Students for Renew

Tom Hoskins: Relationships during the war.

2011-05-07T09:44:00.000-07:00

Alan Carter's List

2011-05-06T21:24:00.000-07:00

Tom Hoskins: Vietnamese Communists & American History

2011-05-05T11:23:00.000-07:00

Tom Hoskins on Cambodia's revolution

2011-05-04T19:45:00.000-07:00

Alan Carter on United States Ambassador to S. Vietnam, Graham Martin.

2011-05-03T19:51:00.000-07:00

Sarah Levine: Cambodia's Killing Fields in the 21st Century

2011-05-02T19:59:00.000-07:00

QUARTERLY NEWSLETTER FROM PROJECT RENEW

2011-04-03T11:27:00.000-07:00

Expanding RENEW's reach by leveraging local resources

Lê Văn Phú, a physician working at Quảng Trị General Hospital, is one of 21 local doctors who were trained by Norwegian doctor Hans Husum on advance life support skills. The training is part of Project RENEW’s cooperation with the Quảng Trị Health Department to improve local medical capacity. Click here to read more.

Cleaning up cluster bombs for residents to build new homes, live in safety

Lê Đông was gesturing toward the edge of his village.

“This area was littered with so many cluster bombs after 1975,” he said, “that when people came back after the war a lot of casualties occurred while they were farming.” Click here to read more.

Quảng Trị government and HDI sign a five-year agreement to support UXO survivors through "Mushrooms-with-a-Mission"

An agreement signed on 3 March 2011 will reduce poverty and bring improved living conditions for UXO victim families by expanding a mushroom-growing project in Quảng Trị Province. Click here to read more.

Vietnamese army veteran fought against the U.S., now works with Americans and international advisors to clean up debris of war

55-year-old Bùi Trọng Hồng retired in 2002 after 30 years in the People’s Army of Vietnam, Quân đội Nhân dân Việt Nam. He has worked as National Technical Officer for Project RENEW’s EOD teams since 2008. In this interview, he reflected on his years of military duty and dealing with battlefield ordnance, and his more recent civilian service as an expert with several NGO projects. Click here to read more.

Germany to help Vietnam clear land mines and unexploded ordnance

2011-04-01T11:41:00.000-07:00

Hanoi - The German Foreign Ministry has pledged more than 1 million dollars to help clear land mines and unexploded ordnance in central Vietnam, the embassy said Friday.

The work would be done through the non-governmental organization International Solidarity of Germany in close cooperation with Vietnamese authorities.

Germany has contributed nearly 8.5 million euros (12 million dollars) to mine clearance in Vietnam in the past 13 years. In that time, the NGO has cleared more than 1,500 hectares in the region, freeing up valuable land for farming and developing infrastructure.

The organization also provides vocational training and support to help rehabilitate people maimed by mines and bombs as well as other disabled people in the area.

More than three decades after the Vietnam War, unexploded ordnance still threatens the lives of people in rural Vietnam on a daily basis, especially in the central provinces.

According to the Vietnam-based mine charity Renew, out of the 15 million tons of munitions dropped by the United States during the conflict, 10 per cent failed to detonate on impact.

Many were dropped over the border in neutral Cambodia to disrupt supply lines and bases thought to be operated by the Vietnamese forces opposing the US.

Millions of rounds of cluster munitions, mines, grenades and bombs, many of them still deadly, are now scattered around houses and gardens, along roadways or buried just under the surface or deep in the earth in both countries.

Since the end of the war in 1975, more than 100,000 people have been killed or injured by the unexploded military ordnance in Vietnam and Cambodia.

Renew, which is funded by US and Norwegian aid, estimated 100 people are killed by landmines each year in Vietnam. Many are scavengers who mistake the ordnance for scrap metal.

Many of the victims are children, the organization said, either scavengers themselves or those who mistake the objects for toys.

Landmine explosions/casualties still affect thousands

2011-03-28T11:31:00.000-07:00

Cambodia's Disabled Fight Poverty, Inequality

Written by Catherine Wilson
Monday, 28 March 2011
Cambodia remains littered with millions of unexploded devices left over from 30 years of civil war, the brutality of the Khmer Rouge and conflict with Vietnam. The government itself believes that as many as 2 percent of the country's 14.7 million people are disabled with landmine casualties a significant proportion. Poung Mai, who lost both legs when he stepped on a landmine, is one of those victims. He and Chhum Sopheap, who has suffered from polio, are seated on the ground in the midday sun next to the ticket kiosk inside the entrance gates to the National Museum in Phnom Penh with a basket of books to sell, each one carefully wrapped in plastic to lessen the inevitable damage from perpetual sun and dust. They are among more than 60,000 physically disabled in Cambodia who struggle against poverty, discrimination, unequal access to education and employment and an under-funded and under-resourced state support system. Cambodia is one of the poorest and most landmine contaminated countries in the world and the challenge of achieving economic inclusion, education and rehabilitation of the disabled is considerable. Numerous demining organisations, such as the Cambodian Mine Action Center, are steadily working to clear the country of millions of unexploded bombs and ordnances in rural regions, especially in the northwest close to the border with Thailand. With 80 percent of the population residing in rural provinces, the prevalence of landmines has significantly reduced access to agricultural land, forests and water resources, and led to one of the highest rates of disability in the world as people in farming communities are maimed and killed as they go about their daily lives. According to the Cambodia Mine Victim Information System (CMVIS), there were 286 landmine casualties in 2010, an increase on the 244 reported in 2009 and 271 in 2008, with 15 new casualties in January this year. It estimates that since 1979 there have been 63,821 mine casualties, which corresponds to 39 landmine deaths and injuries every week for 31 years, with about 44,000 survivors. Poung Mai is from Prey Khmoa village in Prey Veng province where his family were rice farmers. "During the civil war in Cambodia, the government [Khmer Rouge] arrested me and I was made to work in forestry, woodcutting," he said, "and then I stepped on a landmine." He was 28 years of age when both legs were amputated. "After I stepped on the landmine, it was difficult," he continued, "I went around begging everywhere, at the market, to feed my family." Poung has seven children. In 1990 he was removed by authorities to a center that provided food and shelter, but no prospect of livelihood. He subsequently left and found his way to Phnom Penh, where he continued to beg until he joined the Angkor Association for the Disabled in 2009, an organization of people with disabilities founded by Sem Sovantha, who suffered double amputation by a landmine, to provide shelter and training to members and campaign against discrimination. Chhum Sopheap, also from Prey Veng province, came to Phnom Penh in 1997, sleeping on the streets until he started selling books at the National Museum in 2007. Both say that the very small income they earn from selling books, on average $4.00 per day, enables them to rent a room and leave behind homelessness, which is often accompanied by alcoholism, mental ill-health, hunger and disease. Belonging to a disabled organization has also marginally improved their experience with the public, they say. "When they are not with an association," Sem Sovantha explained, "there is a problem with the authorities. When they have an association, people will accept them and talk to them." However, negative social attitudes and discrimination toward the disabled, such as physical harassment, social ostracism and economic exclusion, remain widespread. Chhum claims that he mostly receives a positive response from visitors and tourists at the National Museum, "but the official in the area is not so happy about us, because he thinks it is not appropriate for us to be selling to tourists." Local tour guides also attempt to dissuade visitors from being patrons. "The customer would like to buy," Chhum explains, "but the customer believes the tour guide when he says ‘no, no', because at another shop the tour guide will get a commission." According to a 2009 ILO report, "People with disabilities are among the most vulnerable groups in Cambodian society. They lack equal access to education, training and employment. While many workers with disabilities have considerable skills, many have not had the opportunity to develop their potential." The Cambodian government introduced a Law on the Protection and Promotion of the Rights of People with Disabilities in 2009 to support the right to employment without discrimination, and in the same year adopted a National Plan of Action for Persons with Disabilities, including landmine survivors, in order to better address needs and provide services. The stated priorities of the Ministry of Social Affairs, Veterans and Youth Rehabilitation include strengthening and expanding welfare and rehabilitation services for the disabled, but, according to the Cambodian Disabled Peoples Organization, lack of human and financial resources has hindered real progress toward these goals, although the work of NGOs has resulted in the provision of more vocational training courses. "Social acceptance and social attitudes toward disabled people and landmine amputees can be improved step by step through the Royal Government having a Disability Law and National Plan for persons with disability," a CDPO spokesperson said, "The problem in Cambodia is that we have the laws, but no budget to implement them." In the meantime, Chhum Sopheap and Poung Mai strive to sell their books, many of which are biographies and stories of Cambodians, like themselves, who have struggled through the tragedy of the Khmer Rouge era and are determined to not only survive, but live to see a better future. Original Story...

Vietnam War-Era Bombs Cause Current Day Casualties, Demonstrating Need for Updated Weapons Technology

2011-03-25T11:34:00.000-07:00

Rebecca Buckwalter-Poza

In Laos recently, a 10-year-old boy was killed by a buried bomb he and a friend disturbed while playing. While his friend was killed instantly, the boy survived the initial blast. In a video exhibit at Vientiane's Cooperative Orthotic and Prosthetic Enterprise (COPE), his parents recount the details of the horrific injuries inflicted by the explosion and their frantic search for a truck to take him to the hospital. Their son survived the long trip to the nearest city and the ride to a second hospital but was denied medical care at both. Neither had donor blood. The boy returned to his village only to die in agony at his home.

The bomb that killed this boy was one of many items of unexploded ordnance (UXO) seeded throughout Laos during U.S. bombing campaigns in the 1960s and 1970s. The boy's story illustrates the danger posed by UXOs from the war in Vietnam. His parents' tragic account exposes how domestic infrastructure shortcomings in developing countries can exacerbate the effects of these remnants of modern warfare. As the US and allies undertake operations in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya, they have an obligation to heed these less publicized legacies of prior conflicts. Military forces must transition to new generations of "smart" and self-destructing bombs.

In Southeast Asia, UXOs injure and kill hundreds of people each year. These unstable bombs and de facto landmines render large swathes of land unworkable for agriculture, economic development and infrastructure-building. To clear the land, UXOs have to be removed or safely detonated in place. Otherwise, the land will remain unusable for decades. Some areas of the U.S. are still contaminated with UXOs from the Civil War.

UXOs contaminate a fifth of Vientam's total land area. Between 1975 and 2007, UXOs injured or killed about 105,000 people according to the Vietnamese Ministry of Labor, Invalids and Social Affairs. Too many of these casualties are recent. UXOs caused nearly 930 casualties in the five-year period between 2003 and 2008.

Cambodia still has as many as six million landmines and UXOs. In the last two years, there have been 300 UXO-related incidents, causing 530 casualties. Altogether, there have been more than 60,000 deaths and injuries attributable to explosives since 1979 in Cambodia with others likely unreported.

Neighboring Laos bears the heaviest burden. The United States dropped more than 2 million tons of bombs on Laos between 1964 and 1973, up to 30 percent of which did not explode. Laos is the most heavily bombed country per capita in history. More than half a million raids sowed the country with more than 270 million "bomblets," also called "bombies," the smaller explosive components of cluster munitions. Today in Laos, 80 million bomblets are still active throughout the country, and a quarter of Laos's villages are affected. Since 1964, more than 50,000 people have been killed or injured by UXOs.

In Southeast Asia, the people in the predominantly rural regions in which UXOs are most common are least likely to be educated about explosives. Some disturb bombs while searching for food and resources while others expose them while digging to build. Nearly half of victims are children, who rarely understand the danger when they discover a bomb. Children even play with softball-sized bomblets. Other adults and children knowingly risk bodily injury or death because the value of metal outweighs the threat of harm. Many of the most heavily affected areas are also farthest from medical care. Many survivors live with disabilities ranging from loss of vision or hearing to amputations that leave them unable to support or care for themselves.

Investment in bomb removal must increase dramatically for affected countries to reduce casualties and reclaim land. The developing countries affected lack the financial and human resources to adequately address the scope of the UXO problem. According to Representative Mike Honda, the U.S. spent as much as $17 million per day in today's dollars during Vietnam War-era bombing campaigns in Laos yet has until recently committed only $3 million per year toward bomb removal efforts. This year's commitment of $5 million from the US still falls well short of what's needed. In 2008, with around $3 million, the Mine Advisory Group (MAG) was only able to clear 100,000 items of UXOs across 2.8 sq. km., a numerically insignificant portion of the 87,000 sq. km. affected. Of course, international aid is lagging overall: in 2010, total outside aid for UXO removal in Laos was just $20 million.

Within affected countries, improvements in domestic public health infrastructure and rehabilitation facilities will increase chances of survival and improve outcomes for victims. For prevention, education is necessary but not sufficient. It is necessary to combat the extreme poverty that leads people to risk themselves in pursuit of scrap metal.

Beyond investment in bomb removal, an international ban on cluster munitions would signify a breakthrough for global security -- and against terrorism. As Senator Leahy said, "anyone who has seen the indiscriminate devastation cluster weapons cause across a wide area must recognize the unacceptable threat they pose to civilians."

The Oslo Convention, or the Convention on Cluster Munitions, commits its signatories to destroy the majority of their cluster weapons within eight years and mandates investment in UXO removal abroad. It is the logical successor of the 1997 Mine Ban Treaty, which brought its advocates the 1997 Nobel Peace Prize. Notably absent among the Oslo Convention's 108 signatories: a small contingent of military powers including China, India, Israel, Pakistan, Russia, and the US. Although Britain acceded to the Convention, the US, China, and Russia each possess at least one billion cluster munitions.

President Obama, who voted to limit the use of cluster munitions while in the Senate, could advocate for greater restrictions on cluster munitions and push the transition to "smart" explosives that will self-destruct. Accession is an unlikely short-term goal, but the U.S. and other military forces can independently update weapons technology to prevent post-conflict civilian casualties and collateral damage.

Southeast Asia is not alone in its struggle with landmines and UXOs. It is one of a growing number of regions experiencing the destructive consequences of modern ordnance design. The three-year civil war in Bosnia resulted in the placement of more than three million landmines. Multiple conflicts in Iraq over the 1980s and 1990s seeded the country with thousands of mines and UXOs, leaving as many as one million tons of explosives throughout the country. As many as ten million landmines still lie under Iraq's sands.

Original Piece...

Vietnam War Bombs Still Killing Children

2011-02-03T11:45:00.000-08:00

Yunnan–Vietnam border still haunted by land mines

2011-01-17T12:27:00.000-08:00

Yang Zhuasao, a villager disabled by a land mine

Unexploded land mines are a threat to the lives of rural residents of Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos, but few realize land mines are also a major danger near China's border with Vietnam.

Approximately 6,000 people have been injured by mines in Wenshan Prefecture in southeast Yunnan since large numbers of the explosive devices were first laid along the border during the 1979 Sino-Vietnamese War, according to a recent Kunming Information Hub report.

It is estimated that more than two million mines were laid near the border.

The most heavily affected villages tend to be home to members of the Miao ethnic group, many of whom have been living without one one or both legs for many years. Yang Zhuasao, a villager living near the border, has stepped on mines twice in his life, leaving him with painful shrapnel in his right leg and no left leg.

He now runs a store and receives 660 yuan (US$100) per month in government compensation.Government agencies offer reimbursement ranging from 360 to 5,160 yuan per month to victims of mines left over from China's war with Vietnam three decades ago. The government also helps victims get fitted with free prosthetic legs and find jobs.

The land border between Yunnan and Vietnam was finally completely demarcated in December of 2008, 29 years after the brief war and 18 years after China and Vietnam normalized relations.

Image: Kunming Information Hub

Jody Williams: A Realist Vision for World Peace

2011-01-10T21:55:00.000-08:00

Big progress seen in landmine ban, worries persist

2010-11-24T17:12:00.000-08:00

Wed, Nov 24 2010

By Robert Evans

GENEVA (Reuters) - Major advances in enforcing an international ban on landmines were made in 2009 as casualties fell sharply and Russia reported it was no longer deploying the weapon, campaigners said on Wednesday.

But they told a news conference that concerns remained over continued production by India, Pakistan and Myanmar, the lack of information from North Korea, and landmine use by insurgent groups in six countries.

"The record progress made in the past year towards eliminating antipersonnel mines shows that the (1997) Mine Ban Treaty is working," Mark Hiznay, chief editor of an annual report on the effect of the pact, told a news conference.

"We have stigmatised the weapon to such an extent that we have won the war against the weapon," said Steve Goose, another researcher on the report, issued by the Nobel prize-winning International Campaign to Ban Landmines (ICBL).

The report, "Landmine Monitor 2010", says that 156 countries have signed up to the pact -- which bans production, deployment, stockpiling and transfer of landmines and was negotiated during the 1990s under pressure from the ICBL.

Major powers -- the United States, China and Russia -- and 36 others stand aloof from the treaty which was negotiated outside the United Nations' framework. But the report says most of them are in effective compliance with its provisions.

RUSSIA REMOVED

Russia, which in every Monitor issued since 1999 was recorded as a mine user, was removed from the 2010 list after declaring that it had halted deployment, while China was contributing funds to demining programmes under the pact.

The United States, where the military are believed to want to retain the option on what campaigners say is an obsolete "Cold War weapon", is reviewing its policies on them and will attend a review meeting on the pact in Geneva next week.

Since World War Two ended in 1945, many tens of thousands of civilians are believed to have been killed or maimed by landmines aimed at military personnel in both regional and local conflicts, almost all in developing countries.

The weapon, usually deployed in rural areas and triggered by contact, survives long after fighting is over and is a common hazard for farmers and their children in countries like Vietnam, Cambodia, Afghanistan and Sri Lanka.

Last year, according to the report, 3,956 deaths and maimings of civilians were recorded around the world -- the lowest total since it was first published in 1999 and nearly 30 percent down on the 2008 total.

But the Monitor warns that these figures are approximate and only cover known incidents. Many occurring in remote areas of poor countries go unreported, it says.

(For full text of report, go to www.the-monitor.org/lm/2010)

(Editing by Jonathan Lynn; Editing by Ron Askew)

In Vietnam, cluster bombs still plague countryside At the present rate, UXO clearance will take 300 years.

2010-06-06T16:30:00.000-07:00

Published on GlobalPost (http://www.globalpost.com)
By Guest Writer

Created June 6, 2010 09:14

Byline: Daysha Eaton

Caption:

Le Van Thang, a victim of cluster bomb explosion, holds up a X-ray in his home in Vietnam's central Quang Tri province. He points to a corn kernel-shaped piece of metal between his ribs on the X-ray that he still carries with him. (Amanda Koster/GlobalPost)

KHE SANH, Vietnam — Swishing his metal detector across the red dirt of his backyard, Le Van Thang points to the spot where he buried two grenades.

He found the explosives about five years ago while plowing the family garden. He says he called authorities to take them away, but they refused. “The soldiers said two grenades weren’t enough to bother with,” Thang explains. “They said to call them back if I found more.”

The explosives have been sitting there under a tree, just a couple of yards from his back door, ever since.

Thang lives just outside Khe Sanh, in Vietnam’s Quang Tri province. His two-room concrete home sits on a jungle-covered hilltop about 15 miles from the former demilitarized zone (DMZ). Until 1975, the DMZ divided the communist north from the pro-Western south. It was the site of some of the fiercest fighting of the Vietnam War, and as a result, is littered with explosives.

Unfortunately, Thang’s situation is not uncommon. Thirty-five years after the end of the war, families across the central provinces live in fear of explosions that happen on a regular basis.

In early 2010 alone there were several blasts. Locals were burning a stump when a bomb rocked a schoolyard in Dong Ha, about 30 miles east of Khe Sanh, shaking walls and shattering windows. Luckily all 550 students were in class at the time of the blast and escaped injury.

About a week later, a man was seriously injured while weeding a coffee plantation beside the former U.S. Marine base outside Khe Sanh. Then, in February, just before the Vietnamese New Year, a 40-year-old man was killed while clearing weeds from his banana trees.

Many of the accidents involve unexploded cluster munitions, large weapons often deployed from the air that release dozens, sometimes hundreds, of smaller, baseball-sized “bomblets,” or “grenades.” They were widely used in the central provinces during the Vietnam War.

Cluster bombs blanket large swaths of land and have a high “dud” rate, meaning they don’t explode on contact and go on injuring and killing civilians long after wars officially end. Experts say the cluster bombs used in Vietnam are estimated to have a “dud” rate between 5 and 40 percent.

Three years ago, while digging for scrap metal, Thang came across a cluster bomb and carries the scars of that encounter with him today. Watch this video about Thang's experience:

Some countries are taking action to see that accidents like the one Thang experienced can be avoided in the future. The Convention on Cluster Munitions becomes binding international law Aug. 1. So far, 106 countries have signed the treaty, with Britain joining the list in May. However support has been slow to come from the world's biggest cluster bomb makers — Russia, China, Israel and the United States.

The U.S. hasn't used cluster bombs since the beginning of the Iraq War in 2003, but it has held out on signing the treaty and still has a large stockpile of the weapons. Stephen Goose, the Arms Division Director of Human Rights Watch said it’s crucial that the U.S. sign. "As one of the biggest users, producers, traders and stockpilers of cluster munitions, getting the U.S. on board is key,” Goose said. “The U.S. joining will greatly increase the international stigmatization of the weapon, and convince many of the other hold-outs to come on board.”

A 2009 study by the Vietnamese Ministry of Defense’s Technology Center for Bomb and Mine Disposal and the Vietnam Veterans of America Foundation notes that about 7,000 people have been injured or killed by explosives left from the Vietnam War era in Quang Tri Province alone.

The report also highlights a correlation between poverty and the impact of landmines and unexploded ordnance (UXO). “[The presence of UXO] creates a burden of fear and concern among people living in contaminated communities,” the report states, which hinders construction of housing, expansion of infrastructure, resettlement initiatives and other development activities.

Vietnam’s shift from a centrally planned economy to a market-driven economy in the mid-'90s raised the annual household income from $220 per year to more than $1,000 in 2009. Even during the global economic downturn, Vietnam’s economy is one of the fastest growing in Southeast Asia, at more than 5 percent. But the countryside, where Thang lives, remains mired in poverty.

Every time a new building or road is constructed or a new field is plowed, a survey has to be completed to ensure there are no explosives. That takes time and money. Surveys are currently being provided by several NGOs, but the process is slow.

NGO leaders say they are eagerly awaiting a national mine policy from the Vietnamese government, which they hope will speed things up. Critics also note that Vietnam might attract more international funding for mine removal if it signed on to the international treaties prohibiting the use of landmines and cluster munitions.

After a reporter visited Thang’s house, an NGO removed the explosives from his land — a small step toward in the daunting task of cleaning up the country. Demining efforts are underway in Vietnam, but experts say at the rate they're going, it will take at least 300 years to finish the job.

Strategic plan to tackle UXO problem

2010-04-30T16:56:00.000-07:00

Caption: 14-year-old Hoang Thi Thien had her right eye, chest, abdomen, and legs injured after a war-time bomb exploded in Quang Tri in 2007

Prime Minister Nguyen Tan Dung has approved a plan to reduce the consequences of war-era unexploded ordnance (UXO) that has killed some 40,000 Vietnamese since the Vietnam War ended in April 1975.

The plan, comprised of six projects to be carried out through 2025, aims to remove UXO nationwide and improve the lives of UXO victims, according to a statement posted on the government website on April 23.

It also aims to mobilize “local forces” as well as call for international donors to join programs to reduce the impact of UXO, it said.

Surveys will be conducted in each of the nation’s 63 cities and provinces by 2013 to map the locations of UXO and propose a plan for the control. The initiative aims to remove all the explosives on around 1.3 million hectares, equal to 20 percent of the estimated UXO zones nationwide, by 2025.

The Ministry of Defense will coordinate with the Ministry of Science and Technology to draft the technical standards for UXO removal by next year, according to the statement.

The plan will also provide experts with additional training as well as equipment and technologies.

A data center will be set up to record UXO removals and related information while activities will also be implemented to improve people’s awareness of UXO to avoid further damages.

Chuck Searcy, country representative for the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund, said the plan is “a major step forward for Vietnam, clearly identifying the issue of landmines and unexploded ordnance as a national priority.”

“It brings greater commitment and attention to solving the problem, and it opens the door to stronger financial and technical support from other nations and international donors,” he told Thanh Nien Weekly.

POSTWAR KILLERS

The leftover bombs and mines used by the Americans in the Vietnam War have left fallow some 4,359 square kilometers of once-fertile soil, or 5.43 percent of the country’s total arable land, the Ministry of Defense said in 2003.

An August 2006 report by Clear Path International, an organization working to assist civilian victims of war, estimated that some 800,000 tons of unexploded ordnance (UXO) and mines were still present in nearly 7 million hectares of land, or about 20 percent of Vietnam.

The Technology Center for Bomb and Mine Disposal (BOMICEN) at the Ministry of Defense estimated in 2003 that UXO and landmines killed 1,110 people and injured 1,882 injured every year “on average.”

Kim Phuc, girl in iconic Vietnam War photo, speaks of love and forgiveness

2010-03-24T22:45:00.000-07:00

Monday, February 22, 2010

By Marty Duren

"How many of you have seen my picture?

Photo: Nick Ut/AP

To see her picture once is to have seen it a thousand times; the image is just as sobering today as it was in June of 1972 when it appeared in newspapers around the globe. The children fleeing the fire of napalm bombs in South Vietnam, running down the road from their village and, in the middle, a nine year old girl, completely naked, running, screaming, burning.

The photo, rated by some as the photo of the 20th century, was taken by Associated Press photographer Nick Ut. It won a Pulitzer Prize and at once became the iconic image of the Vietnam War. Sunday, February 21, Kim Phuc, “the girl in the picture,” stood three times at the North Avenue Presbyterian Church in Atlanta and told her story of pain and redemption.

Kim narrated her enjoyable life as a child with a loving family, a mother who operated a well-known restaurant in the village of Trang Bang and her love of school. Life changed when soldiers began descending on their village, knocking on doors and carrying out inspections.

June 8, 1972, the North Vietnamese were entrenched outside of Kim’s village (I believe to the north) when an air-strike, coordinated by the American Air Force, was called in. The adults and some of the children in the village had taken refuge in a nearby pagoda awaiting the end of the bombing. For fear of all the children being in the same place, Kim, an aunt and her grandmother with others of her young relatives were sent out, walking through a cemetery and along a road.

Video shot by a British film crew shows a low flying aircraft, on the wrong side of the village, dispensing four napalm bombs, which upon landing, created a wall of fire which engulfed Kim and her fleeing family. The British journalist recounted in a documentary about Kim’s life that one young child was carried by them with what appeared to be tattered clothing hanging from his body.

It was his skin.

One young cousin was killed immediately while another died within days; Kim’s clothes were burned from her body and her upper left arm was severely burned. She later learned that napalm burns at greater than 800 degrees Celsius. Napalm also burns beneath the skin so the water poured on her by assisting soldiers increased her pain so drastically that she passed out. She was taken to the hospital by Nick Ut the photographer who had moments before snapped her photo.

She endured 17 surgeries over the years the last one being in 1984. She ultimately married and defected to Canada with her new husband in the midst of a re-fueling stop in Newfoundland on their honeymoon. They, their two sons and her parents now call Toronto home.

Kim Phuc listens to her introduction at North Avenue Presbyterian Church. Photo: Marty Duren

Phuc recounted a number of things that she has learned through her trials: growing through pain, the importance of love (especially that of family and friends), that freedom is to be valued and that, as she learned the hard way, life is tough.

Phuc also shared how she grew to forgive those who had caused her so much pain. After becoming a Christian in 1982 she noted, “My situation did not change one bit, but my heart was filled with joy!” Her life verse became Psalm 118:17, “I shall not die, but live, and recount the deeds of the Lord.”

After reading Luke 6:27, 28 (“But I say to you who hear, Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who abuse you.”) she added all the people who had caused her pain to her prayer list. When her church in Saigon was closed by the communist government, she read her Bible and prayed daily.

Phuc,who speaks so softly one could not hope to hear her without a mic even from just a few feet away, still speaks with vitality, humor and purpose.

Kim Phuc is now an advocate for child victims of war, but had to reconcile her own life before being able to intercede for others. As she put it, “Before we can give hope we have to learn to forgive.”

Desperately Seeking Landmines

2010-03-10T14:41:00.000-08:00

By Vince Beiser
Link to Original Story>

On his knees in a field of freshly cropped weeds, protected by a Plexiglas visor and a bulletproof smock, Mohammed Inazario-Mendes digs carefully in sun-baked dirt. He loosens a little with a long-handled steel spoon, then scoops it out with his hands. Then he does it again. Inch by inch, he painstakingly advances a little trench toward the spot a foot away marked with three red sticks.

Inazario-Mendes has good reason to work slowly. Just this morning, two landmines were unearthed only yards from where he’s digging. His job is to find out if the object that triggered his metal detector — the thing underneath those sticks — is another one.

A row of red-tipped wooden stakes marches away to either side, delineating the bounds of this minefield in the lush central highlands of the southern African nation of Angola. Residents of the nearby town of Monte Belo once used this area to pasture their goats and cattle. But during Angola’s decades-long civil war, government forces set up a military position here and surrounded it with mines. When the war ended, the troops went home but left the mines behind — somewhere. No one knows exactly how many there are or where they’re buried. In the last couple of years, one incautious person and two unlucky animals straying into the area have had limbs blown off.

Inazario-Mendes is one of 14 local men working to clear the Monte Belo minefield under the auspices of the HALO Trust, a British nonprofit that removes the lethal leftovers of war — from mines to unexploded ammunition — around the world. The pay isn’t great, but he likes the work. “I’m never scared,” he says. “You just have to concentrate.”

The careful concentration required, however, makes for very slow results. It has taken Inazario-Mendes and his team almost nine months to clear an area barely larger than three soccer fields. Though HALO has been active in Angola for 15 years and employs some 1,100 deminers, it estimates there are still as many as 600,000 mines left there. At this rate, it will take 10 years to clear them all.

Every year, some 5,000 Angolans are killed or injured by buried explosives left over from the war that ended eight years ago. Mines also put thousands of square kilometers of land off limits, a major issue in a country where most people survive by subsistence agriculture. And Angola is just one of more than 70 countries plagued with mines.

So it’s little wonder that from Japan to Croatia, governments, nongovernmental organizations and businesses are scrambling to make demining more efficient. Years of research and tens of millions of dollars have been poured into the effort, yielding innovative systems that use everything from the highest technology to the lowliest animals. Seeming breakthroughs have been touted at international conferences and in breathless news reports for years.

So why is Mohammed Inazario-Mendes still on his knees with a metal detector and a steel spoon?

People have been killing each other with buried explosives since at least 1277, when the Chinese bedeviled invading Mongols with bombs hidden in the ground, according to military historian William C. Schneck. In Europe, armies of that era dug tunnels under enemy fortifications to make them collapse. Florentine soldiers attacking the city of Pisa in 1403 added the wrinkle of filling one of these “mines,” as they became known, with explosive black powder.

Crude hidden bombs triggered by tripwires or long fuses began appearing on European battlefields in the 1500s. The weapons grew progressively more lethal as technology improved. Confederate soldiers planted thousands of what they called “land torpedoes” in the American Civil War, and several countries introduced poison gas mines in World War I. But the weapons really came into vogue in World War II; more than 300 million mines — from large anti-tank devices to smaller anti-personnel explosives — were sown by all sides in that conflict. “They have been an important facet of almost every conflict since,” Schneck wrote in a monograph published in Engineer Bulletin.

In the Second World War, armies generally mapped where they planted their mines, making it easier to find them after the fighting finished. In the 1960s, however, the world lost track. American forces in Vietnam pioneered the use of “scatterables” — mines that could be deployed en masse from airplanes and helicopters. Meanwhile, ever-cheaper landmines — often supplied by the U.S. or Soviet Union to their Cold War proxies — became a weapon of choice in conflicts all over the decolonizing Third World. Keeping detailed records wasn’t exactly high on the guerrillas’ priority list.

The end of the Cold War opened the way for the United Nations and humanitarian groups to finally start clearing out some of those buried explosives. The drive against landmines made headlines as celebrities, including Princess Diana, took up the cause. The campaign achieved an astonishing success in 1997 when 122 nations signed a treaty pledging to stop using, producing and distributing anti-personnel mines. (The United States has not signed the treaty but has largely stopped making landmines.) According to the International Campaign to Ban Landmines, as of 2008, only Russia, Myanmar and non-state armed groups in seven countries were still planting anti-personnel mines.

That’s the good news. The bad news is that there are millions of explosives still hidden in the fields, forests and roads of dozens of countries.

Putting mine in the ground is about as easy as it gets. “You dig a hole and stick it in, pull the pin and walk away,” says Richard Grindle, HALO’s Angola director, a slim former British Army officer. Getting one out of the ground, however, is dangerous, expensive and astonishingly time-consuming.

In the Monte Belo minefield, as in many others, dense vegetation has grown up in the years since the war ended. Before demining can even begin, that foliage has to be cleared, one yard-wide strip at a time — slowly, carefully and using extra-long tools. The deminers then move in, sweeping handheld metal detectors over the ground. (In some places where money is short and metal detectors are unavailable, deminers resort to literally poking at the ground with a metal stick.) Whenever the detector beeps, the deminer drops a red stone or chip to mark the spot. Each one of those markers then has to be carefully excavated by someone like Inazario-Mendes. Digging up to a landmine from the side is generally safe, but it takes time. And much more often than not, the thing that triggered the metal detector turns out to have been a bullet casing, bottle cap or piece of bric-a-brac. If an actual mine is found, it has to be defused by an expert or exploded after everyone has vacated the area.

The result of this painstaking process: Land gets cleared thoroughly, but at a snail’s pace.

The governments of the U.S., Canada, Japan and the European Union have spent tens of millions of dollars trying to speed things up, supporting experiments with a vast range of technologies and devices. A catalog produced by the Geneva International Center for Humanitarian Demining attempts to list them all; it runs to 226 pages.

There are gadgets that can sniff out minute amounts of explosive vapor or microscopic particulates that waft up from buried mines. There are devices that bombard the ground with neutrons, which interact with explosives to emit specific types of traceable radiation. Other systems use acoustic waves generated by powerful loudspeakers to rattle the mines, generating a distinct vibration that can be picked up with laser sensors or microphones. A similar trick can be performed with seismic waves created by machines that literally shake the ground. Satellites and aircraft beaming down infrared radiation can spot thermal contrasts between mines and the soil they sit in. Other airborne sensors can spot a unique anomaly in light emitted by soil above a mine. Closer to the problem, there is the Air-Spade, which uses compressed air at supersonic velocities to blow the soil off a buried mine.

It’s all very exciting stuff — at least in the laboratory. So far, though, none of it really works. That is, it doesn’t work reliably enough, or only works under certain conditions, or is so expensive it doesn’t matter whether it works or not.

Take the Air-Spade. “It requires a compressor and lots of gear, and it blows dirt all over the place — including the little bit of metal you were looking for,” Grindle says.

Radiation-emitting detectors need radioactive materials for power — “and no one wants to deploy that kind of stuff in a war zone,” says Andy Smith, another British Army vet who works with demining groups around the world. “You could give someone the ability to make a dirty bomb.”

Many of the high-tech detection systems are flummoxed by ground that is too wet, too dry or too rocky. Training the generally poorly educated local people to use complicated new machinery can also be a major hurdle. And maintenance is always an issue. “There’s a lot of gee-whiz stuff being built,” says Bill Reid, a former U.S. Army Special Forces soldier who now works with Ronco Consulting Group, a commercial demining outfit. “But if you’re in the middle of Eritrea and something breaks, you’re stuck. And a lot of this gee-whiz stuff is easy to break.”

Where machines fall short, some researchers are looking to animals. APOPO, a joint Belgian/Tanzanian organization, is training giant rats to smell TNT and other chemicals that go boom. More than 30 of the immodestly titled “HeroRATS” are on the job in Mozambique. Researchers at the University of Montana are training — yes, training — honeybees to seek out mines. The insects can sense explosives and be rewarded with food for finding them. Oak Ridge National Laboratory researchers at one point were thinking even smaller: They experimented with a strain of sprayable bacteria that turns fluorescent in the presence of TNT.

A HeroRAT at work in Mozambique. (Courtesy of www.herorat.org)

Deminers on the ground, though, are unimpressed. “Mine-detecting rats are very media-sexy, and they attracted a lot of money, but they’re useless,” Smith says. Their legs are too small to walk regular patterns in overgrown fields, so vegetation must be trimmed, and the rats attached to a string to literally keep them in line. “You need to spend so much time clearing space, you’re better off doing it manually,” Smith says. The fluorescing bacteria also proved a hard sell. “There are huge problems getting people to accept the idea that you’re going to spray microbes over their land,” says Noel Mulliner, technical coordinator for the United Nations Mine Action Service.

“There are hundreds of ways you can possibly detect mines,” Mulliner says. “But very few survive the development course and reach the finish line where they’re practical.”

Those very few, however, have begun making a difference in recent years. The use of dogs has increased as training methods have improved. Explosive-sniffing canines are currently used in about a dozen countries. “They can work 15 to 20 times the speed of a deminer with a detector,” says Reid, whose company uses dogs to help clear minefields in Afghanistan and elsewhere. But dogs have their limitations, too. A pooch trained in, say, the Jordanian desert won’t necessarily work well in the jungles of Nicaragua.

Back on the gadget side, there is a growing catalogue of unsubtle machines that don’t bother finding mines — they just destroy them. These “mechanical deminers” — some human-operated, some remote-controlled — are heavily armored to withstand even direct blasts. Among the most effective are “flails,” rotating drums fitted with hammers or chains that are mounted on the front of an armored vehicle and batter the ground, deliberately triggering mines. Other machines gouge up the soil onto a screen that sifts out the ordnance or comb through the ground with a powerful rotating tiller that pushes the mines to one side where they can be destroyed.

A medium-sized flail, though, costs as much as $700,000. Worse, these machines can toss mines by accident, or simply miss them. That makes them good enough for the military mine clearance they were developed for. “For the military, it’s about, ‘Can we get through this field with an acceptably low risk of stepping on a mine?’” Grindle says. “That might mean it’s 95 percent, even 99 percent clear. But for civilians to use the land, it’s got to be 100 percent.”

For that level of thoroughness, there’s still no substitute for a human being with a handheld detector. So it’s perhaps not surprising that the most significant advances in demining technology have been improvements in the detectors themselves. Metal detectors have gained the ability to spot a mine even in soil with a high iron content, which used to baffle them. So-called plastic mines, which contain almost no metal, used to be essentially invisible, but up-to-date detectors can now spot their tiny metal triggers.

Perhaps the most promising new technology to reach the field is ground-penetrating radar. A GPR unit shoots an electromagnetic wave into the ground that reflects off buried objects, giving important information on an object’s size, form and electromagnetic properties. In short, ground-penetrating radar can tell the difference between a hubcap and a landmine — a distinction that can speed up a deminer’s work tremendously. HALO Trust Director Guy Willoughby has called it “the main breakthrough in mine clearance since 1940.”

Developed by the U.S. military at a cost of $73 million, GPR has only recently been adopted by humanitarian demining groups. HALO and other organizations are using just 100-odd of the units worldwide.

HALO is also trying out a system called the Mine Stalker — a remote-controlled, six-wheeled vehicle equipped with ground penetrating radar, a global positioning system and digital mapping software. This combination allows the unit to spot buried mines and mark the location for defusing teams. Researchers in Japan and Europe are working on other GPR-based systems.

But there’s a catch, of course: the price tag. The handheld GPR systems HALO is using in Angola cost $15,000 each. “If there’s a large amount of clutter, GPR is a huge advantage,” Mulliner says. “But if there are low numbers of mines and little clutter, it’s a waste of money. We haven’t done enough testing to say where the cutoff is — nor can we know the amount of clutter until the field is cleared.”

That points up what’s most needed to speed up demining: cold cash. International funding for demining dropped by nearly 10 percent from 2006 to 2007. Funding levels have since recovered, but money remains tight. Demining operations in Lebanon have been cut by two-thirds thanks to recession-induced cash shortfalls. Jim Megill, executive director of CAMEO, a small Canadian nonprofit demining group that works mainly in Sudan, had to close the group’s office last summer and now runs it from his Ontario home. “It’s gotten harder and harder to raise funds,” he says.

So while the demining groups hustle for money and the inventors tinker, Mohammed Inazario-Mendes will keep on digging up mines by hand. The work may be frustrating and dangerous — but at least he has some job security.

Van Kieu family faces tragic Tet as cluster bomb explosion kills father of six

2010-02-12T14:43:00.000-08:00

Dakrong, Quang Tri (12 Feb 2010)- There will be no Tet celebrations to welcome the Lunar New Year for Ho Van Nguyen’s family this year. A cluster bomb explosion killed Nguyen on Friday morning, Feb. 12, as he was cutting weeds around his banana trees and preparing for the Tet holiday which began in Vietnam on Saturday.

The accident occurred in Mai Lanh Village, Mo O Commune of Dakrong District, which is in the western part of Quang Tri Province, along the former wartime DMZ.

The 40-year-old father of six daughters left home after breakfast on Friday morning. His wife said Nguyen took with him his favorite farming tool, a bush-hook. About 10:30 a.m. there was an explosion from the direction of his family’s hillside slash-and-burnt farm plot along the Dakrong River. It is believed that Nguyen hit a cluster munition while clearing weeds from around his banana trees, using the bush-hook. The area where he was working is a large cultivation site for over half of the 1800 Van Kieu minority people who reside in Krong Klang Townlet. Bananas, cassava, and maize are the major sources of income for local residents there.

Mr. Ho Van Hoi, Nguyen’s uncle, heard the explosion and was the first to rush to the accident scene. When he arrived, he saw his nephew lying lifeless on the ground. Both his hands were severed, his eyes were badly damaged, and the skin was scorched from the chest up to the face of the victim. Click here: Project RENEW Photo storage to see the photos of this tragic accident.

On the eve of Tet, Nguyen’s tragic death suddenly thrusts his family into extreme difficulties. His wife and six daughters, the youngest only three years old, are facing shock and grief, and an uncertain future. The family’s emotional tragedy is compounded by the loss of their only breadwinner, who also supported his aging parents.

“I married twice but have only that son,” lamented Nguyen’s father, Mr. Ho Van Mong, who was a guerrilla fighter during the Vietnam war. “How can I live on without him?”

News of the accident immediately was passed on by Project RENEW staff to Clear Path International (CPI) and PeaceTrees Vietnam (PTVN), two NGO projects which provide direct emergency support to UXO accident victims and their families in Quang Tri Province. PTVN also fields an explosive ordnance disposal team (EOD team) in Dakrong District which was launched in September 2009.

“Our team has destroyed thousands of UXO since our deployment in Dakrong,” said Pham Thi Hoang Ha, PTVN In-Country Project Manager. “However, there are still a lot of UXO that need to be removed.”

According to a Landmine Impact Survey conducted by BOMICEN/VVAF, Dakrong District has the highest level of UXO contamination anywhere in the country: 97% of its land area is confirmed to be contaminated by explosive ordnance.

President of the local Red Cross Association, Ms. Le Thi Lam Hoa, said the area where the accident occurred, Mai Lanh Village, had been reclaimed from virgin land in 1982 for resettling ethnic minority families who were dislocated by the war. “Another accident in that area killed two men in 1985,” said Ms. Hoa. The victim’s father said the area was heavily bombed during wartime, and he had witnessed a large number of cluster bomb dispensers falling to the earth which failed to function.

Since the war ended in 1975, more than a third of the 105,000 casualties in Vietnam have been caused by cluster munitions, called “bombies” or guava bombs by the local ethnic minority people.

VVMF FOUNDER AND PRESIDENT JAN SCRUGGS REFLECTS ON THE PASSING OF REP. JOHN MURTHA (D-Pa.)

2010-02-08T16:01:00.000-08:00

Congressman John Murtha, a Vietnam veteran, died today at age 77. Jan Scruggs remembers the man who was always a staunch supporter of VVMF, especially its overseas humanitarian program, Project RENEW:

"Rep. John Murtha (D-Pa.) was a long-time friend and supporter of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund (VVMF). Although he had already served three years with the U.S. Marine Corps and was in the Marine Corps Reserves by the time the United States became involved in Vietnam, Murtha returned to active duty and volunteered for service there in 1966-67. Later, he became the first combat veteran from that war to be elected to Congress.

"Those experiences stayed with him, and he remained dedicated to honoring and remembering those who served. When VVMF unveiled the first panel of The Wall in the summer of 1982, Murtha was one of the distinguished guest speakers. Later, he spoke movingly at The Wall on Veterans Day 2004. Murtha was an active supporter of VVMF’s international humanitarian program, Project RENEW, which removes explosive remnants of war and provides assistance to ERW victims and their families in Vietnam. Just a few months before he died, Murtha helped VVMF get an earmark in the most recent Defense Department funding bill that will contribute $1 million to assist in the important work of Project RENEW.

"Murtha was a man who loved his country and spent his life in its service. Today, the United States lost a patriot."

Explosion wounds four ethnic minority men near former U.S. Marine base at Khe Sanh

2010-02-07T14:44:00.000-08:00

Ho Van Chung after emergency trauma care at the Quang Tri Hospital

Huong Hoa, Quang Tri, February 07, 2010: A Sunday afternoon explosion of old wartime ordnance seriously wounded four Van Kieu men while they were weeding at a coffee plantation near the former U.S. Marine based at Khe Sanh.

The accident occurred in Tram Village, Huong Tan Commune of Huong Hoa District, where the Van Kieu and Paco ethnic minorities make up most of the local population along the western border area of Quang Tri Province.

The four victims, Ho Van Chung, Ho Van Muong, Ho Van Van and Ho Kham Di, are Van Kieu men in their middle and late twenties. After the accident they were taken to Huong Tan Health Station for first aid treatment then transferred to hospital at Khe Sanh. With minor injuries to his legs, Ho Kham Di was kept there for further treatment, but his three cousins were transported to Quang Tri General Hospital for treatment of more serious wounds.

Chung, born in 1983, suffered most of the blast from the explosion. “My hoe hit the bomb while I was removing weeds from around a coffee tree,” Chung said. “My cousins were all behind me. I don’t know what the ordnance was.”

Chung said he was in severe pain because all four of his limbs were badly injured. The explosion severed his right hand’s thumb and index finger. Open wounds could be seen on his left thigh and shin, and his right foot was badly injured.

Muong and Van did not lose much blood but tiny, sharp shrapnel went through their abdomens which caused terrible pain. The physician said both of these men would need X-rays before a decision could be made if surgery was needed to remove the shrapnel. Sometimes, the doctor said, it’s safer for a patient to live on with metal fragments in the body than to risk trying to remove the shrapnel.

Huong Tan Commune is in proximity with Ta Con Airstrip, the Vietnamese name for the area known by the U.S. military as Khe Sanh Combat Base, an outpost of the U.S. Marines operating in South Vietnam during Vietnam war. In October 2008, also in Tram Village, an explosion of old wartime ordnance detonated in the kitchen of a Van Kieu family. The explosion killed a four-year-old son and injured the mother and her three-year-old daughter.

"Explosion wounds four ethnic minority men near former U.S. Marine base at Khe Sanh." PROJECT RENEW | Restoring the Environment and Neutralizing the Effects of the War . http://www.landmines.org.vn/news/2010_02_07_Acci.html (accessed February 7, 2010).

A journey of reconciliation to Vietnam draws U.S. veterans

2010-01-30T11:30:00.000-08:00

By Julie Sullivan, The Oregonian

January 30, 2010, 1:56AM

Somewhere, in the silence after death on the Mekong Delta, he saw the medals.

Stamped in gold, one showed a Viet Cong soldier attacking a U.S. tank and the words "Heroes Who Destroy Mechanized Equipment."

The Green Beret's hand closed around the medals in the stilled soldier's rucksack. He put the medals in his pocket.

He carried them home.

Forty years later, his brother e-mailed: Want to go back to Vietnam?

His brother reported that Jan Scruggs, the combat vet behind the Vietnam Veterans Memorial -- the Wall -- was leading a delegation of veterans back in January. Among them: a former U.S. drug czar, a Naval War College professor and the owner of the San Antonio Spurs.

The brothers conferred. Both had fought in Vietnam. Both figured someday they'd return. They could take their dad, one of the last Americans to leave in 1975 after working as a tax adviser to the South Vietnamese. Dad was turning 90. The Green Beret hung up the phone and walked through his Lake Oswego home, past his Bronze Star for Valor and framed commendations, to another box, another soldier's medals.

He was in.

For 20 years, there was almost no going back to the battleground where more than 3 million Americans served and more than 58,000 died, along with 3 million Vietnamese and 1.5 million Cambodians and Laotians. Diplomatic relations between the countries had been severed, but the psychic wound of the unpopular war created its own gap. One Marine, paralyzed during the fighting, who managed to visit Vietnam in the early 1980s came home to death threats. Still, veterans persisted.

"It was U.S. servicemen who went back in small numbers that led to the whole movement of reconciliation, not the politicians, not the statesmen, but the men who fought the war," journalist and author David Lamb said last week.

After President Bill Clinton lifted the trade embargo in 1994 and restored relations a year later, Americans began returning. Among them was Scruggs, the man responsible for the most searing and healing edifice of the war -- the Wall.

As a soldier, Scruggs had lost 12 friends in a single explosion in Vietnam and lived with the image of them dying. But as the years passed, and after he earned a master's degree in counseling, he found he couldn't remember their names. He became convinced that veterans, and the nation, needed a way to remember in order to heal.

Scruggs sold some land he inherited for $2,800 and began raising private money for a memorial. Eight million dollars and three years later, the Wall was dedicated in 1982.

Today, the black granite panels are the most visited monument in Washington, D.C., and Scruggs' Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund is raising money for Part II -- an underground education center between the Lincoln Memorial and the Wall. The center will house the 100,000 artifacts left at the monument and photographs of each American killed.

On a return trip to Vietnam in 1999, Scruggs said he realized healing was needed there, too. He launched a program to disarm the 350,000 tons of unexploded landmines and other ordinance that remain. Project Renew funded a bomb squad, education programs and micro-loans for victims in the most heavily mined province. In December, Congress approved a $1 million federal grant to help.

To deliver news of the unprecedented award, Scruggs assembled 14 combat veterans, their families and Gold Star families who'd lost a husband or brother in Vietnam. Among them were Spurs owner Peter Holt, retired four-star Gen. Barry McCaffrey, and the Whitehouses, including Tom Whitehouse, the former Green Beret who lives in Lake Oswego.

To read more

Click here to a story by Tom Whitehouse on his journey to Vietnam

Tom's dad, George Washington Whitehouse, was an Internal Revenue Service agent assigned to advise the Republic of Vietnam, accompanied by his late wife, Doris. At 89, the senior Whitehouse still files 300 tax returns a year for the poor and elderly near his home in Emmaus, Pa.

Tom's older brother George Whitehouse, 62, was the founder and senior vice president of a payroll company in Kensington, Md., and a longtime supporter of the Wall. George served as an artilleryman with the unit that fired the last U.S. combat round on Aug 10, 1972.

The Whitehouses had gone to the Wall as a family the first time in the 1980s, and regularly returned. They'd seen the letters, candles and flowers. They'd stood in silence, they'd thought about the stories.

That's where Tom Whitehouse, 61, began to think the medals he carried home weren't trophies.

They told a soldier's story. A story that didn't belong to him.

View full sizeRandy L. Rasmussen/The OregonianTom Whitehouse, of Lake Oswego, carried these medals back to Vietnam.

Tom, the younger Whitehouse, reached Vietnam first. Not pro-war, not anti-war, just a second son, a "classic underachiever," he called himself, drifting through his freshman year at Penn State. When he dropped out and faced the inevitable draft, he volunteered for the Army's Special Forces, the Green Berets.

He landed with the 5th Special Forces Group around New Year's Day 1970 at an outpost on the Cambodian border near the vast wetland known as the Plain of Reeds. There, his 12-man team recruited, trained, armed and led Cambodian irregulars in a running battle with the North Vietnamese. Working in pairs, or often alone, the Green Berets fought as the Cambodian guerrillas they led did, without helmets or flak jackets, conducting long-range patrols and ambushes to stop and kill enemies crossing the border. On his first reconnaissance flight, anti-aircraft fire blasted the M-16 between his feet in half. On his first patrol, he was the lone American. At 21, he was almost always the senior person on the ground.

Calm by nature, Whitehouse was able to compartmentalize much of what happened, a response that served him in the year ahead. News accounts and Army documents show that beginning in February, the tiny force faced an unprecedented push by the North Vietnamese into the Mekong Delta. On Feb. 7, his radio operator and his sergeant were wounded in a heavy firefight. According to the Army's account:

"Lt. Whitehouse repeatedly exposed himself to the heavy enemy fire to reassure his troops, to guide their maneuvers and direct effective counter-fire. He constantly moved through open areas to aid the wounded and led assaults on enemy positions. During one action he personally destroyed three fighting positions and killed the soldiers who occupied them. Despite the tremendous fire, Lt. Whitehouse remained cool and his sound tactical decisions allowed the friendly units to defeat a larger NVA unit."

After four days of heavy fighting, Whitehouse's forces helped disrupt the push toward Saigon, leaving more than 200 enemy troops dead.

On March 6, Willie Stephens and Walter Foote, died, too. Robert Henderson, and Whitehouse's favorite interpreter Lat, died June 15. In all, two thirds of those in Whitehouse's unit were killed or wounded during their yearlong tour. Whitehouse identified bodies and prepared them for transport. He stayed with the interpreter's body and his widow, all night. He wrote letters to families. During his last week in Vietnam, he was ordered to lead a convoy into Cambodia, where he became convinced he would die as well.

He did not. He left Vietnam at 22, a captain in the Green Berets. He volunteered to go back, but there were too many West Point graduates in line. So he went to survival school, where he withstood water torture and other training to prepare him for being taken prisoner of war. He became an expert on Pakistan. But as the Army began to downsize, he realized he could not advance without a college diploma and completed his service.

He went back to the life he envisioned before the war. Married the girl next door. Finished his degree at Penn State. He earned a law degree at the University of Miami. Then his attempt at normalcy unraveled.

He divorced and drifted west to a friend's couch in Portland in 1978. He started driving as a dispatch messenger at The Oregonian. He married Marilyn Pacheco in advertising. In 1991, he was named director of human resources. The couple raised their daughter, Dawn, in Lake Oswego. They became grandparents of two boys. He took up golf.

Few knew that Whitehouse had ever served as a Green Beret or that his dearest friend at the paper also served in Special Forces -- for South Vietnam. Decades after the war, Whitehouse's beloved godchildren were Vietnamese.

But a return to Vietnam offered a chance to further reconcile what had happened.

The timing was terrible: Newspapers are in an unprecedented economic decline, and The Oregonian is in a transition. Whitehouse's three closest colleagues -- the publisher, the president of the company and the editor -- had just retired. The newspaper faces a reorganization and layoffs. Whitehouse said he could not abandon the staff at such a time, even for 10 days. He hadn't slept decently in months.

But Scruggs' delegation was meeting with North Vietnamese veterans. Whitehouse could finally return what he had taken. Medals were an important morale booster for enemy soldiers a long way from home. Medal expert Edward Emering said the Vietnamese even had a slogan: "Born in the North to die in the South." And it had been standard practice to rifle through pockets of the enemy or take insignia for intelligence.

Whitehouse hadn't kept a single picture of himself from Vietnam. But he kept the medals. He moved them across the country, protected in a cloth-lined box. He never spoke of the February day he took them, the day he earned the Bronze Star for Valor, the day his sergeant, shot through the sciatic nerve, lay screaming and the radio operator bleeding, and the dry grass exploding like the devil's prairie fire across the Plain of Reeds.

The Whitehouse men landed with the delegation in Hanoi Jan. 11. It was "surreal" and deeply unsettling, they said later, to enter the enemy capital, see the red flag with its yellow star and walk through the "Hanoi Hilton," now a museum. The French had used the infamous prison to torture Vietnamese prisoners before the North Vietnamese used it to torture the American prisoners of war. "You got the idea they learned all that from the French," George Whitehouse recalled thinking. The delegates saw propaganda posters of U.S. soldiers playing ping pong and John McCain's flight suit, under glass.

They saw the lake where McCain's plane crashed, met with the U.S. military team still working to account for missing Americans and toured Ho Chi Minh's mausoleum. Finally, late on the second day, the American veterans reached the meeting with North Vietnamese military officers -- to have tea, Scruggs said, with the very men they'd faced over loaded rifles.

Until that morning, Whitehouse had no idea whether he would speak, jotting down a few words at breakfast. As the event ended, he spoke.

"I served in combat with the U.S. Army and when I returned to the U.S., I took some medals with me. As a young man I thought of these as trophies. As an older and hopefully much wiser man, I know they represent a person, they represent a soldier, one who performed with valor as many in this room did also. As such they should be returned with the appropriate honor and respect. This is not about governments. This is not about politics. It is about the mutual respect of soldiers. As a new friend wisely told me, 'to heal you must first forgive.' In that spirit, may we veterans lead the way to a new era of cooperation and peace."

Whitehouse then presented his small case holding the two decorations to Lt. Gen. Tran Hanh.

"The room was spellbound," delegate Judy Campbell wrote afterward.

"When it sunk it what Tom had said, the general removed a handkerchief from his pocket to dry his tears."

Journalist David Lamb, who wrote a book on returning to Vietnam, said the experience is "absolutely cathartic. You could throw away half the medication at the VA hospitals if the soldiers and Marines would go back. There is absolutely nobody who is not changed by it."

Dr. Jim Sardo, a Portland Veterans Affairs psychologist, said that the desire to return to Vietnam is both common and unusual, in therapeutic terms.

"It's often more a spiritual wound, or existential piece that goes beyond psychotherapy," Sardo says. "Most veterans left before the war was over, so for them, the war is ongoing. When they get to Vietnam, they can see the war is over. It's clearly over."

The country the Whitehouses returned to is still communist, but also friendly, stable and rapidly modernizing, with schools of scooters jamming the streets. The airfield where George had spent three days firing howitzers in 1972 is now a driving school. The R & R stretch at China Beach is a five-star hotel with $2 million vacation villas next door. George could see a casino and a Greg Norman golf course under construction. The mountaintop where he used his math skills to aim artillery is covered with green.

But remnants of war remain. Days before the delegates arrived, a farmer in Quang Tri Province near the Demilitarized Zone found a grenade and two cluster bombs near his home. The delegation had a ceremony in which they detonated the bombs with the help of Project Renews disposal team. Delegates also dedicated a school built by U.S. veterans. Vets have also built a library, community center and a baseball field there.

For information on Project Renew, the program to disarm unexploded ordnance in Vietnam, or the Education Center at The Wall, contact the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund at 202-393-0090 or www.vvmf.org.

Sardo, the psychologist, said such steps are a powerful path to health.

"If the Vietnam Wall is a lens that focuses veterans on losses and grieving, then the country of Vietnam is about connecting with the place in a positive, creative way, in building or healing," Sardo said.

When the official tour ended, the delegates scattered to their own pasts. George Whitehouse traveled to where four fellow soldiers died and a dozen were wounded in an artillery accident on July 7, 1972, just weeks before the troops withdrew. George Washington Whitehouse journeyed to the site of his old tax office. A Gold Star sister found the ground where her brother was killed.

Tom Whitehouse, whose own base was too remote, went alone to a hotel terrace overlooking Saigon. A busload of German tourists blasted through, downing cans of beer and departing in a few short minutes. He found himself in the silence afterward, and felt a sense of peace.

"All Americans have a huge connection to Vietnam," he said later. "Not Vietnam the war, or Vietnam the country, but Vietnam the syndrome that has impacted all of us in the U.S., through personal loss, and in what it has done to our country.

"The problem has been when we try to sublimate it or forget it. We have to deal with it. If the people who fought the war, who faced each other across the jungle or in combat, can get beyond that, then everyone else certainly can."

-- Julie Sullivan

EDITOR'S NOTE: The Oregonian rarely covers staff members in its news pages. This story is an exception, in order to bring readers news of an international delegation to Vietnam earlier this month. Tom Whitehouse is the newspaper's director of human resources and a Vietnam War veteran. He is the only Oregon resident to accompany the 2010 Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund on its historic January trip.

US vets return to see grim legacy of Vietnam War

2010-01-16T13:08:00.000-08:00

By BEN STOCKING

The Associated Press
Saturday, January 16, 2010; 1:08 PM

DONG HA, Vietnam -- A piece of shrapnel sliced Jerry Maroney's right leg. A bullet pierced Peter Holt's neck. Les Newell took a shot in the rump.

These old American soldiers recovered from the physical scars of combat long ago. But last week, they visited a place where people still have fresh wounds from the Vietnam War, which ended nearly 35 years ago.

They came to Quang Tri Province, which is still littered with landmines and unexploded ordinance that routinely kill and maim people trying to scratch out a living in the rice fields. Their visit was organized by the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund, which built the Washington, D.C., monument that commemorates the lives of the 58,000 Americans who died in Vietnam.

VVMF sponsors Project RENEW, a non-profit organization that helps Quang Tri residents like Pham Quy Tuan, 41, whose left hand and right arm were blown off by a leftover American projectile he found in a rice paddy four months ago.

"When I realized I'd lost my hands, all I could think about was how much I love my wife and kids, and how I would become a big burden to them," said Tuan, who also suffered severe burns and remains in chronic pain.

The VVMF delegation was led by Barry R. McCaffrey, a retired four-star general who served as President Clinton's drug czar and now appears as a military analyst on NBC news. Also participating were family members of fallen soldiers and Vietnam veterans making their first trip back to Vietnam, several of whom had personal missions.

Thomas J. Whitehouse of Lake Oswego, Oregon, a former U.S. Army captain, wanted to return some medals taken from the body of a Vietnamese soldier four decades ago.

Sam Metters, who has three Bronze Stars and a Purple Heart, hoped to find a school that he and several Army comrades designed for Vietnamese orphans while they were stationed near Saigon.

Judy Campbell of Wilmington, Delaware, planned to visit the spot in Bien Hoa where her brother, Keith Campbell, was killed during a pitched battle on Feb. 8, 1967, three weeks before his 21st birthday. Keith Campbell, a medic, was killed by a sniper just 19 days after he arrived in Vietnam, while saving two injured soldiers during a fierce firefight.

"He was a medic, and medics save lives," said Judy Campbell, who was 17 when her brother died. "That's what Keith did, at the cost of his own."

The delegation began its weeklong tour of Vietnam in Hanoi. They were impressed by the economic boom unleashed by the market reforms the communist country has implemented over the last two decades.

And they were heartened by the warm welcome they received from the people, including those in a Quang Tri district where they dedicated a new elementary school funded by VVMF.

"I feel like a rock star," said Maroney, 62, a former Marine who recently retired from his job as a detective in Long Island, New York. "Look at how well everyone is treating us!"

Maroney was apprehensive before he arrived. "I hated these guys. They killed my friends. We killed them. It was war."

For the Vietnamese in Quang Tri, the war hasn't completely ended.

"It's still a daily part of their lives," said Scruggs, who decided to start Project RENEW during a visit to Vietnam in 2000. "Some of them are missing limbs, some have been blinded. It tears your heart out."

According to VVMF, more than 350,000 tons of landmines and explosives remain scattered across the country, much of them in Quang Tri, near the former Demilitarized Zone, or DMZ, which once divided North Vietnam and South Vietnam. The province was the most heavily bombed and shelled during the war, and 92 percent of it remains contaminated with explosives.

Since 1975, when troops from the communist north triumphed, more than 100,000 Vietnamese people have been killed or injured by landmines or unexploded ordinance, more than 7,000 of them in Quang Tri, according to the Vietnamese government.

Project RENEW focuses on three districts in the province, where it educates people about the dangers of landmines and clears the land of explosives. It also assists the injured, providing them with artificial limbs, small loans and job training.

The program operates a hotline and has trained two teams to respond quickly when residents spot explosives.

On Thursday, the delegation watched a team detonate explosives that had been found near two homes in the Cam Lo district, including a cluster bomb and a grenade launcher in the yard of 75-year-old Nguyen Thi Yen Thi. Thi was relieved to see them go.

"You never know when those things might explode," said Thi, who has found a half dozen explosives in her yard over the years.

One of them spontaneously combusted on a hot summer day; another blew up when someone was burning trash in her yard. The others were removed without incident.

Two of Thi's nephews have been injured by landmines, a third was killed.

Many victims are children who play with the explosives, unaware of the danger. But many are adults like Tuan, who, before his injury, made a living collecting scrap metal and selling it to junk dealers.

When he discovered the projectile in the rice paddy, Tuan took it home and decided to remove a piece of copper wrapped around the device.

Copper is twice as valuable as the metals he usually collects, for which he typically receives a dollar or two a day.

When the bomb exploded, his wife was out collecting trash, which she recycles for a living. His 11-year-old son and 8-year-old daughter found him in the backyard.

When his wounds are more fully healed, the Project RENEW staff will see if he can be fitted with a pair of prosthetic limbs.

"Nothing would make me happier than a pair of artificial hands," Tuan said. "I'm helpless."

Stocking, Ben. "US vets return to see grim legacy of Vietnam War - washingtonpost.com. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/01/16/AR2010011601238.html (accessed January 16, 2010).

VVMF DEDICATES RENOVATED PRIMARY SCHOOL IN VIETNAM

2010-01-13T16:03:00.000-08:00

Six American Veterans Provided Funding for Trieu An Commune Facility

Quang Tri, Vietnam and Washington, D.C. (Jan. 13, 2010) – The Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund (VVMF) will dedicate a newly renovated and expanded primary school in Trieu An Commune tomorrow as part of a week-long delegation by American veterans to Vietnam, announced Jan C. Scruggs, VVMF founder and president.

The dedication ceremony will feature remarks by Scruggs, Gen. Barry R. McCaffrey, USA (Ret.), who is leading the delegation, and local Vietnamese officials.

VVMF became involved when it was approached by officials at the Vietnam Union of Friendship Organizations (VUFO), VVMF’s in-country sponsor, about providing assistance for the Tuong Van Elementary School in Trieu An Commune. The existing school was not large enough to accommodate all of the students at one time, so a split school day had to be instituted. Also, the road leading to the school often flooded during rainy season, making it dangerous and nearly impossible for the students to attend. In addition, the building itself was aging and in need of repair.

VVMF sought support from six American veterans who served in the Vietnam War, many of whom had taken part in past VVMF delegations and had seen first hand the need of Vietnam’s people. The six donors who funded the project include:

• Marshall Carter, chairman, New York Stock Exchange, New York, N.Y.;
• William Soza, board of directors, John Marshall Bank, McLean, Va.;
• William Murdy, chairman and CEO, Comfort Systems USA, Houston, Texas;
• Terrence O'Donnell, partner, Williams & Connolly, Washington, D.C.;
• John Weber, partner, Baker Hostetler, Washington, D.C.; and
• Jimmy Mosconis, owner, Bay City Lodge, Apalachicola, Fla.

In addition to the Tuong Van Primary School, VVMF has built a library, a cultural community center and a baseball field in Quang Tri Province. These projects are funded through the generous support of VVMF delegation members and American veterans who have been deeply moved to provide assistance after witnessing Vietnam’s underserved people.

VVMF broke ground for the new school in February 2009. While the school’s renovation has been completed and the school has been in use since last fall, the dedication was timed to coincide with the visit of VVMF’s January 2010 delegation.

VVMF brings delegations of veterans, family members and friends to Vietnam regularly. These visits take participants from Hanoi to Ho Chi Minh City and include meetings with Vietnam and U.S. government officials. Delegations spend at least one day in Quang Tri Province to observe the operations of VVMF’s humanitarian program, Project RENEW, which employs a Vietnamese staff to eradicate explosive remnants of war (ERW), as well as provide medical and income-generation assistance to victims and their families.

Launched in 2001, Project RENEW is a cooperative effort between VVMF and the Quang Tri Province People’s Committee, designed for Restoring the Environment and Neutralizing the Effects of War. Initiatives include the identification and removal of explosive remnants of war (ERW) by trained explosive ordnance disposal teams; educational campaigns focused on teaching people about the dangers of ERW; medical assistance programs, including prosthetic care; and income-generation efforts to help victims and their families earn a living.

VIETNAM VETERANS MEMORIAL FUND TO RECEIVE $1 MILLION FROM U.S. GOVERNMENT FOR DEMINING ACTIVITIES IN VIETNAM

2010-01-11T16:05:00.000-08:00

Announcement Kicks Off Delegation of Returning American Veterans

Hanoi, Vietnam and Washington, D.C. (Jan. 11, 2010) — The Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund (VVMF) announced today that it will receive a $1 million grant from the U.S. government to assist with demining activities in Vietnam, announced Jan C. Scruggs, the organization’s founder and president.

Last month, the U.S. Congress approved and President Obama signed into law a defense funding bill that included a provision directing the U.S. Secretary of Defense to award a $1 million grant to VVMF for demining activities. The grant, which was the result of the leadership of Rep. John Murtha, (D-Pa.), will be used for VVMF’s Project RENEW—a nine-year-old humanitarian program charged with Restoring the Environment and Neutralizing the Effects of War. Rep. Murtha is a long-time supporter of VVMF and its international humanitarian program.

“The Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund applauds the U.S. government for its continuing efforts to assist Vietnam with the deadly legacy of the Vietnam War—the more than 350,000 tons of explosive remnants of war (ERW)—that continue to contaminate the country and harm its people,” said Scruggs today during a VVMF press briefing in Hanoi. “This grant will be used for Project RENEW and its many successful programs in Vietnam.”

Scruggs’ announcement kicked off a week-long educational and humanitarian delegation to the Southeast Asian country. The VVMF delegation is led by Gen. Barry McCaffrey, USA (Ret.), the former U.S. drug czar under President Bill Clinton and a national terrorism and security analyst with NBC News.

McCaffrey and Scruggs are joined by Peter M. Holt, CEO of the Holt Companies, whose holdings include Holt CAT—the largest U.S. Caterpillar dealer. He also is the owner of the San Antonio Spurs of the National Basketball Association (NBA) and several other San Antonio, Texas professional sports teams. The delegation is comprised of American war veterans and their families in addition to others whose loved ones served with the U.S. military in Vietnam.

In addition to its two-day Hanoi stop, the delegation will visit Hue, Quang Tri and Da Nang before departing Jan. 17 from Ho Chi Minh City. The full-day visit to Quang Tri Province on Jan. 14 will allow delegates to gain a better understanding of the country’s ongoing ERW problem and VVMF’s efforts to help through Project RENEW.

A violent peace

2009-11-21T10:09:00.000-08:00

Nguyen Van Troi slept through the afternoon, not common practice for a farmer who usually tends fields all day. His neighbors in Quang Thach Commune in the central province of Quang Binh were all working, but Troi, 56, could not.

A sudden cold front had exacerbated the pain in his chest and left hand. They were all injured seven years ago when Troi was digging to plant cassava.

“I heard an explosion and felt as if my body was being torn apart,” Troi told Thanh Nien Weekly during a visit arranged by the UK-based Mines Advisory Group (MAG), an organization that clears the remnants war in former conflict areas worldwide.

Troi, whose left hand has been virtually paralyzed, said he has been terrified of digging on his land ever since.

“It’s dangerous. Unexploded bombs could be found anywhere.”

The fear has forced Troi and his neighbors to grow perennial crops, which require far less digging, but also earn far less money.

“We don’t want to dig. No one wants to be killed or injured,” he said.

Permanent war

Quang Binh and its neighbor to the south, Quang Tri, have recorded the highest number of deaths and injuries caused by unexploded bombs and landmines in Vietnam, said a study released this summer by the Vietnam Veterans of America Foundation (VVAF) and the Vietnamese Ministry of Defense’s Technology Center for Bomb and Mine Disposal (BOMICEN).

In early October, Quang Tri authorities unearthed seven unexploded bombs after Storm Ketsana cut a swath into the province. The seven bombs were found in a commune bordering Laos.

“We find or are told about unexploded bombs and ordnance almost every day,” said Hoang Minh Duc, head of a MAG mine action team tasked with tracking unexploded war ordnance in Quang Binh.

Police said on Wednesday that four men had been killed on the spot when a bomb left over from the Vietnam War blew up in the southern province of Tay Ninh. They were trying to open it to remove explosive material, according to police sources.

‘Huge responsibility’

Since the end of the Vietnam War in 1975, unexploded bombs, artillery shells, mortar bombs, rockets and landmines have killed 10,529 and wounded 12,231 people in the six most heavily-affected central provinces alone, the study by VVAF and BOMICEN said. Of the six provinces, around 7,000 people in Quang Tri and some 6,000 in Quang Binh have been killed or injured due to leftover ordnance, it said.

Over 40,000 people across the country have been killed by unexploded ordnance (UXO) since the war ended and over 35 percent of the land in six central provinces remains contaminated with UXO, it added.

According to the VVAF survey data, of 1,361 communes surveyed in six central provinces, 1,360 are contaminated with UXO.

“Vietnam has the unfortunate distinction of being the country that has had more bombs dropped on it than any other country in history,” VVAF founder Bobby Muller said in February 2004 as his organization signed the agreement to launch the survey with Vietnam’s Ministry of Defense.

“An undeniable fact is that the United States dropped these bombs,” Muller said.

“We as Americans bear a huge responsibility for helping to clean up Vietnam, because so much of the unexploded ordnance (UXO) found here originated with the US military,” Chuck Searcy, country representative for the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund, told Thanh Nien Weekly.

No peace

DEATHS DUE TO WAR-ERA ORDNANCE
SO FAR THIS YEAR

November 17: Four people in Tay Ninh Province were killed when a bomb blew up as they were trying to open it to remove explosive material.
September 8: A boy was killed and his father seriously injured when a bomb exploded near them as they dug a pond in Ha Tinh Province.
August 3: Four people were killed in Phu Yen Province as they tried to remove explosive material from a bomb.
July 6: Four men were killed in central Vietnam when a bomb exploded along the Ho Chi Minh Trail in Quang Binh Province, where they were using a metal detector to salvage metal and explosives.
March 20: Three men in Tay Ninh Province were killed while trying to saw through a shell to salvage metal and explosives.
March 17: A bomb exploded killing a woman and wounding four other people including a baby in Bac Giang Province when a scrap-metal buyer was weighing material salvaged by local children.

Ho Van Nuoi, who lives on UXO-contaminated land in Quang Binh’s Canh Hoa Commune, said the war has never stopped haunting him. During the war, Nuoi lost much of his left leg and sustained permanent paralysis to three of his fingers due to bombs dropped on his homeland.

Like most Quang Binh and Quang Tri residents, Nuoi lives in fear.

“Ever since, I’ve been afraid that the unexploded bombs will kill my children – even now that we are at peace,” Nuoi said.

Nuoi said the bombs were also taking a devastating financial toll on his family.

“We want to plant timber trees in the garden to increase our income, but we can’t. We’re scared of hitting unexploded ordnance.”

“On the land that we do cultivate, we don’t dare dig very deep. Our productivity has suffered as a result.”

The presence of the bombs had also caused much grief for the family of Nguyen Van Thao in Quang Binh’s Hop Trung Village. This family’s tragedy darkened the festive period of Tet, Vietnamese Lunar New Year, in 2008.

While grazing cattle on the family farm, Thao’s 17-year-old son Thien discovered a curious and rather innocent-looking item, no bigger than a tennis ball. In a split second, curiosity turned to tragedy.

“We heard the explosion” said Thao. “We ran to the field and saw Thien lying unconscious. He had injuries to his eye and two fingers on his right hand were missing.”

Thien will never regain the use of his injured eye, doctors have said.

A colossal task

UXO in Vietnam can never be 100 percent cleaned up, Searcy said in an email interview with Thanh Nien Weekly in July.

Senior Vietnamese military officials also said the task of cleaning up and destroying every piece of UXO would be a tall order.

Deputy Defense Minister General Nguyen Huy Hieu wrote in an article published by Quan Doi Nhan Dan (People's Army) newspaper in June that there were still an estimated 800,000 pieces of UXO around the country, especially in the central provinces. He estimated that about 6.6 million hectares (16.3 million acres) of land, more than 20 percent of the country’s total surface area, had been affected by UXO.

Finding and clearing all the bombs, landmines and other UXO would require “dozens of billions of dollars and will take hundreds of years,” Hieu wrote.

Phan Duc Tuan, an army colonel and deputy head of Military Engineering Command, said at a news conference in July that at the current pace, it would take 300 years and more than $10 billion to clear Vietnam of leftover bombs, shells and mines.

Tuan said that with aid, the agency in charge of clearing UXO had estimated that only about half could be cleared by 2050.

Progress begins at home

“UXO has not only killed people but contributed to poverty in Vietnam as well,” said Searcy. “Many international experts have said the US would have to bear the major responsibility for such a ‘crime against humanity,’” he said, adding that the US government should do more to help the Vietnamese victims.

But he also pointed out the need for Vietnam to ratify the Mine Ban Treaty and Convention on Cluster Munitions, which prohibits the use, production, transfer, and stockpiling of cluster munitions.

Jimmy Roodt, Country Program Manager for MAG Vietnam said one problem was that Vietnam had not identified UXO removal as an issue of national priority.

“International donors and embassies develop their budgets upon the priorities identified by Vietnam government.”

Grassroots

Everyday Vietnamese people could also play a role in supporting UXO victims and removing the plague from the country, Searcy said.

“The Vietnamese people, through their social organizations, their veterans units, and the companies they work for, should continue to be generous in contributing to programs designed to ease the burdens of Vietnamese families disabled by UXO explosions.”

Many people in and outside Vietnam believe that Vietnam is now living in peace without any lingering effects of the war, according to Searcy.

“Local Vietnamese citizens, who more and more are meeting foreign tourists, students, professionals and business delegations traveling throughout Vietnam, should use the opportunity, not to complain – that is not in the nature of the Vietnamese people – but to tell foreigners about this post-war legacy that still exists in Vietnam.”

Reported by An Dien

Project RENEW's Quarterly Newsleter

2009-10-07T16:26:00.000-07:00

From Project RENEW:

"It’s our effort to inform you, and other friends and supporters who have expressed interest in Project RENEW, of the work we are doing to reduce the danger of Explosive Remnants of War (ERW), and related humanitarian development activities in Quang Tri Province, Vietnam.

Highlights in this issue:

- Mobile Outreach brings artificial limbs and braces to the disabled in Dakrong District.

- EOD Quick Response Teams answer calls to remove ordnance, ease residents’ worries.

- Clearance of Vung Ha site makes way for safe expansion of Quang Tri Town.

- RENEW staff achieve professional and academic excellence.

- Project RENEW welcomes VVMF 2010 delegation.

- Global ban on cluster munitions signed by 100 nations, moving toward ratification.

Simply click the following link to read more.

2nd Edition of Project RENEW's quarterly newsletter

Thank you for your interest and your support for Project RENEW’s humanitarian operations during the past eight years. With your help, we can make Vietnam safer for families today and for future generations.

Sincerely,

Project RENEW Team"

Report: Land mine contamination vast in Vietnam

2009-07-31T19:28:00.000-07:00

Report: Land mine contamination vast in Vietnam

By BEN STOCKING (AP) – 20 hours ago

HANOI, Vietnam — More than one-third of the land in six central Vietnamese provinces remains contaminated with land mines and unexploded bombs from the Vietnam War, according to a study released Friday.

Nearly 35 years after the war's end, Vietnamese civilians are still routinely killed and maimed by leftover mines and other explosives. Vietnam estimates that more than 42,000 people have been killed in such accidents since 1975.

The study by the Vietnam Veterans of America Foundation and Vietnam's ministry of defense provides the most detailed information to date about the amount and location of unexploded ordinance littering a region that saw some of the heaviest fighting and bombardment during the war.

The survey was the result of close collaboration between the United States and Vietnam on one of the most sensitive legacies of the conflict.

In addition to mapping unexploded mines and ordinance, the project, which the U.S. government provided $2 million to finance, involved clearing 3,345 acres (1,354 hectares) of land in 1,361 communities across the six provinces.

But the study also underlines the scope of the mine-clearing work that remains to be done.

Vietnam's Ministry of Defense estimates 16.3 million acres (6.6 million hectares) are still contaminated across the country, said Thao Nguyen, the Vietnam Veterans of America Foundation's country director.

"The clearing of unexploded ordinance and land mines is far from finished," Nguyen said.

U.S. Ambassador Michael Michalak said the survey will help set priorities for future clearance work.

"Eliminating residual explosives from past conflicts is an important issue for the people of Vietnam, as it is for the United States," he said.

The U.S. has provided $46 million to help with mine-clearing efforts in Vietnam since 1989, he said.

The study looked in detail at victims in the provinces of Quang Tri, Quang Binh, Thua Thien Hue, Quang Ngai, Nghe An and Ha Tinh.

Thirty-four percent were hurt while scavenging for unexploded bombs to sell as scrap metal; 27 percent were farming or herding livestock; and 21 percent were playing or tampering with the bombs.

The study found the most heavily contaminated provinces were Quang Binh and neighboring Quang Tri, the site of the former demilitarized zone during the war.

Since the war ended, nearly 7,000 people have been killed or injured by leftover ordinance in Quang Tri and 6,000 in Quang Binh, the study found.

Copyright © 2009 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.

Mine casualties up in June

2009-07-20T10:45:00.000-07:00

The Phnom Penh Post
Written by Sam Rith

Injuries and fatalities have been in decline this year but rose 17 percent last month over June 2008 with 21 total casualties.

THE number of people injured or killed by land mines and explosive remnants of war (ERW) this past June was 17 percent higher than last year's figure, according to a recent report from the Cambodia Mine/UXO Victim Information System (CMVIS).

The report, released Thursday, stated that of 21 total casualties, 12 people were injured, two lost limbs and seven were killed.

Heng Ratana, director general of the Cambodian Mine Action Centre (CMAC), said the June figures were a deviation from the long-term decline in casualties in recent years, though he noted that figures from month to month were unpredictable.

"It [the number of casualties] is irregular ... because the mines are in the ground, no one knows where they are," he said.

The report stated that there were 150 casualties between January and June this year, a
13-percent decrease compared with the same period last year.

Heng Ratana said his officers continued to respond to emergency calls from citizens to clear mines that they have found, which he said helps to reduce the number of casualties.

"If we did not have forces to respond to emergency calls, the number of casualties would be greater," he said.

He noted that the provinces most affected were Battambang, Pursat, Pailin, Banteay Meanchey,Oddar Meanchey and Preah Vihear.

Net Nath, a CMAC deputy manager in Battambang, said nine people have died in that province so far this year and that 39 have been injured by land mines or ERW.

He said his officers have been trying to reduce the casualty rate by making residents of the province more aware of the risks there.

-------------------------------------------------
Rith, Sam. "Mine casualties up in June | National news | The Phnom Penh Post - Cambodia's Newspaper of Record." | The Phnom Penh Post - Cambodia's Newspaper of Record. 20 July 2009. 26 July 2009 <http://www.phnompenhpost.com/index.php/2009072027249/National-news/mine-casualties-up-in-june.html>.

Robert McNamara dies

2009-07-06T17:34:00.000-07:00

Former secretary of defence under John F Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson was the architect of the Vietnam war

Full Article from The Guardian

Land mine/UXO story from the BBC

2009-06-12T06:38:00.000-07:00

A Celebration of Project Renew

2009-05-24T10:03:00.000-07:00

Students for Renew Present: A Celebration of Project Renew
Brattleboro Union High School Auditorium
June 11, 2009
Brattleboro, Vermont

On June 11, at 6:00 p.m. in the BUHS auditorium, Brattleboro's Students for Renew, a student organization raising funds and providing education to aid the relief and recovery of unexploded landmines and ordinance in Vietnam, is presenting a Celebration of Project Renew. The public is invited to support this worthwhile cause and be a part of the evening’s events.

Guest Speakers

Guest speakers include Bill Holiday, Students for Renew founder, B.U.H.S. social studies teacher, and adjunct professor at Keene State College, who will lecture and present slides from his 2007 trip to Vietnam with the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund Friendship Delegation.

BUHS student, Caroline Heydinger, Vermont State Oratorical Champion and National Runner-Up, will present her capstone project about the continuing problem of land-mines and unexploded ordinance in central Vietnam and Project Renew’s efforts to aid victims unexploded ordnance weapons.

The celebration will include the world premier of Students for Renew's original short film, entitled "UXOs in Quang Tri," concerning the ongoing harm caused by war remnants. After the viewing, the film’s director, Reginald Martell, degree candidate in the MAT (Master of Arts in Teaching with Technology) program at Marlboro Graduate School, will take questions from the audience.

Musical Performance

The evening concludes with a musical performance from Red Heart the Ticker, fresh off their turn with Garrison Keillor on A Prairie Home Companion.

Red Heart the Ticker is the musical collaboration of Robin MacArthur and Tyler Gibbons, a husband and wife duo from Marlboro, Vermont. Red Heart the Ticker was born when, in 2005, they built themselves a cabin in the woods of Vermont and lived without running water. As the long cold months of winter drew on they decided they would have to start playing music together to combat cabin fever. Red Heart the Ticker (red heart for warmth, ticker for rhythm) was born. Their song, entitled “Depression,” is an integral part of Students for Renew's original short film, and they will perform this song as well.

The event has a suggested donation of $5.00, but no one will be turned away for lack of funds.

For information, contact...

Dede Cummings at 802-254-9076

or

Bill Holiday at 802-451-3490.

Icbl News May 2009

2009-05-01T10:14:00.000-07:00

Icbl News May 2009

Publish at Scribd or explore others: Humanities How-to-Guides & Manu usa air

...from the SFR photo archive.

2009-04-29T17:59:00.000-07:00

Hue, Vietnam.

Students for Renew's Heydinger Comes in Second at Oratory Nationals

2009-04-21T15:56:00.000-07:00

"Caroline Heydinger, of Brattleboro, Vt., earned a $16,000 college scholarship with a second place finish, while Werner Ferrone, of Homosassa, Fla, earned a $14,000 scholarship and finished third. The scholarships account for a small portion of the roughly $3.5 million in post-secondary scholarships that The American Legion, the nation's largest veterans organization, awards annually."

Marketwatch. "Lafayette, Ind., Senior Sweeps to Victory, Earns $18K Scholarship In American Legion Oratorical Contest - MarketWatch." MarketWatch: Stock Market Quotes - Business News - Financial News. 20 Apr. 2009. 21 Apr. 2009 <http://www.marketwatch.com/story/lafayette-ind-senior-sweeps-victory?dist=msr_7>.

Script for the Students for Renew film, "UXOs in Quang Tri"

2009-04-05T11:59:00.000-07:00

UXOs in Quang Tri by Reginald Martell UXOs in Quang Tri by Reginald Martell reginaldwam3

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First Cut of the SFR Original Film

2009-03-23T16:21:00.001-07:00

Deadly Legacy of War in Vietnam

2009-03-22T11:58:00.000-07:00

Gilson - Deadly Legacy of WAr in Vietnam Gilson - Deadly Legacy of WAr in Vietnam reginaldwam3

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Professional development opportunity in Vietnam

2009-03-13T10:26:00.000-07:00

Trip Email Letter Trip Email Letter reginaldwam3

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"We Were Soldiers" author, Joe Galloway, Part 6

2009-02-21T12:20:00.000-08:00

Courtesy of Bill Holiday

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"We Were Soldiers" author Joe Galloway, Part 5

2009-02-20T12:19:00.000-08:00

Joe Galloway tells the story of Rick Rescorla, Vietnam war veteran, and hero of the September 11 attacks on World Trade Center tower 2.

Courtesy of Bill Holiday

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"We Were Soldiers" author, Joe Galloway, Part 4

2009-02-19T12:16:00.000-08:00

Joe Galloway on the young draftees he met while reporting in Vietnam, and his exegetic discussion of Oliver Stone's Platoon, with Col. Robert Hemphill.

Courtesy of Bill Holiday

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"We Were Soldiers" author, Joe Galloway, Part 3

2009-02-18T12:14:00.000-08:00

Reporting in Vietnam, Joe Galloway leaves the Marines for the Army 1st Cavalry Divisions Mobile, and operations in the Ia Drang Valley.

Courtesy of Bill Holiday

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"We Were Soldiers" author, Joe Galloway, Part 2

2009-02-17T12:11:00.000-08:00

Joe Galloway discusses the history of war press coverage, and his first days covering the Vietnam War, in Quảng Ngãi.

Courtesy of Bill Holiday

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"We Were Soldiers" author, Joe Galloway, Part 1

2009-02-16T12:05:00.000-08:00

Joe Galloway tells the story of his days with United Press International during the Cold War, the United States' early military commitment to Vietnam, and his journey from the White House, to Saigon, on the heels of the 1st Battalion of the 9th Marines, in 1964.

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Courtesy of Bill Holiday

THREE SOLDIERS, DETAIL TO BE DEDICATED IN FLORIDA

2008-07-01T13:44:00.000-07:00

Statue to be Dedicated in Apalachicola on July 12 at 10:30 a.m.
Washington, D.C., July 1, 2008 – Three Soldiers, Detail, a bronze sculpture that is the only authorized “detail,” or partial sculpture, created from the original molds used for the Three Servicemen Statue by Frederick Hart (1943-1999) in Washington, D.C., will be dedicated at the Veterans Memorial Plaza in Apalachicola, Fla., on July 12 at 10:30 a.m. Lindy Hart, wife of the sculptor, will attend the ceremony.

Jan C. Scruggs, founder and president of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund, will be the keynote speaker. Scruggs was the driving force behind the effort to build the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C. in the early 1980s. The Wall, as the Memorial is also known, was dedicated in 1982. The Three Servicemen Statue, which is part of the Memorial site, was created by sculptor Frederick Hart and dedicated in 1984. When the statue was dedicated, the entire Memorial was transferred to the federal government as a gift to the American people and accepted by then President Ronald Reagan.

“The Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund is pleased to be part of this effort,” said Scruggs. “When people look at the statue, whether it is the Three Servicemen Statue in our nation’s capitol or Three Soldiers, Detail in Apalachicola, they will remember the sacrifices made by all of our armed forces during the Vietnam War.”

Another featured speaker at the event will be Col. Harry Buzzett, one of Apalachicola’s favorite sons, whose Army career spanned World War II, Korea and Vietnam. The ceremony will also feature an exhibition of Vietnam-era “Huey” helicopters from Dothan, Alabama, a wreath laying at the new statue and a military honor guard. Members of local motorcycle clubs, including ABATE, American Legion Riders, AMVETS Riders, Christian Motorcyclists Association, Patriot Guard Riders, U.S. Military Vets Motorcycle Club and Vietnam Vets/Legacy Vets Motorcycle Club are expected to attend as well.

Jimmy Mosconis, founder and president of Three Servicemen Statute South, Inc., will be the master of ceremonies. Mosconis was an Army staff sergeant who was in Vietnam in 1968-69 and served with Scruggs. The two returned to Vietnam last year to visit, among other places, Xuan Loc, where they were both wounded during the war.

“I am pleased with the enthusiastic support we’ve received from members of the community,” said Mosconis. “It is an honor to have the only replica of this famous statue in our town, and it is an honor we would not have received without the dedication of everyone here.”

In late June, the Three Soldiers, Detail began its trip from Long Island, N.Y., where it was cast, to Apalachicola, Fla., in a 28-foot trailer in which it was the only item being shipped. Shipping services were donated by FedEx National LTL, the long-haul transportation carrier of Fed Ex. For shipping, the statue was packed in three crates and secured with air bags and bracing to make sure this precious cargo got to its destination with no problems.

Three Servicemen Statue South is the non-profit group that spearheaded the effort to bring the statue to Florida. Under Mosconis’ leadership, the group obtained permission from the estate of sculptor Frederick Hart and the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund more than seven years ago. Apalachicola is the only city in the United States to feature this detail of the Three Servicemen Statute. A “detail” refers to any partial reproduction of a work of sculpture.

Three Soldiers, Detail was created with the original molds used to make the Three Servicemen Statue. The sculpture will be set on a black granite pedestal, serving as the centerpiece of Apalachicola’s newly completed Veterans Memorial Plaza. This new city-owned park includes brick pavers that honor veterans from all branches of the military who served in all of America’s wars. Adding dedications to the pavers has been a way for Three Servicemen Statue South to raise money to bring the statue to Apalachicola, and opportunities are still available for those who want to dedicate a brick.

Both The Wall and the Three Servicemen Statue have become well-loved icons on the National Mall, serving as symbols of our nation’s honor and recognition of the men and women who served and sacrificed during the Vietnam War. When he created the statute, sculptor Frederick Hart felt it spoke to the “true heroism that lies in the bonds of loyalty.” It is a visual reference for the ages of the courage and devotion to their country of all service members.

The public is invited to attend the dedication, which is Apalachicola’s home-grown tribute to the men and women who went off to war from the many towns throughout the southeastern United States. Once the dedication is complete, the new Veterans Memorial Plaza will be managed by the Florida State Park System and is expected to draw thousands of visitors annually.

Three Servicemen Statue South Inc. is still raising money to pay for the statue, site preparation and landscaping. To make a donation or dedicate a brick paver, visit www.threeservicemenstatutesouth.org.

Established in 1979, the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund is the nonprofit organization authorized by Congress to build the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C. Today, the Memorial Fund is an international nongovernmental organization dedicated to preserving the legacy of The Wall, promoting healing and educating about the impact of the Vietnam War. Its initiatives include educational programs for students and educators, a traveling Wall replica that honors our nation’s veterans and a humanitarian and mine-action program in Vietnam. The Memorial Fund is also building the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Center, an underground educational facility, near The Wall.

"A Study of Knowledge-Awareness-Practices to the Danger of Postwar Landmines/Unexploded Ordnance and Accidents in Quang Tri Province, Viet Nam"

2008-05-29T11:54:00.000-07:00

Quang Tri Unexploded Ordinance Summary, 2003 Quang Tri Unexploded Ordinance Summary, 2003 reginaldwam3 Landmark survey launched in Hanoi document the number of deaths and injuries due to landmines and UXOs since the end of the American war in Vietnam.

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US/Vietnam@Forbes.com - Intel's Vow in Vietnam

2007-11-27T14:02:00.000-08:00

A state entity, as well, commits to a graft-free billion-dollar project. Will the anticorruption pledge take hold nationwide?

Giant chipmaker Intel made August headlines in Vietnam when it signed a pact with the government-owned Saigon Hi-Tech Park, where it is building a $1 billion factory, to fight against corruption and any improper business conduct.

Vietnam, for all of its buzz of economic activity, remains high on Transparency International's list of the world's most corrupt countries. Prime Minister Nguyen Tan Dung has promised to combat graft, and Intel (nasdaq: INTC - news - people )'s deal was taken as a sign of governmental resolve. This is the first time a state agency made such a deal. It's also a first for Intel in its foreign investments. Cont....

2007-11-11T17:43:00.000-08:00

Joint Prisoners of War, Missing in Action Accounting Command meeting from our 2007 visit to Hanoi.

Courtesy of Bill Holiday

VVMF's Chuck Searcy on the economic future of Vietnam.

2007-10-29T17:51:00.000-07:00

Local Teacher Learns a Lesson - Brattleboro Reformer

2007-10-23T19:26:00.000-07:00

The following news story ran in the Brattleboro Reformer on October 9, 2007

View Article Scan
By BOB AUDETTE
Reformer Staff
BRATTLEBORO
He's been teaching the lessons of Vietnam at Brattleboro Union High School since 1984. But during a recent visit to Southeast Asia, gill Holiday realized he still had plenty to learn about the conflict that took the lives of nearly 60,000 Americans and more than 2 million Vietnamese.

"The Vietnamese people have put this war behind them," said Holiday. For a people who have been in an almost constant state of warfare for 2,000 years, the American War, as it is known in Vietnam, was "just a blip on the radar. It surprised me how they have put it behind them and we haven't."

Holiday, a Brattleboro native, is often remembered for his feats of athleticism during his own high school years and as a coach after finishing college, but is now known for the history lessons he presents at his alma mater.

In August, Holiday traveled to Vietnam with Jan Scruggs, a Vietnam veteran and founder of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund. Scruggs, who has made half a dozen trips to the country, visited Xuan Loc, where he was wounded in 1969.

"I wasn't sure how (the Vietnamese) would see us," said Holiday, adding "Vietnam is not holding a grudge. If it was me, I would look at us a little jaundiced."

The trip was part fact-finding and part goodwill mission, with teachers and other Vietnam veterans touring areas of historic interest and learning about the operations of Project RENEW, a VVMF humanitarian program focused on mine awareness education and victim assistance.

RENEW is an acronym for Restoring the use of lands to the Vietnamese through Education and Neutralization of the Effects of the Vietnam War.

Three and a half million land mines and 300,000 tons of unexploded ordnance litter the country, according to Vietnamese officials. 35,000 people have died because of land mines and unexploded ordnance since 1975. Countless others have been injured by the weapons.

According to VVMF, from 1965 to 1975, the U.S. Armed Forces used more than 15 million tons of bombs, mines, artillery shells and other ordnance in Vietnam. That's more than three times the tonnage used in World War II and 12 times the amount America used in the Korean War.

Ten percent of the Vietnam War munitions did not detonate as designed, and the Vietnamese have been dealing with the effects of unexploded ordinance for more than 30 years.

Holiday has wanted to travel to Vietnam for several years, but not until this past summer was he able to make it fit his schedule. "I made a commitment a long time ago to visit a lot of the places that I teach about." Those trips included visits to Alabama to learn more about civil rights and Dallas to learn more about the Kennedy assassination.

In Ho Chi Minh City - which most people still call Saigon said Holiday, he visited the War Remnants Museum, once known as the War Atrocities Museum. The museum shows how weapons used by France and the United States, including Agent Orange, affected the Vietnamese and their country.
Holiday also visited Hanoi, Khe Sanh, the Laotian border, Cu Chi, Hue and Danang.

"My focus was purely educational," said Holiday. "To see Vietnam for myself and use what I could in teaching or in providing opportunities for students."

Holiday brings veterans into the classroom to talk to the students about the war, part of the Veterans Education Project. And they don't all come with the same viewpoint.

"Some opposed the war and others believe we didn't apply the right strategy."

He also applies the lessons of the past to current events.

"Some kids come to the conclusion that people were lying (about why we were in Vietnam)," and they are starting to wonder the same thing about Iraq. "Where were the weapons of mass destruction?"

Holiday is a member of the Teach Vietnam Teachers Network, which was introduced in 2002 by VVMF to help teach about the war and to educate students about the impact of the Vietnam War.

Teachers are also encouraged to complete a community outreach project to promote Vietnam- and veteran-related education within his or her community. Projects may range from holding a Veterans Day ceremony at school to initiating a "pen pal" program with a veterans' hospital to creating a memorial to local veterans.

Three of his students are organizing a campaign to raise money to help the VVFW's RENEW project.

"It's a very worthwhile community service project to help raise funds," he said, and the students can make an active contribution to "the closure of the war."

It's easy to think of Vietnam as a backwards country, he said, but when you visit there, you realize how industrious and forward looking they are, with mobile phones in everybody's pockets and new highways being built.

"The country is still communist on the surface," he said, but "they are also cultivating investment."

VERMONT HIGH SCHOOL STUDENT LAUNCHES NATIONAL CAMPAIGN TO HELP VIETNAM VETERANS MEMORIAL FUND’S HUMANITARIAN PROGRAM

2007-10-19T10:20:00.000-07:00

Effort To Educate Students about Land Mine Problem in Vietnam Set for Oct. 22 at Freedom High School in South Riding, Va.

Washington D.C.—Caroline Heydinger and her fellow students at Brattleboro Union High School in Brattleboro, Vt., have launched a national effort to raise awareness and generate support for the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund’s Project RENEW™, a humanitarian initiative designed to reduce the threat of unexploded ordnance (UXO) and land mines in Quang Tri Province in Vietnam, said Jan C. Scruggs, the organization’s founder and president.

Heydinger will visit schools throughout the United States to educate students on the continuing impact of land mines and unexploded ordinance in Vietnam. The Oct. 22 presentation, beginning at 10:45 a.m., will feature Memorial Fund Treasurer Robert H. Frank, CPA, addressing the students of Freedom High School. Frank has made more then 20 trips to Vietnam to oversee Project RENEW™ since 1999.

“We are happy to see the students of Brattleboro Union High School taking an interest in Project RENEW™ and helping to support it,” said Scruggs. “Having young students eager to educate their peers and the general public about Vietnam and help the citizens there is remarkable.”

Caroline Heydinger, a junior at Brattleboro Union High School, became interested in Project RENEW™ after her mentor, teacher Bill Holiday, returned in August from a visit to Vietnam organized by the Memorial Fund. Holiday is a member of the Teach Vietnam Teachers Network, a group of educators established by the Memorial Fund to serve as an informational resource about the Vietnam War in their schools and communities. Along with fellow students Freida Hirsch and Violet Batcha, Heydinger turned her civic leadership course into a fundraising effort for Project RENEW™. She hopes to travel to Quang Tri Province in the next year to present the funds raised in person.

Project RENEW™ was launched in December 2000 by the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund to reduce the threat of an estimated 350,000 tons of land mines that remain scattered throughout Vietnam from the war that ended in 1975. Land mines and UXO result in more than 1,000 casualties each year. The project focuses on mine awareness education and victim assistance in Quang Tri Province.

Established in 1979, the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund is the nonprofit organization authorized by Congress to build the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C. Today, through a series of outreach programs, it is dedicated to preserving the legacy of The Wall, promoting healing, educating about the impact of the Vietnam War and is building the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Center, an underground educational facility, near The Wall.

The Voice of Vietnam Coverage of the VVMF 2007 Visit

2007-10-18T13:57:00.000-07:00

VVMF helps promote Vietnam-US relations

The Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund (VVMF) is a US-based nonprofit organisation that works to preserve the legacy of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial to educate about the impact of the Vietnam war.

On August 20, the Vietnam Union of Friendship Organisations (VUFO) presented an insignia for peace and friendship among nations to the VVMF in recognition of its valuable contributions to resolving the consequences of landmines, unexploded ordnance (UXO), items of explosive ordnance, promoting mutual understanding and developing the relationship and cooperation between Vietnam and the US. Cont....