DONG HA, Vietnam — On a visit to the former Khe Sanh battlefield, scene of one of the bloodiest clashes of the Vietnam War, the only people Chuck Searcy encountered were two boys who led him to an unexploded rocket.
One of the boys extended his leg to kick the bomb until Searcy yelled, “No, stop!”
“It was my first encounter with unexploded ordnance,” Searcy said of that moment in 1992. “I had no idea I would dedicate my life to removing them.”
It was not his first encounter with Vietnam. He was there as a soldier in 1968, the same year as the Battle of Khe Sanh, and came away disillusioned. As an intelligence analyst for the U.S. Army, he had access to raw information, from enemy body counts to exaggerated claims about American progress.
“I saw that our friends at home were being given information that was not only misleading, but deliberate lies,” Searcy said.
When his tour of duty ended, he doubted not only the war but his own character. “Sometimes I've really wondered if my shyness or my refusal to step forward and say this is wrong, if it was a moral failure on my part,” he said. “I was failing in a duty I had as an American.”
That sense of duty has driven him to dedicate his life to repairing one of the deadliest legacies of war: the millions of unexploded bombs and landmines that continue to wound and kill people.
Now 79 and living in Hanoi, Searcy is perhaps the best-known American veteran among Vietnamese.
“Chuck was one of the pioneers among the veterans in normalizing relations,” said Hoang Nam, a senior government official in Quang Tri province who met Searcy straight out of university. Together, the two men founded Project Renew, based in Quang Tri, which since 2001 has been deploying demining teams (currently there are 180) and providing prosthetic limbs and job training to explosion victims.
Searcy said his commitment to post-war Vietnam is not out of guilt, but out of a sense of responsibility to try to repair the damage done by his country. “They just bombed and bombed until there were no targets left,” he said. “That didn't make sense.”
Nearly 8 million tons of munitions were dropped on Vietnam between 1965 and 1975, Searcy said. The Vietnamese Government estimates that de facto landmines have caused 100,000 deaths and injuries since the end of the war.
Since Project Renew began its work, in partnership with Norwegian People's Aid, the number of victims in Quang Tri has decreased from more than 70 incidents per year to zero in 2019.
When he returned to Georgia after his time in the Army in 1970, Searcy said, “I was angry and confused.” He enrolled at the University of Georgia, where he earned a bachelor's degree in political science and joined the group Vietnam Veterans Against the War.
In 1992 Searcy returned to Vietnam “to see what the country was like in peacetime.” When Searcy learned how many people were still dying from unexploded bombs, he said, “My jaw dropped.”
In the 20 years of Project Renew's operation, 815,000 bombs have been detonated or disabled, Searcy said. “Imagine that! 815 thousand,” he said. “My God!”.
“They just bombed and bombed until there were no targets left. “That didn't make sense.”
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