An American who helped clear 815,000 bombs from Vietnam

During a visit to the former battlefield of Khe Sanh, scene of one of the bloodiest confrontations of the Vietnam War, the only people Chuck Searcy encountered on the wide, barren field were two young boys who led him to an unexploded rocket near there was a ditch. .

One of the youths reached out to kick the bomb, until Mr. Searcy shouted, “No, stop!”

“It was my first encounter with unexploded ordnance,” Mr. Searcy said of that moment in 1992. “I had no idea I would dedicate my life to removing it.”

It was not Mr. 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 a U.S. Army intelligence analyst, he had had access to a range of raw information, from enemy fatalities to exaggerated claims about American progress.

“We’ve seen almost everything,” he said in a recent interview. “And I saw our friends back home being fed information that was not only misleading, but deliberate lies.”

“That shocked us as innocent young men,” he added, “and we started to feel like the system was broken.

By the time his one year of service was over, Mr. Searcy found himself doubting not only the war, but his own character.

“I have sometimes wondered whether my shyness or refusal to step up and say this was wrong, whether this was a moral failure on my part,” he said. “It was a concern that made me feel like I was failing in a duty I had as an American.”

That sense of duty has driven him to devote his life to repairing one of the war’s most deadly legacies: the millions of unexploded bombs and landmines that continue to kill and injure people.

Mr. Searcy, now 79 years old and living in Hanoi, is perhaps the best-known American veteran among the Vietnamese. He often gives local interviews and makes statements emphasizing his anti-war views, helping to shift U.S. policy toward involvement in 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 has deployed teams of deminers since 2001, teaching schoolchildren how to stay safe and providing prosthetics and vocational training to victims.

Mr. Searcy said he was often asked what motivates his commitment to the well-being of postwar Vietnam.

It’s not guilt, he said. Rather, it is a sense of responsibility to try to repair the damage his country has caused.

The phrase he particularly embraces is a Marine Corps directive requiring the disposal of spent metal shell casings at a shooting range: Keep your brass in order.

Mr. Searcy, both figuratively and literally, oversees the deadly munitions left by the Americans throughout Vietnam.

Quang Tri Province, the location of Khe Sanh and on the border with the Ho Chi Minh Trail, lies just below the line that divided South and North Vietnam. It was the most heavily bombed region in Vietnam, Mr. Searcy said.

“It was a bit pointless,” he said. “They bombed and bombed and bombed until there were no targets left. That didn’t make any sense.”

In all, Mr. Searcy said, nearly eight million tons of munitions were dropped on Vietnam between 1965 and 1975. Bombs that failed to detonate became de facto landmines, which the Vietnamese government says have caused 100,000 deaths and injuries since the end of the war.

Since Project Renew began work in partnership with Norwegian People’s Aid – an organization that conducts landmine clearance operations in more than a dozen countries – the toll in Quang Tri has dropped from more than 70 incidents per year to zero in 2019. Together with For the Norwegians Project Renew employs 180 deminers.

The goal, says Mr Nam, Renew’s co-director, is to get the problem under control so people can live their lives without fear. But every day, Mr. Searcy said, his deminers receive two, three or four reports of newly discovered munitions.

Two people have been killed in Quang Tri in the past three years: a man who was digging a new floor in his kitchen and a boy who picked up and threw a cluster bomb.

In addition, annual floods cause the ground to shift, making it impossible to declare an area definitively free of ammunition.

“It is impossible for a province or a country to be absolutely free of bombs,” Mr. Nam said.

One victim, Ho Van Lai, 34, now works with Renew, teaching schoolchildren to identify and avoid unexploded bombs.

He was a child 24 years ago when he came across a cluster bomb, known here as a bombie, on the side of the road. “We thought they were toys to play with,” he says. “I was curious. I started hitting it with a rock. I didn’t hear the explosion, but I heard my friends screaming, and I felt hot inside.”

He lost both legs below the knee, one arm above the elbow and the sight in one eye.

After his year as an Army intelligence analyst in Vietnam, Mr. Searcy ended his military stint in Germany. When he returned to Athens, Georgia, in 1970, he said, “I was angry and confused.”

He enrolled at the University of Georgia, where he earned a BA in political science, joined the anti-war group Vietnam Veterans Against the War and began speaking out publicly about his views.

His father, who had fought the Germans and been imprisoned during World War II, was furious.

“We don’t know who you are anymore,” his parents told him. “What happened to you? Did they turn you into a communist?”

But as happened to many Americans during those years, his parents’ doubts about the war gradually increased and their views changed.

“Your mother and I talked,” his father told him one day months later, “and we came to the conclusion that the war is a bad thing, that you were right and we were wrong.”

Together with a colleague he founded a weekly newspaper, The Athens Observer, and ran it for more than ten years. Mr. Searcy subsequently became involved in politics, participating in political campaigns and serving as a U.S. Senate staffer.

In 1992, he returned to Vietnam with an army buddy “to see what the country looked like in peacetime.”

A month into their journey, they found a country still suffering, cut off from international aid by a US embargo and struggling in poverty under doctrinaire communist economic restrictions.

“We were amazed by the warm welcome of the Vietnamese people, who seemed to have forgiven us for the terrible pain and suffering we had caused in the war,” Mr. Searcy wrote in a remembrance published in The Vietnam Times in 2022 published. “I realized that then I wanted to come back and find a way to help the Vietnamese people recover from the tragic war that the United States had caused.”

His first opportunity to help came in 1995 when the Vietnam Veterans of America Foundation asked him to create a humanitarian project to help disabled children, amputees and others crippled by polio, cerebral palsy and other diseases.

When Mr Searcy heard how many people were still being killed by unexploded bombs, he said: “My jaw dropped.”

This became his mission. He and the Norwegian group founded Renew with half a million dollars in seed money from private donors.

Mr. Searcy has become a fixture in Hanoi’s expat community, a tall, lanky figure who speaks the language and seems to know almost everyone.

“He is inveterately sociable,” wrote George Black, who tells his story in “The long reckoning: A story of war, peace and redemption in Vietnam.”

In 2003, Mr. Searcy received the Vietnam National Friendship Medal, the highest honor given to a foreigner who has contributed to the country’s prosperity.

In Project Renew’s 20 years of operation, 815,000 bombs of all kinds have been detonated or disabled, Mr. Searcy said: air-dropped bombs, cluster bombs, artillery shells, booby traps, grenades and mortar rounds.

“Imagine that! 815,000,” he said: “My God!”