VIETNAM: Villagers Build Lives Out of Unexploded Bombs

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

By Aaron Glantz and Ngoc Nguyen

KHE SANH, Vietnam, Nov 26 2003 (IPS) - Driving through Khe Sanh now, one could miss the handful of monuments that mark the site of the bloodiest battle of the American War, known to most of the world as the Vietnam War.

These days, the town in Quang Tri province is bustling with restaurants and cafes. Trucks carrying goods from the Lao border plow through the town’s main road, spewing fumes and kicking up dirt.

Less than a mile outside of Khe Sanh, the paved road turns to dirt and the electric grid stops. Smoke comes out of the thatch-roof huts built on stilts that dot the hillsides.

A cluster of women of the Bru hill tribe, the ethnic minority inhabitants of the hills in Central Vietnam, pull up their distinctly patterned sarongs and wash themselves in a stream. They spent the morning gathering twigs to use as tinder for cooking and heating.

The sounds of pigs and chickens fill the homes. But the local hill tribe people barely make a living from these livestock and even if they could afford to start up a farm, the surrounding land might not be safe to work on.

Thirty years ago, the U.S. armed forces dropped a hundred thousand tonnes of bombs, some weighing as much as 1,000 kilogrammes, in the area around Khe Sanh. Overall, U.S. forces pummelled Vietnam with close to eight million tonnes of bombs.

The Vietnamese government estimates as many as 800,000 cluster bombs and M-79 mortars are still in the soil – and most of them have not exploded yet. Thirty-five percent of the land in Central Vietnam -the region most affected by unexploded ordnance (UXO) – cannot be farmed.

The Vietnamese government estimates that 38,000 people have been killed and 65,000 injured by UXO since the war ended in 1975. One-third of survivors live on less than 30 U.S. cents a day, according to the ‘2003 Landmine Monitor Report’ by the International Campaign to Ban Land Mines.

Still, people here have found another way to make ends meet, including by making use of the legacy of war.

Twenty-one year old Tung, who declines to give his full name, has been digging up unexploded bombs for three years. ”You need a hammer and chisel to pry open the bomb shell,” he says to IPS. ”You can’t do it with your fingers. Then you have to pour the explosives on the inside out and bury it in the soil.”

Tung learned the trade watching his neighbours. He looks for a crater in the ground and then starts digging. It can up to take three or four days to bring the bomb out safely.

It is risky, but Tung says it is the quickest way to get money for food. He can sell a complete mortar for up to 100 U.S. dollars. A smaller cluster bomblet would fetch much less.

The amount Tung can make from selling a complete bomb is three times more than what he would get selling a pig, which takes five to six months to raise.

Tuan, a 60-year-old subsistence farmer who lives near Dakong village, also in Quang Tri province at the centre of the old Demilitarised Zone between North and South Vietnam, was tilling land a decade after the end of the war when he struck a U.S. cluster bomb and lost his left arm.

”There were so many bombs on my farm, it was like every time you turned around you would hit one,” he recalls.

At first, Tuan and his family first tried to clear the bombs themselves. But that proved too difficult and he eventually turned to local scavengers to clear his land. ”People just kept showing up and asking if they could dig up bombs on my farm and I said ‘sure why not?”

Under Vietnamese law, farmers can call in the military to have their land cleared. But the cost is steep, about 500 dollars an acre.

”The Vietnamese government cleared the bombs in important places where they were going to build public buildings,” Tuan explains, a sad look in his eyes. ”For the peasants they did make an effort to clear it up but later. The government can’t clear it all because the bombing was over such a wide area.”

But development has also brought up a new risk related to UXO. As more and more development brings people farther into the countryside, new land is being excavated and bombs, buried for years, are exploding.

In fact, Tran Dao from Cam Lo village – struck by a cluster bomb while planting flowers at school when he was 15 – shudders to think of the bombs that may still be in the soil as he and others work on a project to expand the main East-West road.

This road underscores the massive changes in Vietnam in past decades and its integration with neighbouring nations. It goes from Dong Ha, on the central west coast, to Lao Bao at the border with Laos, and is designed to be a major artery as Vietnam increases trade with Laos and other South-east Asian countries.

”Even though most likely they cleared the bombs, there’s just no guarantee,” Dao says. ”So I’m afraid, you know, digging out there everyday.”

Kien Toi, who lives in a hut four kilometres up the dirt road outside Khe Sanh, is a coffee farmer but his biggest business is unexploded bombs. ”The war might have been bad,” he says, ”but at least it left us a livelihood.”

He buys two or three canvas sacks of unexploded bombs every day, marks them up and sells them to businessmen from the city who melt them down for building materials – and he has kept a few for himself.

The legs of his bed and his table are made from unexploded bombs. But unexploded bomb parts are not just propping up beds.

Just a few feet down the road, builders are constructing a one-room house, using steel rods recycled from unexploded bombs.

Builders in Central Vietnam used to construct houses out of wood, but forest resources were damaged heavily by the U.S. forces’ spraying of the defoliant Agent Orange.

The government estimates that 30 years after the war, 2.5 million acres of Vietnam’s former farm and forest land remain barren, and villagers and timber companies have cut down these resources too.

The builders do not see anything strange about building a home out of UXO. They say it is half the price of new steel – and they joke that they are never going to run out of this cheap building material, because the United States dropped so many tonnes of bombs on Vietnam.