A morning with MAG

Day two in Dong Ha. This rural setting has changed some of our morning habits: Dave can’t get up at 5 to hit the badminton scene, people aren’t running back from quick communiqué via the internet, and no sweet French morning pastries. Here we wake up and march into the day like soldiers: 7 am sharp, quiet round tables, and the simple hardiness of eggs, a small baguette, and an inch of thick and very black coffee. It does the trick and we file into the van dispatched to our first morning stop back at the CPI office. Today, we will be with their neighbors and peers in landmine work - MAG (Mines Advisory Group -- www.mag.or.uk).

The JSC group shuffles into a small room garnished with few maps and plenty of three-ring binders. The uniformed worker, Cliff, introduces himself: a former long-time British military engineer who now heads up MAG’s mine removal efforts in Vietnam. He is direct and succinct as he explains MAG’s work, which delays some of the shock of his words: “There is easily one UXO or landmine accident a week”, “There were just 2,000 American mines cleared from Gio Lihn”, “Five mines found this week, and it’s just Tuesday”, “We can find 900 pieces in one day at a metal scrap yard”. He answers our questions, and each group member seems to have one or two -- funding, personal reasons, clarifications. He is not patronizing us, and explains everything in detail and frankness.

In a pause, he moves our discussion to the hallway to show us shelves that display many of MAG’s educational souvenirs from 30 or more years ago. It is staggering, the malevolent genius that designs, manufactures, and utilizes these weapons. Necessity is the mother of invention, but war necessitates such a loss of humanity to those involved. Mind boggling to think about, and draws my sympathies to all involved in conflicts. When talking of landmines, Cliff makes the point to say they were designed to maim and demoralize, but not kill. All three categories are covered now in the civilians and beneficiaries we have been meeting.
We are behind now, and so hurriedly head off to visit some MAG mine removal teams in action. The first stop is at a site in a rice field and farming area. The roads to get there are so rough we abandon the van and are shuttled, high speed, in Cliff’s vehicle. Once there, we get a close up view of tedium: crystal clear procedure, basic and simple equipment, methodological sweeping and probing inch by inch and foot by foot -- each worker wearing the dense uniform of caution. The second stop still has us all shaking our heads -- a schoolyard that MAG has finally been allowed on because the children are on summer break. They found 14 pieces just doing the day long exploratory assessment, and 8 since then. By the time we arrived at 11 am, the team had three newly discovered UXO’s lined up: two active mortar shells and one Vietnamese grenade with the fuse clearly and chillingly visible. The school was build post-war on a dump of sorts, and now was a playground of sand, hiding the danger by just .5 meters. Needless to say, we walked directly in the footsteps of our guides at this point, and hurriedly retreated to sidewalk when the orientation was finished.