Danish Demining Group (DDG) Team 1

Mrs. Bong (in blue top) with the DDG Team 1 and children.

1. Vo Van Quang Vu/ 18 (not present in photo due to being away job hunting)

2. Vo Van Quang Truong/16

3. Vo Thi Tuong Vy/13 (girl)

4. Vo Van Quang Hoang/ 11

Reproduced with kind permission of the author Matt Matulewicz (author retains full copyright on images and text)

Foreword

I wrote this story in late 2015 after interviewing Mrs. Bong whilst I was mentoring the DDG UXO clearance team who were clearing her small area of land of over 200 UXO, from 105mm projectiles to 4.2 inch mortar bombs. Many of them contained white phosphorus.

The story is written from the perspective of the team para medics who were almost startlingly professional in the pursuit of keeping the team healthy whilst standing by to act and save life in an emergency. Explosions and WP are not the only hazards the team faces, there are deadly snakes in the trees as well as on the ground, scorpions and poisonous centipedes and any small cut or a prick from a thorn can turn septic within an hour or so.

DDG has only two small teams working near the coast south of Da Nang, but their achievements are out of all proportion to their teams size and - above all - they work safely.

Location

The tiny farming village of Son Vien is situated on a gently undulating plain close to the sea approximately 30 kilometres southeast of Da Nang. The area is relatively remote, being accessed via a spider’s web network of narrow concrete farm roads and dirt tracks. The heat is oppressive as the sun blazes down from a sky so brilliantly blue dotted with a few small white clouds that give no promise of rain. 

The humidity takes the visitors breath away momentarily as he or she emerges from an air conditioned vehicle and their spectacles become opaque with condensation. At times the air is so thick with moisture it is like breathing in damp cotton wool. 

The plain around the village is pock-marked with bomb craters and these, along with the countless soldiers’ graves, bear silent witness to the bitter fighting that took place around there during a war that is now largely forgotten. This is a war that the Vietnamese people generally refer to as “The American War”, although they do so somewhat surprisingly, without bitterness or rancour.

This is the story of a family of innocent people caught up in an horrific aftermath of the war. It is a story which is all too common and one which will continue to happen to other families into the future.

DDG Team 1

Team 1 worked methodically, carefully. They have been well trained, some of them many years before, in the art of detecting and destroying unexploded ordnance, or UXO, to give it the mnemonic it is usually referred to by.

The team consists of Mr. Nguyen Minh Duc, team leader; Mr. Dinh Xuan Nam, deputy team leader; four deminers: Mr. Nguyen Duy Khanh, Mr.Hoang Kim Vinh, Mr. Le Quang Thanh, Mr. Nguyen Minh Tien, Mr. Dang Khanh, the teams ambulance driver - and the two team medics Ms. Nguyen Thi Hong and Ms. Nguyen Thi Hong Uyen.

With the teams ambulance parked at a safe distance from the working area, the two medics locate themselves in a safe area chosen by the team leader during an earlier visit and which is actually the veranda of a local farmhouse belonging to Mrs. Van Thi Bong, a widow aged 42 years. The house is a little larger than many in the village and was once a well maintained property. But now the doors and window frames need rubbing down and varnishing and the concrete fences are sagging and leaning. The house is sparsely furnished and what little furniture there is looks old and worn. But it is immaculately clean. Even the piglets in the sty outside look pink and freshly scrubbed.

The two medics sit under the shade of the veranda roof listening to the team’s radio transmissions; the team leader’s calm instructions to his team coming over the airwaves with clarity – gone are the days of crackling communications with today’s modern hand held radios. The two medics are listening in particular for any call for help from the team leader or any team member. A call that will have them racing to a point at which they will be met by a team member and from which, if it is safe, they will be guided to the casualty. They carry large back packs full of trauma gear and a specially designed casualty extraction stretcher. They are ready at a moment’s notice to do the job that they hope they will never have to do.

Mrs. Van Thi Bong unobtrusively places an ancient electric fan behind the medics, to give them some relief from the heat, which is almost ferocious, it being late morning now. On this day there is a slight breeze coming from the sea, but not enough to help cool the day and it only manages to languidly stir the sparse dry grass which grows in patches on the arid sandy soil. The fan grinds into action and the medics sit, for the time being, in unaccustomed luxury from its stream of humid air.

“Cam on, Chi” – thank you sister – say the medics in unison and Mrs. Van Thi Bong smiles a sad smile and says in Vietnamese, “if only my husband was here to meet you, he was a deminer too”.

The radio comes alive again as the team leaders voice gives instructions for the team to take a fifteen minute break and drink water.

One of the medics asks: “Chi oi” (polite way of saying, hey sister in the Vietnamese language) “what happened to your husband?”

With sadness in her voice that is clearly audible Mrs. Van Thi Bong begins to tell her story:

Mrs. Van Thi Bong

“My husband, Vo Van Phung, was a good man and very hard working. He built this house with his own hands, with help of course, but he also worked our small fields, grew crops, worked at other jobs – anything that came up, as he was very good with his hands – and he collected scrap metal - bomb fragments - from the war to sell. The market price of scrap metal is about 2000 Dong for a kilo of scrap steel (there were around 21,000 Dong to a US Dollar at that time), so he had to work long hours and travel far to collect enough scrap to get a reasonable return for his efforts. But he never complained and we had enough money to keep ourselves in food and clothes.

But in 2006 the economy was bad and our crops failed, jobs were hard to find and scrap metal was becoming scarce as more and more people started to search for it. We had to borrow money from the bank to survive - twelve hundred US Dollars”. My husband wanted to pay the money back as soon as possible and one day he told me he had an idea. He said that most of the available wartime scrap metal was now underground as nearly all the surface scrap had already been collected. So he wanted to buy a metal detector to find buried scrap metal.

I was afraid. I asked him if he was sure that it was safe to do this. He said we had no choice. He bought a metal detector and started going out collecting metal, moving further and further afield. I hated him going out with that metal detector and couldn’t wait until I heard the sound of his motorcycle outside each evening as he arrived home. Every day I was worried sick whilst he was out. Each day when he came home he would unload a sack from his motorbike, sometimes with as much as ten kilos of scrap in it.

On the tenth day after he bought the metal detector, he went out in the morning and never came home.

I sat up all night desperately worried, crying, praying that he was safe, but in my heart I feared for him. The next day a man came from the People’s Committee to tell me that my dear husband was dead. He had been digging up some scrap metal at a place 30 kilometres away and it had exploded and killed him.”

Her voice had dropped almost to a whisper and now she stopped talking, overcome by the emotions that she could no longer control.

After a moments silence, she continued with quiet dignity.

“I was left a widow with four children. Things have been very hard since that awful time. We can’t grow enough crops to feed ourselves, the plants grow too slowly and the soil is poor and dry. But in some ways I am lucky. There have been three similar tragedies affecting families in this village alone during the last fifteen years. In one incident a man and his wife and one child were killed when the man was trying to get some explosives out of something he had found, to sell to fishermen. Their two other children are now in an orphanage somewhere.

The other tragedy happened just over there” – she pointed with her chin, as is the Vietnamese custom, to her left – “a man was digging something out of the ground when it exploded and killed him. You can still see the hole in the ground where it happened.

And now I worry for my son. He is 19 years old and thinks of himself as a man and he is ashamed that he cannot support us. He goes from town to town seeking work, but there is no work.

Her face clouds with darkness as she continues: I know that he will soon go digging for scrap metal. I have begged him not to do it. But he is a man now and he will say there is no choice. Again I will wait fearing the worst and hoping, praying, that he will come home safe.

The radio carries the team leader’s voice over from the search area: “Break over, resume work. Take care.....”

“Chi Oi – Sister,” says one of the medics, “may we send your story to our headquarters many, thousands of kilometres away in Denmark?”

“Yes but.... Why my story? There are many like me....” She asks, softly.

“Chi, - sister”, says the medic, “there will be many more like you unless we can clear all the bombs, but we are few and the bombs are many, so people should know about you and what happened to you and your family. Is there any message that you would like to send with your story?”

Mrs. Van Thi Bong thought for a moment and then said:

“Yes. Please tell them that we are very grateful and thankful that you have come here to clear the bombs. Danish Demining Group are the first people to come here and at first we were very doubtful and we were afraid that you would all be killed too. But now thanks to your teams we are safer and maybe soon we will be able to dig in the field over there and plant more crops”. Again she pointed with her chin towards the area where the small DDG team was working, beyond a gnarled old Cashew nut tree. She was silent for a moment or two, then said:

“Oh and can I ask if there is anyone there who can help me and other people with educating our children? My kids are clever and want to learn, but I just don’t have the money to send them to school. “