Vietnam Veteran Returned to Clear Bombs
DONG HA, Vietnam — On a visit to the former battlefield of Khe Sanh, scene of one of the bloodiest standoffs of the Vietnam War, the only people Chuck Searcy encountered were two young boys who led him to an unexploded rocket.
One of the boys reached out to give the bomb a kick until Mr. Searcy cried out, “No, Stop!”
“It was my first encounter with unexploded ordnance,” Mr. Searcy said of that moment in 1992. “I had no idea that I would be dedicating my life to removing them.”
It was not his 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 a U.S. Army intelligence analyst, he had access to raw information, from the enemy’s body counts to exaggerated claims of American progress.
“I saw that our friends back home were being given information that was not just misleading but deliberate lies,” Mr. Searcy said.
“That shocked us as innocent young men,” he added, “and we began to feel that the system was broken.
By the time his one-year tour of duty ended, he was doubting not only the war but 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. “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.
Now 79 and living in Hanoi, Mr. Searcy has become a fixture of the expatriate community there. He is perhaps the most widely known American veteran among Vietnamese, often giving local interviews and making statements that stress his antiwar views, and helping bend American 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 Mr. Searcy just out of college. Together, the two men founded Project Renew, based in Quang Tri, which since 2001 has been deploying teams of de-miners (there are now 180 of them), teaching schoolchildren how to stay safe and providing prosthetics and job training to victims of explosions.
Mr. Searcy said his commitment to postwar Vietnam is not from guilt, but a sense of responsibility to try to fix the damage caused by his country.
“They just bombed and bombed and bombed until there were no targets left,” he said. “That made no sense.”
Almost eight million tons of ordnance was dropped on Vietnam from 1965 to 1975, Mr. Searcy said. The Vietnamese government estimates that the de facto land mines 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 over 70 incidents a year to zero in 2019.
When he returned home to Georgia from his time in the Army in 1970, Mr. Searcy said, “I was angry and confused.” He enrolled at the University of Georgia, where he earned a degree in political science, and joined the group Vietnam Veterans Against the War.
Mr. Searcy became involved with politics, joining political campaigns and working as a U.S. Senate staff member.
In 1992, he and a friend returned to Vietnam “to see what the country looked like in peacetime.”
“We were amazed at the warm welcome from the Vietnamese people, who seemed to have forgiven us for the terrible pain and suffering we caused in the war,” Mr. Searcy wrote in a reminiscence published in The Vietnam Times in 2022.
When Mr. Searcy heard how many people were still being killed by unexploded bombs, he said, “my jaw dropped.”
In Project Renew’s two decades of operation, 815,000 bombs have been detonated or taken out of action, Mr. Searcy said. “Imagine that! 815,000,” he said. “My God!”
“They just bombed and bombed and bombed until there were no targets left. That made no sense.”
CHUCK SEARCY who now lives in Hanoi