Project Sekong 2012: Some of the refuse of war that we find is safe for villagers to recycle into things useful around the farm.
After a cluster bomb casing left the airplane it split in two and dispersed as many as 670 cluster bomblets. The casings halves then fell to earth. Today, people still find them and put them to use. Here, farmers have used them as supports for their elevated rice storage bins. They'll support a lot of weight and are difficult for rats to climb.
Report 12
We’re running into just enough old ordnance now to keep the deminers on their toes. One of our guys turned up a 40mm rocket grenade. Another, several rounds of antiaircraft ammunition. Then, one of the ladies got a strong reading on her detector and after a fair amount of digging was rewarded with a seven-foot long bomb casing. To our relief, it turned out to be, not a general-purpose bomb filled with explosive, but an empty casing that once dispersed a load of 670 cluster bomblets.
Almost always we find these cluster bomb casings empty, their load having been scattered as intended over the countryside. But on rare occasions we find an intact casing still full of bomblets, a consequence of the casing not having opened properly after it left the airplane that dropped it. It’s an impressive sight to see hundreds of factory-fresh bomblets jam packed inside, and the find always results in an awesome demolition. But, a full casing makes for a lot of time-consuming work so we were happy to discover that ours was completely empty.
Then, just 47 feet away from the first canister a deminer found a second. It too was empty. The mystery is that we are not finding any bomblets. If these two casings indicate that clusters were dropped here, then some surviving bomblets from those payloads should be littered about. But, we’re not finding that evidence. Strange.
It’s not a bad state of affairs when the deminers have a mystery like this to ponder. Worse is for their work to grow so uneventful that they become bored, loose concentration, and grow careless.