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UXOs in Quang Tri: A Digital Narrative
Duration:
7 minutes and 27 seconds
Country:
United Kingdom
Language:
English
Genre:
Documentary
Producer:
Reginald Martell
Director:
Reginald Martell
Views:
68
(14
embedded)
Posted by:
studentsforrenew on Jul 4, 2009
A short film, from Students for Renew, about the continuing threat of unexploded ordinance in Quang Tri province, Vietnam.
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Video Transcription
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- ♪ [ Acoustic guitar strumming ] ♪
- In her 2006, Natural History of Vietnam,
- Eleanor Sterling likens the deminsions of Vietnam's political boarders to that of an hourglass.
- This shapely analogy is apt, but time, the abstract component in this analogy
- has not played its role in healing all of Vietnam's physical wounds
- Remnants of the Vietnam's War, "The American War," as they call it,
- compose only the top layer in this tiny country's geology of war;
- a strata that digs down through a thousand years of Vietnamese history.
- In many cases the rusting airplanes, and tank carcasses are sources of pride for the Vietnamese,
- acting as displays in the museum of Vietnam's thousand-year war for independence.
- And though they act as uncomfortable reminders,
- the war has long been over for these hulks.
- They're no threat to anyone.
- No one told the UXOs that the violence was over,
- and if they heard, they surely do not care
- They are our soulless mechanisms of war,
- and they wait with the quiet patience of a thing that deals only in death.
- During the middle part of the 20th Century, United States military aircraft dropped
- over 15-million tons of explosives and munitions on the country of Vietnam.
- ♪ [ music playing over loud concussions of exploding bombs ] ♪
- ♪ [ Music ] ♪
- Today the dangers comes, not from the bombs that did explode.
- It comes from the bombs that did not.
- They are the legacy.
- Of the 15-million tons dropped,
- 300,000 tons of those munitions lay at rest in Vietnam's countryside,
- waiting for the final shove that makes the explode.
- They're everywhere.
- These bombs and rockets; anti-personell mines, anti-tank mines,
- are known collectively as unexploded ordnance.
- UXOs
- These devices do not discriminate.
- Young.
- Old
- Men
- Women
- Livestock
- If misshandled they will explode.
- If handled correctly they still might explode.
- Exploding is the whole point for these things.
- Since the war ended in 1975
- 35,000 Vietnamese civilians have been killed in unexploded ordinance accidents.
- 35,000.
- That's like the death of every person attending a baseball game at Fenway Park.
- And just like the baseball fans, all civilians.
- Every one.
- ♪
- The most effected area is tiny Quang Tri province.
- In Vietnam's hourglass, Quang Tri is its pinched center.
- In Quang Tri the threat of UXOs is not one of simple bad luck.
- Poverty compounds the problem, because food and money often run short.
- One source of extra income is the duty paid for scrap metal.
- UXOs are an excellent source of scrap metal,
- so mines and shells are hunted by amateur deminers.
- A lot of them are kids,
- sent to find scraps to sell, or to clear newly discovered mines from crop fields
- Quang Tri's western half is a rugged place.
- There are no fields to spare.
- The mines must go with or without the assistance of a professional.
- A good share of the time the mines are harvested and sold without incident
- but sometimes they blow up.
- At the end of 2000, the Vietnam veterans Memorial fund
- - these are the folks that built the memorial in Washington D.C. -
- returned to Vietnam.
- The delegation, mostly veterans of the war,
- had been invited to celebrate 25 years of peace.
- Vietnam war veterans posses a unique knowledge of Southeast Asia.
- They knew that if anyone had earned a peaceful existence, it was the Vietnamese.
- Something had to be done about the UXOs.
- A true peace for Vietnam meant getting the bombs and the mines out of the ground;
- neutralize the treat so that no one else gets hurt,
- and help those who have been hurt construct a meaningful life,
- with things like medicine,
- prosthetics, or maybe a house;
- a job
- an education
- a cow,
- anything they could do to help. It was time to do it.
- They started an organization and called it "Project RENEW."
- Restoring the Environment and Neutralizing the Effects of War.
- That's the acronym.
- Neutralizing the effects of war.
- That's the least we can do.
- ♫ Talk to me, talk to me, please ♫
- ♫ Talk to me, talk to me, please ♫


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