The war that killed Dinh Nguyen ended long before he was born.
Just under a year ago, the 34-year-old was hunting in a pond on the edge of his village in central Vietnam for snails to feed his ducks when he found a large metal object. Unaware of the danger he was in, he lifted it from the muddy bed and brought it to the roadside for closer inspection. The American mortar round slipped through his wet fingers and exploded.
A neighbour tried to stem the flow of blood but Dinh Nguyen died before the ambulance arrived.
Two years earlier, less than 100km away in the village of Dai Trach, Nhi Bao Hoang was playing in a field with her sister when a bomb went off a few metres away.
“I saw the explosion and was very scared,” the 13-year-old recalled, sitting on a small chair in her secondary school and pointing to the end of her classroom, 12m away, to indicate the distance. “It was very loud and very close.”
She explained that men were digging a trench close to her home when they came across the shell. “The bomb just exploded,” she said. “I picked up my sister and ran home to tell my parents.”
Wednesday marked the 50th anniversary of the fall of Saigon. American forces withdrew in haste, airlifting staff and civilians from the US embassy roof by helicopter. Their departure marked the collapse of the South Vietnamese government and the end of the Vietnam War, but it did not end the killing.
Between 1965 and 1975, according to the US Department of Defence, which digitised and then publicly released its records in 2016, the US military carried out more than a million bombing missions in Vietnam.
Altogether the US and its allies dropped more than 7.5 million tonnes of bombs over Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia, more than were dropped during the Second World War by the Allies and their opponents. It remains the largest aerial bombardment in human history.
Quang Binh province, where Nhi’s school is, was once on the edge of the demilitarised zone (DMZ), dividing North from South. The battles were fierce and the bombing ferocious. It remains one of the most dangerous areas in the country, littered with unexploded ordnance (UXO) including cluster munitions, shells and landmines.
The Mines Advisory Group (MAG), a UK charity that clears UXO from warzones across the world, was at the school to teach Nhi and her classmates about the dangers hidden in the ground around them. The children played games, watched a cartoon produced by MAG and even recited the emergency hotline number out loud.
Dressed in her school uniform of white shirt and red scarf, Nhi recited what she had just been taught: “I mustn’t touch the bombs or bring them home.”
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Since 1999, MAG has cleared 286 square kilometres of land. But almost 60,000 square kilometres of the country is still contaminated, about a fifth of its total territory, according to the Vietnam National Mine Action Centre, a national steering committee dedicated to overcoming the remnants of war.
At her office in the nearby city of Dong Hoi, Sarah Goring, MAG’s director for Vietnam, pores over a spreadsheet with 1,009,828 rows, detailing each US bombing mission carried out in the war. A different column denotes what was dropped by which aircraft on what target.
“We want to make all reasonable efforts to clear all known areas,” Goring said. “But you can’t clear it all. Look at the UK. You still find UXO there today.”
There is no quick fix for UXO clearance, especially when the bombing has been on the scale of the US campaign in Vietnam. The work is expensive, slow and extremely dangerous.
But it delivers on an economic as well as a humanitarian level. People living in areas cleared by MAG have seen their average per capita income grow from $890 per year in 2015 to $2,400 in 2023, Goring said. They are no longer afraid to farm their own land.
In a rubber tree plantation near Con Mit village, men and women dressed in khaki uniforms and wide-brimmed hats emblazoned with the MAG logo and an American flag, swung metal detectors across the ground.
Kneeling among the trees, Kieu Thi Dinh, 33, the deputy team leader, explained what led her to such perilous work.
“A neighbour of mine was killed by an explosion when I was 15,” she said. “Their body was torn apart, and some parts couldn’t even be recovered. That memory haunts me to this day.”
She joined MAG to help others live without that fear.
The team moved forward inch by inch through the dense heat, ears cocked for any sound from their instruments. Red sticks and string marked out the dangerous areas amid the lush green vegetation.
Before long they came to an unexploded cluster munition, one of three pieces of UXO found that day among the trees. They carefully laid explosives over it, built a fortress of sandbags and then retreated 250m to trigger a controlled detonation along a wire.
The farmer, Nhat Van Le, looked out across his land towards his rubber trees.
“I can’t even remember when I found the first bomb, it was so long ago,” he said, as five puppies played around his feet. “There were so many cluster munitions dropped on this area because it was next to the main supply route to the north. The area is famous for sweet potatoes. There are almost as many cluster munitions in the ground as potatoes.”
The explosion ripped through the air, echoing off the hills nearby. The sandbags absorbed most of the shrapnel.
MAG is one of several charities working to reduce the dangers from UXO in the country.
It was founded in 1989 by a former British Army engineer, Rae McGrath, and now employs 775 people in Vietnam. Most of its funding comes from the US State Department. Washington has donated more than $250 million to UXO clearance in Vietnam — a fraction of the estimated $100 billion the nation spent on its military campaign.
That funding came under threat in January, when President Trump ordered a sweeping freeze on foreign aid. MAG received a “stop work” order, suspended all operations and gave notice to its staff.
A temporary 90-day waiver allowed operations to resume, but the future is uncertain.
Global demand for de-mining services is only likely to grow: more than 20,000 people are killed each year globally by UXO.
According to the International Committee of the Red Cross, more than 80 countries across the world are affected by explosive remnants of war. MAG works in 25 countries alone, from Angola to Zimbabwe. The global menace of landmines and UOX shows no sign of easing, as conflicts in Gaza, Lebanon and Ukraine generate new minefields.
The Centre for European Policy Analysis, a US think tank based in Washington, says Ukraine is now the most heavily mined country in the world. Over 40 per cent of its territory is affected even though cluster munitions are banned by the UN and the use of anti-personnel mines is forbidden under the Ottawa Treaty. Russia is not a signatory, however, and Estonia, Finland, Latvia, Lithuania and Poland have all recently announced plans to withdraw from the treaty, preferring to mine their own land than cede it to a potential Russian invasion.
Last week, President Putin announced plans for a three-day pause in fighting in Ukraine, while President Trump pushed for a full ceasefire. However, the damage caused by UXO has already been done. Military analysts estimate Russia was firing more than 600,000 artillery shells a month, including cluster munitions, by the end of 2024 — outpacing the 250,000 shells it produces each month according to Nato — not to mention missiles, drones and grenades. If it has taken half a century to partially clear Vietnam, what does this mean for continuing conflicts such as the war in Ukraine?
In Vietnam, unexploded ordnance has killed more than 40,000 people since the end of the war and injured 60,000 others, the majority of whom are the family breadwinner, according to the Vietnam Union of Friendship Organisations. Half a century after the conflict ended, 1,000 people are killed in the country each year on average by UXO and more than 1,300 are permanently injured.
Hoan Van Nguyen is a Vietnamese farmer whose land MAG has cleared and whose mother and sister were killed in 1968 by a bomb dropped from a US plane.
Then on a hot spring day 30 years ago, the former naval officer went fishing with his brother and father. His brother felt something strange underfoot as he stepped into the river. He bent down and pulled from the water an unexploded American-made BLU-61 cluster bomb, before tossing it away. It exploded on impact, killing him and Hoan’s father instantly.
“I fell backwards and thought I had dust in my eyes. I tried to wash them as I didn’t understand it was an injury from shrapnel,” said Hoan, 64, pointing at his eye, now permanently closed.
“The munitions here belong to the US and so they should clear Vietnam so people can live without fear,” he said with a sigh, watching his chickens delicately weave their way through his garden. “Fifty years later it’s still their responsibility to make Vietnam safe.”
