In Vietnam, Deadly Legacy of US War Will Linger for Years Via NY Transfer News * All the News That Doesn't Fit Friday, April 28 4:16 PM SGT Vietnam's war legacy will linger for years DONG HA, Vietnam, April 28 (AFP) - Wolfram Schwope looks over the broken stretch of land which once housed an American artillery base and where now deminers are crouched tensely, alerted by their metal detectors. "It will take years," Schwope says of how long will be needed to clear thousands of mines and rounds of unexploded bombs and shells from this battered province which 25 years ago straddled the demilitarised zone between North and South Vietnam. Schwope's Gerbera team from Germany has been here two years, one of three demining teams working in Quang Tri province, where both sides of the war defended their frontlines with everything they had. What is left is deceptively innocent-looking earth, every inch of which must be combed for deadly cluster bomblets filled with tiny personnel fletchettes, rotting artillery shells, mines and other volatile munitions. His men, on loan from the Vietnamese army, move with painstaking slowness in the sultry afternoon heat on what was part of the US Ai Tu air, logistics and artillery base. "A deminer makes only one mistake in his life," says Schwope, a Berliner, and searches for a piece of wood to touch, as he adds: "No casualties so far" among his team of 47 including a doctor on constant stand-by. The people -- the farmers, road-builders and children taking water buffalos to graze, not to mention those scavaging for scrap metal -- are seldom as lucky. "They tell me there is an average of one victim a week," he says. At the Dong Ha state hospital former literature professor Hoang Dang, who coordinates a programme in Quang Tri for Handicap International, says he too does not have the casualty figures for mine and UXO (unexploded ordnance) that continue to claim lives from the war that ended a quarter of a century ago. But from the start of the programme here only six years ago, his small rehabilitation unit has provided 541 artificial limbs, 521 pairs of crutches and 37 wheelchairs, he says. Before 1994, for almost 20 years, the victims had to travel the often prohibitive distance of 200 kilometres (125 miles) over unrepaired roads to the coastal city of Danang for help. There are amputations, injuries and deaths, he says, and like Schwope reminds visitors that less than 50 kilometres (30 miles) to the north of Dong Ha lies the old McNamara line and 60 kilometres (37 miles) to the west the Ho Chi Minh trail -- the first the most heavily mined, and the second the most heavily bombed in the war. A 20-minute drive from the hospital along a sleepy, unpaved sidelane, sisters Le Thi Homoa, 15, and Le Thi Nhon, 24, shyly greet a foreign reporter who towers over them. Both of them are around three foot tall, with stunted legs hidden by long shirts, their hands like tiny baby feet with toes instead of fingers. "The doctors told me that it was chat-doc mau da cam -- toxic products the colour of orange peel," says the girl's father, war veteran Le Huu Dong, 58, referring to the millions of gallons of deadly Agent Orange defoliant sprayed by US troops along the Ho Chi Minh trail and other areas. "I did not know. But my son died at birth and the girls were like this, and the doctors said this was why. I don't know about myself but my wife worked with the Southern soldiers near Khe Sanh, and they told me the women are the worst affected." Help from the government, he says, amounts to 350,000 dong (25 dollars) every six months. In a visit earlier this month to Hanoi, the first by a US defence secretary since the end of the Vietnam War, as the Americans call it, and the American War as the Vietnamese call it, US Defence Secretary William Cohen offered help for Agent Orange victims. Last year Hanoi estimated the number of victims at some 79,000 most of them in what was once the South. ================================================================= NY Transfer News Collective * A Service of Blythe Systems Since 1985 - Information for the Rest of Us 339 Lafayette St., New York, NY 10012 http://www.blythe.org e-mail: nyt@blythe.org ================================================================= nytas-04.28.00-17:15:05-23353