who served in Saigon during the 1968 Tet Offensive. The group’s mission is to help clear the countryside of leftover UXO, and it has grown to employ an all-Vietnamese staff of a hundred and sixty people.

http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/the-vietnam-war-is-still-killing-people

http://landmines.org.vn/

[Kip Humphrey]

1. The Vietnam War Is Still Killing People, part two

[rug]

2. +1

Along with their families.

I can only imagine the future casualties that are being produced in this decade's wars.

[Kip Humphrey]

3. +1+1

[Jeffersons Ghost]

12. K&R

[awoke_in_2003]

13. Dupleted uranium...

no way of cleaning that stuff up. It will vex Iraq for decades.

[sorefeet]

4. My buddie is dying from

bone cancer most likely caused from the agent orange according to his doctor. But the V.A. denies it.

[rug]

6. He's not alone.

https://vva.org/what-we-do/outreach-programs/agent-orange/

[merrily]

5. The Swiss had the right idea. Just say no to war. Spend the money on the nation and its citizens nt.

Yeah, I know, Swiss bank accounts, Nazis, etc. Anyone who twists and this post as pro those things, instead of as pacifist, you are even nastier than I thought. Kudos on exceeding expectations.

[MisterP]

7. part three: they're not killed, but their lives have been taken from them (pics NSFW)

http://www.news.com.au/world/asia/vietnams-horrific-legacy-the-children-of-agent-orange/news-story/c008ff36ee3e840b005405a55e21a3e1
ultimately war isn't about sides, but who's in the planes vs. who's underneath the planes

[rug]

8. Horrific is the right word.

What is this affecting now, the third generation? The fourth?

[pinboy3niner]

9. R.I.P., Ngo Thien Khiet

It's a shame to lose a person doing such good work.

I fought at Cam Lo on one operation when my infantry battalion was sent there from our normal area of operations a bit farther South in Thua Thien Province. I called in artillery there, but none of those rounds were left unexploded. In my platoon, though, I remember a couple of grenades that were thrown that didn't explode because the safeties hadn't been removed. I guess they're still there.

[rug]

10. From a cluster bomb from a war that had been going on for 10 years before he was even born.

http://vietnamfulldisclosure.org/index.php/renew-deminer-dies-injuries-cluster-bomb-accident/

I'm glad you made it through, pinboy.

[pinboy3niner]

11. Thanks, rug

I still have my grid map from that operation, on which Cam Lo, a small village just South of the DMZ, was already marked as destroyed ruins. The village was memorialized, in a way. The grid map for that entire sector was titled "Cam Lo."

[Archae]

14. WW1 is still killing people.

Leftovers from war, especially explosives, will kill if they are dug up by accident.
Every year I read about someone in France who is killed after a shell or bomb from WW1 gets dug up.

In Britain they are still finding WW2 bombs buried under houses and buildings.

It's a legacy we don't want, but it is there anyway.

[Nevernose]

15. The US has caused this problem all over the world

Cambodia and Laos are still thick with unexploded ordinance, and there are thousands of people risking their lives daily to find and remove it. Learning what forty year old undetonated cluster munitions look like is a skill rural SE Asians master by the time they're five. Hundreds are still killed or wounded every year.

What's worse? These same bombs are now all over Afghanistan (though the Russians dropped their fair share there), Iraq, Syria, and Yemen. We're going to be giving them reasons to hate us for the next century.

Most countries have banned their use entirely. But America? We're still exporting them to totalitarians, because Freedom and Profit!