By Jonathan Bloom, KGO
SAN FRANCISCO — Next year will mark the 50th anniversary of the start of the Vietnam War. Though U.S. and Vietnamese relations have long since been patched up, there are wounds from that war that haven’t healed — many of them in Vietnam itself. An American veteran has made it his mission to clean up what the war left behind.
Chuck Searcy, an American veteran has made it his mission to clean up the mess that was left behind during the Vietnam War. Image taken from video by KGO.
They’re the remnants of war — cluster bombs dropped by American forces on Vietnam.
“The Defense Department estimates that about 10 percent did not detonate as designed,” said Chuck Searcy. “So when they fell to the ground intact, now today, 40 years later, they’re exploding and they kill and maim people.”
Searcy is a veteran of that war, now living in Vietnam. His mission is to clean up what’s left behind.
“The real goal has to be making Vietnam safe,” he said. “And that’s very different from cleaning up every bomb and mine.”
For Searcy’s Project RENEW, that means teaching the Vietnamese how to deal with those American bombs. But, there’s a new threat.
“It is the most toxic substance known to man,” he said.
Agent Orange was a chemical the U.S. dropped on thick Vietnamese jungles.
“That was designed to defoliate the trees and to expose the enemy — the Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese — so that we could attack them, bomb them,” Searcy said.
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