Nguyen Hung usually tends to rice paddies in central Vietnam, unaware that, fewer than 30 centimeters below the soil, cluster bombs still lurk decades after the U.S. scattered them in the Vietnam War. But last month as the farmer stood in his lime-green field, an announcement blared over loudspeakers: he and his neighbors had to clear out, so a detonation team could move in. A new report from Captain Nguyen Thi Thuy of all-female landmines clearance team marks detected zones on a map of Hai Lang district, near a former U.S military base used during Vietnam War, in Quang Tri province, Vietnam, March 4, 2020.Some of the work is funded by the United States, where officials ask how such use of weapons, which still kill Southeast Asians today, should inform the U.S. conflict in Iraq and Afghanistan. Project Renew said it found 14 cluster bombs beneath Nguyen’s rice paddies last month. Many of them were 20- to 30 centimeters below the plants, according to Truong Cong Vu, a team leader on the project.  As nations wage war on COVID-19, Vietnam is cleaning up the remnants of an actual kinetic war. Project Renew adapted to the pandemic. It continued the work in February and March, while following guidelines from the state, which told people to wash their hands for 30 seconds and stay two meters apart to curb the spread of the coronavirus. “Survey and clearance operators were required to keep a distance from each other while working in the fields, wear face masks and practice hygienic etiquette,” the organization said in a recent report, titled FILE – U.S. Defense Secretary Mark Esper, center, and Vietnamese Defense Minister Ngo Xuan Lich review an honor guard in Hanoi, Vietnam, Nov. 20, 2019.On a visit last November, U.S. Defense Secretary Mark Esper touted efforts at cooperation between both sides, saying, “These include U.S. efforts to clean up dioxin contamination and to remove unexploded ordnance, along with Vietnam’s strong support for U.S. personnel accounting activities.” In June 2019, staff at the U.S. Congressional Research Service (a department within the Library of Congress) sent legislators an analysis of the $400 million the U.S. has spent on UXO clearance in Southeast Asia. It said cleanup will probably involve several more decades and casualties. These human and dollar costs, as well as the long time that war legacies have lasted, are factors for legislators to consider, the report said. The authors wrote the “continued presence of UXO in Southeast Asia” raises issues, including whether U.S. remedies have “lessons for similar activity in other parts of the world, including Iraq and Afghanistan; and, more generally, efforts to lessen the prevalence of UXO in future conflicts.”   
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