U.S. veteran has helped clear 815,000 bombs from fields
DONG HA, VIETNAM >> On a visit to the former battlefield of Khe Sanh, the scene of one of the bloodiest standoffs of the Vietnam War, the only people Chuck Searcy encountered on the broad, barren field were two young boys who led him to an unexploded rocket lying by a ditch.
One of the youngsters reached out to give the bomb a kick until Searcy cried out, “No! Stop!”
“It was my first encounter with unexploded ordnance,” Searcy said of that moment in 1992. “I had no idea that I would be dedicating my life to removing them.”
It was not Searcy’s first encounter with Vietnam. He served there as a soldier in 1968, the same year as the battle of Khe Sanh, and came away disillusioned.
As an Army intelligence analyst, he had access to a full range of raw information, from the enemy’s body counts to exaggerated claims of American progress.
By the time his one-year tour of duty ended, Searcy found himself doubting not only the war but also his own character.
“I’ve really sometimes wondered if my timidity or refusal to step up and say this was wrong, whether this was a moral failure on my part,” he said. “It was a worry that made me feel that I was failing in a duty that I had as an American.”
That sense of duty has propelled him to commit his life to redressing one of the most deadly legacies of the war: the millions of unexploded bombs and land mines that continue to kill and injure people every year.
Now 79 and living in Hanoi, Searcy is perhaps the most widely known American
Chuck Searcy, an American veteran who co-founded Project Renew, a group that works to deactivate unexploded bombs, greets Trinh Thi Hong Tham, the leader of a demining team, last month in Dong Ha, in the Quang Tri province of Vietnam. Searcy lives in Hanoi.
veteran among Vietnamese, helping bend U.S. policies toward engagement with Vietnam.
“Chuck was one of the pioneers among the veterans in normalizing relations between the two countries,” said Hoang Nam, a senior government official in Quang Tri province who met Searcy just out of college.
Together, the two men founded Project Renew, based in Quang Tri, which since 2001 has been deploying teams of deminers, teaching schoolchildren how to stay safe and providing prosthetics and job training to victims.
In Project Renew’s two decades of operation, 815,000 bombs of all types have been detonated or taken out of action, Searcy said: aerialdropped bombs, cluster bombs, artillery shells, booby traps, grenades and mortar rounds.
Searcy said he was often asked what motivates his commitment to the welfare of postwar Vietnam.
It is not guilt, he said. Rather, it’s a sense of responsibility to try to remedy the damage his country has caused.
Quang Tri province, the site of Khe Sanh and on the border with the Ho Chi Minh Trail, is just below the line that divided South and North Vietnam. It was the most heavily bombed region in Vietnam, Searcy said.
“It was kind of pointless,” he said.
Altogether, Searcy said, almost 8 million tons of ordnance was dropped on Vietnam from 1965 to 1975. Bombs that failed to detonate became de facto land mines, which the Vietnamese government estimates have caused 100,000 deaths and injuries since the war’s end.
Since Project Renew began its work, in partnership with Norwegian People’s Aid — an organization that operates land mine-clearing operations in more than a dozen countries — the toll in Quang Tri has declined from more than 70 incidents a year to zero in 2019.
The goal, said Nam, the co-director of Renew, is to bring the problem under control so that people can go about their lives without fear.