Digging up mines in Vietnam's central Highlands
Fly to Hanoi and take the famous Ho Chin Min Trail, which the Vietnamese used to smuggle food and weapons along during the long “American War.”
In 1965 the la Drang valley was the site of the first major battle between the US Army and the Vietnamese. It was bloody, but inconclusive. Partly as a result of this, the US took to dropping weapons from the air. B52s carpet bombed whole landscapes, villages, towns and forests alike with conventional explosives and the infamous napalm. One of the photographs that came to define the war was of one young girl, her clothes burnt off by the chemical, fleeing her village after it had been wiped off the map.
Actually, the forests recovered from the bombs and napalm, but they could not survive the arrival of capitalism. Cashews, coffee, tea, and chocolate beans have replaced the trees, the elephants, the monkeys, and even the hill tribes themselves, the people called the Montagnards (“mountain people”) by the French colonial rulers, who started the process by clearing vast swathes of the forests for rubber plantations.
But don't go to see the vanishing forests, focus instead on the much more mundane landscape which is home to the landmines. Vietnam, like so many other countries bombed by the US, has a munitions legacy that continues to kill thousands each year. Here, in the Central Highlands, migrant workers use portable mine detectors, hired (not loaned!) by the Vietnamese army, to search for shell casings and live bombs in the dusty red earth.
As an added bonus, you can visit the many recent graves of those who found bombs the hard way!
These days Vietnam is losing one or two thousand civilians a year to landmines. Angola, Mozambique, Somalia, Afghanistan, and Cambodia, on the other hand, are struggling to adapt to an estimated 30 million landmines, making vast areas of land unsafe and unusable.
Yet landmines have a particular symbolism for the Vietnamese. They were the “arme de choix” (favorite weapon) of the Viet Cong, helping them to (literally!) level the war's playing field. Indeed, for all their associations with high-tech bombing raids these days, mines have been central to nationalist struggles against mighty imperial powers in South East Asia and Africa.
In Vietnam, the Americans particularly favored a mine known as the Claymore, which was detonated on command. But they also had a soft spot for smaller self-detonating mines, which they scattered during the late 1960s and 1970s in “area-denial strategies” across not only Vietnam, but neighboring Laos and Cambodia too.
Alas for the US forces, the Viet Cong became adept at not only finding the enemy mines, but also at digging them up and recycling the explosives. The Claymore was particularly prized. In one province, after American forces had planted 30,000 mines in a 15-mile (24 kilometer) antipersonnel barrier, the VC lifted an estimated 10,000 mines. The “insurgents” were even able to make anti-personnel mines out of the American cluster bombs. It is estimated that 90 percent of the material used by the VC to manufacture mines, including explosives, came originally from the US military.
And today the re-use and recycling continue—now by hunters, fishers, smugglers and scrap metal dealers. In 2002, poachers in Pu Mat National Park used landmines to kill both endangered animals and park rangers. One fisherman told papers that, in his village, everyone was keen to use mines for fishing “as you can retrieve so many more fish with them.”
Some of these mines may be actual antipersonnel landmines laid during the war. In most cases, however, they are improvised devices made from explosives extracted from war-era bombs and shells. “Bomb hunters” can search for and dig up this ordnance, selling the metal to scrap dealers and the explosives to other intermediaries, who then supply the hunters and fishermen. At a price of up to 1.5 million dong ($100) per disassembled bomb, it's much better business to scavenge for mines than to grow mangoes (regardless of the danger)!
There are reports of injuries and deaths at all stages of this mine recycling process. In Vietnam in 2004, approximately two thousand civilians were killed by bombs—thirty years after the last one was dropped.