This story follows the 22 September 2026 report on the safe disposal of the MK82 bomb, published on NPA Vietnam’s Facebook page.

On the morning of 16 September 2026, NPA/RENEW team member Phạm Xuân Sang was searching a rubber and lemongrass plantation farmed by Mr. Nguyễn Văn Bòn in Gio An Tây village, Cồn Tiên commune, Quảng Trị Province, when his detector registered an unusually strong signal that suggested a larger item could be buried beneath the ground.

“When I detected the signal, I could see it covered a wide area,” Sang said. “I sensed there was something big down there, so I followed the procedure.”

Once uncovered, the item was reported, and Provincial Operations Manager Mai Văn Việt and EOD team leader Hoàng Kim Chiến identified it as an MK82 aerial bomb weighing approximately 227 kilograms (500 pounds) and containing roughly 87 kilograms of Tritonal explosive. Lying below the surface, this unseen danger had remained hidden beneath land that Mr. Bòn’s family had farmed for years.

That same day, the team safely removed and transported the bomb to NPA/RENEW’s Central Demolition Site in Vĩnh Định commune and safely demolished it at 11:40 AM.

Two weeks later, we returned to Gio An Tây to hear from the people who live and work there about what the discovery meant to them.

“The consequences would not fall on one or two people”

Mr. Lê Quang Gián, chief of Gio An Tây village, said the area saw fierce fighting during the war, and that explosive remnants are still common despite many years have passed. Many people in the village, from the elderly to the middle-aged and younger residents, still live with injuries from bombs and shells.

“For a bomb of that size to be found by the team is something to be truly glad about, because its destructive power is enormous,” he said. “When people reclaim land, if someone happened to strike it, the consequences would not fall on one or two people. Many people would be affected, and it would spread fear through the village.”

The village regularly reminds residents to report any suspected item to the authorities and never to touch or move it themselves.

Back to work on safe ground

Clearance at the site began on 5 August 2026 and is expected to finish by 21 October 2026, with about 695,088 square metres of land being released back to the community once completed. Mr. Gián said many plots in the village have never been worked. Once they are cleared, he said, families can farm with confidence and even bring in machinery to open up the land.

One of those plots belongs to 68-year-old Mrs. Nguyễn Thị Thiết. When we met her, she was weeding her 1.5 hectares of land, which was located within the task area, to prepare for a new crop of acacia.

For years, she said, the thought of what lay under her hoe “sent a chill through me.” In the past, she explained, people often took the risk of gathering the items they found in their gardens into one pile, just so they could keep farming. “In the old days, I didn’t dare to dig hard, for fear of hitting a bomb.”

“Today I feel at ease,” she said. “I can dig deeper and wider.”

Her message to the clearance teams was short: “Thank you for working so hard to bring safety to the people of our village.”

“True to our mission”

Sang has worked with NPA/RENEW since 2018. For him, finding the MK82 was more than a technical achievement.

“I did something that is true to the mission of our organisation,” he said. “Helping people farm their land more safely.”

His advice to residents echoes the village chief’s: “To keep yourself and the people around you safe, if you find anything you suspect is explosive, report it to the authorities or call the hotline 0901 941 941.”

NPA sincerely thanks the Government of the United States 🇺🇸 through the U.S. Embassy in Hanoi, and the Government of Norway 🇳🇴, for the valuable support to our meaningful mine action work in Vietnam 🇻🇳.

Quang Tri, August 2026. The Embassy of Ireland has awarded a grant of €257,927 to RENEW Centre for Rehabilitation and Disability Support to continue victim assistance, disability support, and explosive ordnance risk education across Quang Tri and Quang Ngai provinces. The grant covers the twelve months from 1 August 2026 to 31 July 2027.

Ambassador Deirdre Ní Fhallúin and RENEW Director Nguyen Hieu Trung signed the contract this month. Of the total, €225,927 supports activities in Quang Tri and €31,000 supports activities in Quang Ngai, where RENEW has worked since 2019.

A Continuing Partnership

The Embassy of Ireland has funded RENEW’s risk education work since 2015 and added support for survivors and people with disabilities in 2016. That funding has continued each year since, now under the program “Victim Assistance/Disability Support and Explosive Ordnance Risk Education toward a safe community from explosive ordnance risk,” part of the Embassy’s 2023–2027 strategy in Vietnam.

RENEW’s management team and Chuck Searcy with Irish Ambassador Deirdre Ní Fhallúin and Head of Development Cooperation Edel Cribbin at the event marking 20 years of Ireland-Vietnam partnership for sustainable development, Hanoi, 25 June 2026.

“I would like to thank you and your team for your commitment to this project,” Ambassador Ní Fhallúin wrote to RENEW ahead of the signing. “I look forward to a continued fruitful partnership with RENEW Centre.”

Ireland’s support sits alongside contributions from the Vietnamese government and RENEW’s other international partners, including Norwegian People’s Aid, in a partnership that dates to Project RENEW’s founding in 2001.

What the Grant Supports

The funding continues two lines of work RENEW has built side by side for more than two decades.

The first is risk education: teaching people, and especially children, to recognize explosive ordnance and report it rather than move it. RENEW has reached more than 342,000 boys, girls, men and women in Quang Tri to date.

The second is direct support for survivors and people with disabilities. This includes prosthetics and assistive devices that RENEW has provided to 3,149 persons with disabilities, along with rehabilitation and vocational training that helps a person rebuild a livelihood after an accident.

A Family in Khe Sanh

Hồ Văn Y is one of the people that second kind of support is for. He lost a leg at seventeen, in an explosion while working in a coffee garden in the Khe Sanh area. Today he lives in Ruong Village with his wife and their three sons, in a stilt house with four breeding cows on the hillside around it.

On 28 May 2026, Edel Cribbin, Head of Development Cooperation at the Embassy of Ireland, visited the family at home, one of many families affected by postwar UXO who are rebuilding their lives with assistance from RENEW.

Edel Cribbin, Head of the International Development Programme at the Embassy of Ireland, visits the family of Hồ Văn Y in Ruong Village, Khe Sanh, on 28 May 2026.

Join Our Mission

Every device removed and every survivor supported depends on partners who stay for the long term. RENEW Centre thanks the Embassy of Ireland, and the people of Ireland, for their continued trust.

To learn more about RENEW’s work in Quang Tri and Quang Ngai, or to support it, visit landmines.org.vn.

This project is funded by the Government of Ireland’s International Development Programme through the Embassy of Ireland in Hanoi.

The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of RENEW Centre and do not necessarily represent or reflect the views of the Government of Ireland or the Embassy of Ireland.

Quảng Trị, August 2026

Mr. Chuck Searcy, co-founder of Project RENEW and representative of VVMF in Vietnam, and Mr. Hoàng Đăng Mai, Chief of the Foreign Affairs Division, Office of the Quảng Trị Provincial People’s Committee, cut the ribbon to launch Project RENEW. Đông Hà. 15 August 2021.

On 15 August 2001, a small team began work in Quảng Trị with a single purpose: to help families live safely on land that still held the explosive remnants of a war that had ended a generation earlier. That was the beginning of Project RENEW.

Ms. Edel Cribbin and colleagues from the Embassy of Ireland, together with staff of the RENEW Center, visit the family of Mr. Hồ Văn Y, a UXO survivor near the former Tà Cơn Airbase. Khe Sanh, 26 May 2026.

Twenty-five years later, that work goes on.

In a quarter of a century, the confirmed hazardous land across the former province (South Quảng Trị) has been surveyed field by field, and more than half of it has now been cleared and given back to the farmers who depend on it. More than 3,000 people, many living with the lasting effects of the war, have received prosthetic limbs and rehabilitation. Children have learned to recognize and stay away from unexploded ordnance at the Project RENEW Mine Action Visitor Center. Survivors and people with disabilities have built livelihoods that provide for entire families.

None of this has been the work of one organization alone. From the first day, Project RENEW has been carried by the people of Quảng Trị and by friends around the world who believed this land could be made safe again.

Among those friends, Friends of Project RENEW, our support group in the United States, has launched a campaign to mark the anniversary: “$25 for 25 Years.” Every gift helps teach a child to stay safe and restore mobility to a survivor.

The danger is far smaller than it once was. It is not yet gone. As we mark 25 years, we are not only looking back at what has been done, but forward to the day when no family in Quảng Trị has to fear the ground beneath their feet.

To support the next 25 years, visit Friends of Project RENEW.

More than thirty years ago, Chuck Searcy returned to Vietnam for the first time since the war. In a July interview with Quảng Trị Radio and Television, the Project RENEW co-founder looked back on that journey.

“The most special aspect of Quảng Trị, the thing that strikes almost all Americans and foreigners first, is the combination of determination, resilience and strength in the people of Quảng Trị,” he said. “But also their compassion and their forgiveness, because they have experienced so much tragedy over the past decades, with the terrible war and its terrible consequences here. And yet they remain open, warm, friendly, welcoming to everyone. It’s wonderful, and it’s an amazing characteristic of the people of Quảng Trị province.”

Comparing today’s Quảng Trị to the province he first knew, he described a place transformed: “The biggest changes are the most obvious ones, in the infrastructure, the land, and the prosperity of the local people, compared to 30 years ago, when Quảng Trị was very, very poor and desperately seeking to revitalize, to grow, to prosper, to build a new life for the people. That was a very difficult time, decades ago. And today the results are obvious. There are new buildings, new roadways and infrastructure. There is land being farmed productively. There’s industry, development, growth in services, the educational system. Everything in Quảng Trị today is so much better than it was years ago, when I first came here. Growth and the development here.”

Asked at the close of the interview what message he would send today’s generation in Vietnam and the United States about peace, Searcy answered:

“I would say, look to Quảng Trị province. Look to the people here. Look to life here today. The rebuilding that has occurred since the war. The new life that has opened up for the next generations of children here.

“Quảng Trị province is a wonderful example that the rest of us can follow. And for most of us, that example is an inspiration that motivates the rest of us to go on and try to build a world of peace, a world of compassion, and a world of sharing. So I have deep respect for the people of Quảng Trị province. I have much admiration for them, and for what they have taught us about recovery and reconciliation, peace and friendship.”

Interview by Quảng Trị Radio and Television, reporter Nguyên Bảo. Filmed July 2026.

Impact story

Mr. Nguyễn Sư Tâm, Thuỷ Trung village, Vĩnh Hoàng commune.

His family’s 1,500 m² of land sat inside Confirmed Hazardous Area (CHA) 0885. On it, Tâm grows rubber, intercropped with peanut, cassava and yam to earn income while waiting for the rubber trees to be ready for tapping. The last peanut harvest brought the family 12 million VND (US$460). His wife, Nguyễn Thị Hương, makes cassava starch and hand-rolls incense at home for extra income. The couple has two sons: one drives a taxi, the other is a student at Hue University of Agriculture and Forestry.

“It feels safe. I feel a real joy now that the land has been cleared of unexploded ordnance,” Tâm said.

Mr. Tâm helps his wife, Nguyễn Thị Hương, dry incense in the front yard.

On 6 May, NPA/RENEW handed over two areas (CHA 0884 and CHA 0885, totaling 2,482,460 m²) to the local authorities, returning safe land to 3,014 people in Thuỷ Trung. During clearance, the teams found and dealt with 655 items of explosive ordnance, of which 347 were cluster munitions.

Right next to the two handed-over areas, the teams are now clearing CHA 0881 in Xóm Nỗng village, Cửa Tùng commune (1,349,662 m²), which began on 20 April and is due for completion on 30 September 2026. So far they have cleared 777,765 m², more than half, and found 336 explosive items.

Two NPA/RENEW team members search for ordnance with a large-loop detector.

Every square meter cleared of explosive ordnance is another peanut crop, another cassava crop, sown without fear.

We sincerely thank the Government of the United States through the U.S. Embassy in Hanoi, and the Government of Norway for the valuable support to our meaningful mine action work in Vietnam.

On the morning of 26 June 2026, NPA/RENEW’s Explosive Ordnance Disposal (EOD) responded to two calls from Quảng Trị local residents in quick succession, both through the provincial UXO hotline.

A mortar in the garden

The first came from Cẩm Phổ village, Gio Linh commune. Mr. Lê Văn Trà (born 1974, father of two sons) and his wife were clearing grass on the small plot in front of their house, preparing the ground for the next crop, when they uncovered a mortar round on the edge of the land plot. They stopped, left it untouched, and called the hotline immediately.

NPA/RENEW EOD team, led by Deputy Leader Nguyễn Văn Thuỷ, arrived and identified it as a US-made 60mm mortar round, with a missing fuze and safe to move. Mr. Trà smiled with relief as the mortar was removed from his garden. The land his family has farmed for years carries one less danger.

A heavily corroded US-made 60mm mortar round, lying in the soil of Mr. Trà’s garden for more than half a century before it was found and safely removed.

Mr. Lê Văn Trà smiles with relief after the 60mm mortar round was safely removed from his garden.

Quang Tri Mine Action Center’s statistics indicate that Cẩm Phổ village has recorded 31 accidents from explosive ordnance (EO) since the war ended. Every EO safely removed is one more time such an accident-recorded number does not grow.

The land his family has farmed for years carries one less danger.

The Hill of Angels

The second task took the team up to Cồn Tiên, the “Hill of Angels,” once a US Marine combat base. In Phú Ốc village, Mr. Võ Văn Bốn found a 40mm grenade or M79 munition round lying on the pavement of an inter-village road that is being repaired. He reported his sighting to the commune military command.

In the afternoon of 25 Jun, Captain Đoàn Văn Nghĩa, the military officer of Cồn Tiên commune, had come to the spot and placed four concrete blocks around the M79 to warn his neighbors and keep the area safe until the EOD team could arrive the following morning. He guided the NPA/RENEW team to the location himself. The 40mm grenade was later assessed as safe to remove.

Captain Đoàn Văn Nghĩa points to the spot on the inter-village road where the M79 round lay, marked the previous afternoon with four concrete blocks to keep residents safe.

Two ends of the same land

Two EO, from two ends of the same land, from the Gio Linh coast to the hill at Cồn Tiên, were carried to a safe demolition site and destroyed together that same morning.

The NPA/RENEW EOD team holds a safety briefing before destroying the two explosive items recovered that morning.

The two explosive items, a 60mm mortar round from Gio Linh and an M79 round from Cồn Tiên, are safely destroyed together on the morning of 26 June 2026.

During the first half of 2026, the NPA/RENEW mobile EOD team received 191 tasks through the hotline and safely removed and destroyed 283 EO items.

People report, local military forces secure the site, the EOD team clears it. This is how a community in Quảng Trị keeps itself safe, more than fifty years after the guns fell silent.

We sincerely thank the Government of the United States through the U.S. Embassy in Hanoi, and the Government of Norway for the valuable support to our meaningful mine action work in Vietnam.

Sixty students from Lê Thế Hiếu and Cam Nghĩa schools fill RENEW’s Mine Action Visitor Center for Chạm Đến Ước Mơ, an afternoon built around one belief: that the road from Quảng Trị leads to wide horizons.

A talkshow that gave students new belief through stories from their own home ground

On a Monday afternoon, under the heavy summer sun, sixty students from Lê Thế Hiếu School and Cam Nghĩa School (Cam Lộ), together with many other children from Đông Hà, gathered at RENEW’s Mine Action Visitor Center for Chạm Đến Ước Mơ (Touch Your Dreams). The talkshow brought the students closer to role models who grew up on the soil of Quảng Trị and have gone far on their own journeys.

The program is part of the Safe Steps, Safe Life project, funded by the Embassy of Ireland in Vietnam.

Two children of this red soil who grew up here and went far. Pilot Nguyễn Trần Diệu Thuý and saxophonist Phan Lê Hiếu came home to tell the students it can be done.

The two guests took the stage. Nguyễn Trần Diệu Thuý, the first female pilot from Quảng Trị, born in 1989 in the village of Phổ Lại, Cam An, and now a mother of three, told the students she hoped to see them follow her into the sky.

“I hope there will be many young pilots from Quảng Trị. Together, we will fly across the skies of our homeland,” she said. “I still have more than twenty years of flying ahead of me, so I am sure I will meet one of the faces here again.”

Not a lecture but a conversation. The students asked their own questions, and the answers came back as encouragement rather than instruction.

Phan Lê Hiếu, a saxophonist from Đông Hà, born in 1991 into a family with no musical background, urged the students to hold on to their dreams.

“Always keep dreaming,” he said. “Study gives you a foundation of knowledge, but dreams will carry you farther and take you to more places. Every journey has a first step, which is why safety matters so much.”

Beyond the conversation with the two guests, the children also revisited the four safe steps to take when they encounter a bomb, mine, or other explosive, learning them through fun, easy-to-remember movements with the Đông Hà children’s performance group in a lively dance set to the song Safe Steps.

Four safe steps, learned through movement and laughter. The children rehearse what to do when they find a bomb or piece of unexploded ordnance, dancing to Safe Steps with the Đông Hà children’s performance group.

Afterward, the students wrote their own dreams on Dream Cards, a small act that, for many of them, felt like a first step.

A dream, once written down, becomes a first step. Each child set their hope on paper, the smallest and surest beginning of a long journey.

Every child has the right to grow up, to learn, to play, and to chase their dreams. And all of that begins with safe steps.

Chạm Đến Ước Mơ (Touch Your Dreams) is part of the Safe Steps, Safe Life project, a communications campaign on the prevention of cluster bombs and other explosive ordnance accidents, carried out by RENEW with the support of the Embassy of Ireland in Vietnam.

A two-day field visit reinforces a decade-long partnership for victim assistance and explosive ordnance risk education.

On 28 and 29 May 2026, a delegation from the Embassy of Ireland in Viet Nam, led by Ms. Edel Cribbin, Head of Development Cooperation, visited the RENEW Center for Rehabilitation and Disability Support in Quang Tri Province. After first meeting the RENEW team over a Zoom call in March 2026, Ms. Cribbin was now able to step onto the ground in Quang Tri and see the work for herself. The two-day visit was an opportunity for the Embassy to observe activities of the Victim Assistance, Disability Support, and Explosive Ordnance Risk Education project that it has funded for the past decade, and to meet directly with families whose lives have been shaped by the long shadow of war and the steady work of recovery.

In Khe Sanh: thirteen years on

In Ruong Village, Khe Sanh Commune, the delegation visited the family of Mr. Ho Van Y. At the age of seventeen, Mr. Y was tilling a coffee farm near the former Ta Con Airbase when he struck an unexploded bomb in the soil. He lost his right leg in the accident. Thirteen years on, he has received three successive prostheses from the RENEW Center, raises four breeding cows on the surrounding hillside, and lives in a stilt house with his wife and three young sons.

The delegation sat with the family inside the house, listened to Mr. Y describe the rhythm of his days, and handed over essential household equipment: a water filter, an electric fan, a food cabinet, and a rice cooker. A small fire pit in the corner of the home, with a kettle resting on a three-legged trivet, spoke of the modest scale on which a family in this mountainous commune still builds a life.

In Huong Hiep: a life rebuilt

In Phu An Village, Huong Hiep Commune, the delegation met Mr. Ho Van My and his wife, Ms. Ho Thi Tran. Mr. My was blinded in a landmine accident at the age of seventeen, while working the soil near his family’s home. Ms. Tran was born with congenital leg atrophy. The two married in 2022 and have three children together. Their youngest daughter is currently studying Japanese in Hanoi, with the hope of one day working abroad.

Last month, after a needs assessment by RENEW staff, the family received a breeding cow. The animal now grazes near the house. For a couple who have lived most of their lives with disability and very limited means, the cow is more than livestock. It is a quiet symbol of a life being rebuilt, one season at a time.

At the Visitor Center: education that prevents tragedy

On the morning of 29 May, the delegation visited the Mine Action Visitor Center, where four Explosive Ordnance Risk Education (EORE) activity groups were running simultaneously: outdoor mine-risk games and safety marking, a general orientation on the causes of accidents and safe behavior, an immersive experience using the RENEW AR augmented reality application, and a peer education model in which students role-play to understand and walk alongside persons with disabilities.

The activities, designed for school-aged children, brought to life the kind of patient, hands-on risk education that helps prevent the next generation of tragedies, of the kind that the families in Khe Sanh and Huong Hiep have lived through.

Looking ahead together

In the Center’s meeting room, the leadership of the RENEW Center and the program managers of the two project components briefed Ms. Cribbin and her colleagues on activity progress and looked ahead to the next phase of work. The conversation also touched on the scope of project activities across the communes of Cua Tung, Gio Linh, Hieu Giang, Trieu Phong, Trieu Binh, and Vinh Dinh, and the encouraging fact that no UXO accidents have been recorded in the project areas during the current reporting period.

A decade of accompaniment

Project RENEW expresses its sincere gratitude to the Government of Ireland, through the Embassy of Ireland in Viet Nam, for its enduring partnership: funding Explosive Ordnance Risk Education since 2015, and Victim Assistance and Disability Support since 2016.

A decade of accompaniment has translated, in homes from Khe Sanh to Huong Hiep, into prostheses and breeding cows, into water filters and rice cookers, and above all into the quiet certainty that the most vulnerable are not being left behind.

Go raibh maith agaibh.

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.