Project Phongsali 2011: The UXO that people want us to remove are large bombs. 500, 750 and even 2,000 pounders.

In village after village we are finding bomb canisters mostly empty of explosives but still holding fuses and boosters. If these are struck or exposed to fire they will explode blast shrapnel.

Day Twenty-Two

We’re not quite through our first week of work with the complete team, but I’m beginning to see a pattern emerging that will require us to adapt and adjust.

Most mornings we’ve headed out of camp intending to search schoolyards and destroy any ordnance that we find lurking under foot. All schools in this district were built on uncleared land and may well contain hidden UXO.

We plan schoolyard clearance, in part, as an overture to the villages, a calling card so to speak. We reason that students will excitedly tell their parents that a clearance team has arrived, is searching for ordnance, and is visiting classrooms to teach safety. From child to parent, villager to villager, word of our mission will quickly spread.

In addition, if we find and destroy items in a schoolyard near a village, the blast from our controlled demolition will shake the ground, rattle windows, and inspire villagers to reflect on ordnance they might have previously encountered in forest and field — stuff that people sometimes neglect to tell us about because they’ve grown reconciled to living with the danger.

A good plan, if we can implement. Thus far, we’ve yet to fire up a detector in the vicinity of a school. Everyday we set out with good intentions and are promptly waylaid by people with problem ordnance. What people are showing us is, for the most part, stuff recently excavated during the rebuilding of Highway 2E.

People are leading us to general-purpose bombs — mostly 750 pounders. (But, an impressive 2,000-pounder as well!) Most of the casings have been tampered with, and those that have been successfully opened are largely empty of explosive. Of the wide assortment that we’ve inspected, few are safe to have parked in a populated area. Some still have several pounds of high explosive in them, and all have fuses and boosters intact.

We’ve rendered nearly a dozen of these casings safe this week, and have a growing list of bombs that people have described. Clearly, at this pace we may not get to a schoolyard anytime soon.

How many of these suckers can there be? The company building the road was permitted to begin construction without clearing the roadway of ordnance, on the assumption that there is very little UXO in Phongsali province. Someone has dangerously miscalculated.