Trail

I just got back from a week on the old Ho Chi Minh Trail. Thing is, there was no trail. The trail was more of a concept, an agreement between the Lao government and the North Vietnamese government. The Lao revolution got military support and financial assistance from the Vietnamese, and the Vietnamese got untrammeled access and logistical support from the Lao. There was no one specific road, with green signs saying, "Ho Chi Minh Trail exit 23". It was a web of paths and roads and villages and foxholes and tunnels and caves and jungles and ponds and paddies. The US really tried, really tried so hard to interrupt the flow of goodies down this network. Dropped a lot of bombs.

That's one of the reasons I was there, I was out following a bomb disposal team for a week. Learned a lot; I guess I know a lot of the basics of demining now. Saw a lot of hardware and an unbelievable amount of scrap. You have to wade through mountains of fragments and tidbits to find and neutralize the still-active munitions out there. The deminers work hard. I sweated a lot; I wasn't even digging or working, just watching and shooting. What's the translation from Celsius to Fahrenheit? I don't know, but I know now that 41 degrees is furnace-hot and it's so moist that you could be sandwiched in a boxer's armpit.



Wanna see some bombs? Here. Look. The little one's a BLU-26 bomblet with the exterior skin rusted away, just showing you the casing of ballbearings that spray everywhere when it explodes. The big ones are 500-lb MK-83 general purpose bombs. They make a big crater, except when the fuse fails and they lie buried deep in the dirt. Still active; you wouldn't want to bang on the silver bit with a hammer, that would be rash, but you can kick the side of it and nothing happens.

UXO(unexploded ordnance) isn't like landmines; it doesn't tend to go off unless you molest it with a bit of fervor, such by digging a hole or plowing a field.

What really blew me away was the scale. The volume of shrapnel that the detectors find is immense. but each little squeal of the detector has to be treated with the same care as if it were a live bomb. Think about it: imagine a little bomb the size of your fist, coated in ball bearings. When it explodes, those several hundred ballbearings go everywhere. And this little bomb is one of 500 that came out of the same cluster shell, one of four shells dropped by that Phantom, that Phantom being one of the four Phantoms flying that bombing mission, that mission being one of 580,000 flown. So they weren't all Phantoms, they weren't all BLU-26 cluster bombs, etc. etc. But you get the idea. There's a lot of scrap metal making it difficult to pick out the shit that didn;t go off and is still there. Oh- there's a bunch of crap left over from the ground fighting oo, not to mention the odd nail or piece of wire that someone might have lost at some point. In any case, it's a pain in the ass, it's semi-dangerous, it's hot and nasty, and there are bugs crawling on you. And some annoying journalist taking your photo.

I'm very grateful to the guys who brought me with; I understand it can be annoying to have a non-worker on a work site. I'm doing a little publicity blurb for them, and I shot some stuff for them that they needed for their own purposes. It's the least I could do.