The PM/WRA delegation visiting NPA/RENEW’s central demolition site at Hoi Yen village, Vinh Dinh commune, where explosive ordnance items recovered through the QTMAC hotline are safely destroyed.
HOI YEN VILLAGE (12 May 2026) – On the morning of 12 May, a five-member delegation from the Office of Weapons Removal and Abatement (PM/WRA) of the U.S. Department of State, together with the U.S. Embassy in Hanoi, arrived at NPA/RENEW’s Central Demolition Site (CDS) in Vĩnh Định Commune. The delegation was led by Programme Manager Ethan Rinks.
The visit was part of PM/WRA’s periodic monitoring of its grantees in central Vietnam. The destination was a perimetered clearing in the heart of one of the province’s most heavily contaminated districts, where unexploded ordnance recovered from across Quảng Trị is taken for safe and permanent destruction.
Six items were waiting.
The demolition pit prepared at NPA/RENEW’s CDS for the 5-inch naval shell containing white phosphorus, unearthed by a Trúc Lâm villager tending his garden in Gio Linh.
Five of them had been recovered from a single field in Vĩnh Quang Hạ Village, Gio Linh Commune. A farmer working his land had uncovered a metallic object protruding from the soil. He recognized what he saw, an 81mm mortar round, and called the QTMAC hotline. NPA/RENEW’s Explosive Ordnance Disposal team, tasked by the Quảng Trị Mine Action Centre, arrived to investigate. A careful search of the area around the find produced four more items the farmer had not seen, all U.S.-pattern munitions: three M79 grenades and an M26 hand grenade, all lying in the same soil where his rice would have grown.
The sixth item came from a different Gio Linh field, and a different story. In Trúc Lâm Village, a man tending his garden uncovered something larger: a 5-inch U.S. naval shell, fired from offshore more than half a century ago, its white phosphorus filler still viable. Another phone call to QTMAC. Another response by the EOD team. Another recovery and transport to Hội Yên.
Before the demolition began, the delegation walked the perimeter of an older crater nearby, twenty meters wide and five meters deep. It had been formed six days earlier, when NPA/RENEW’s EOD team destroyed a 750-pound M117 aerial bomb at this same site. That earlier bomb, recovered from beside the Sa Lung railway in Vĩnh Linh, had been quietly waiting just thirty centimeters below the soil for over fifty years until repair workers uncovered it. The crater now stood as a sobering measure of what the railway, and the families living beside it, had been spared.
The delegation observing a crater 20 meters wide and 5 meters deep, resulting from the demolition of the 750-pound high-explosive M117 aerial bomb which the NPA/RENEW EOD team handled on 6 May, following a local community report of an item found near the North – South railway.
NPA/RENEW Team Leader Hoàng Kim Chiến then briefed the delegation on the sequence to come: two separate detonations, the first for the five high-explosive items from Vĩnh Quang Hạ, the second for the white phosphorus shell from Trúc Lâm. The operation was coordinated with the commune authorities and the Military Liaison Officer.
NPA/RENEW EOD team leader Hoang Kim Chien briefing the PM/WRA delegation on the two sequenced detonations that his team is going to undertake in coordination with the commune authorities and military liaisons.
The first detonation came shortly afterwards. The second followed once the team had confirmed the site was clear. By mid-morning, all six items were gone.
Six items. Two villages. Two phone calls. One complete cycle of the provincially-led, partner-implemented model that defines mine action in Quảng Trị.
The 5-inch shell recovered from Trúc Lâm carries its own historical weight. Naval gunfire support along the Vietnamese coast, particularly off Quảng Trị and the former Demilitarized Zone, was sustained throughout the war. That such a shell could lie intact in a Gio Linh garden for more than fifty years, its filler still chemically viable, is a measure of how patient the legacy of that bombardment has been.
The moment of the demolition for the white phosphorus shell, which requires separate handling. Half a century after they were fired, six explosive remnants of war end their journey in two controlled demolitions.
It is also a measure of why monitoring visits like this one matter. Every survey conducted, every square meter cleared, every item safely destroyed in central Vietnam stands on a partnership that has been sustained, year after year, by U.S. Government support delivered through PM/WRA.
Fifty years after the war, the work continues. From the rice fields of Vĩnh Quang Hạ to the gardens of Trúc Lâm, the soil of Quảng Trị is being returned, item by item, to the families who live above it.
We sincerely thank the Government of the United States, through the U.S. Embassy in Hanoi, for the valuable support that makes this work possible.
