Land Mine Museum
On Saturday the 29th Dave and I take a tuk tuk to the Land Mine Museum, deciding to visit the bigger sights tomorrow when three of his friends from school arrive from Malaysia for a visit. We talk the driver down from fifteen dollars to eight dollars. The drivers were saying it was fifty kilometers out, but Dave and I had thought it would be in town, the logical place for a museum.
As it turned out, it was a long ways out of town, taking us about forty-five minutes it seemed each way. The museum is a collection of small, single room buildings with disarmed munitions in cases; large posters with descriptions of the land mine problem in Cambodia; and many very interesting pictures mostly of Aki Ra, the founder, disarming mines using shovels, 2X4s, and sticks. A former child soldier during the wars, he purportedly has disarmed fifty thousand mines using these crude methods.
“I want to make my country safe for my people” he is quoted on a poster on one of the walls. This really brought out some strong emotions for me. Whereas I will be helping an individual and his/her direct caregivers here and there, Aki Ra will be helping every single person who will ever tread on those areas.
I also was quite conflicted on the use of mines as that was a major part of my duties as a combat engineer in the army. I can see the actual human toll in the pictures here, yet I can see its value on the battlefield. A mine field can direct the enemy to the field of battle of your choosing or delay him as he breaches it. It can reduce the number of casualties you sustain and stack the odds in your favor.
I remember clearly the training mission in Korea where we laid a “Lazy W” minefield behind some wire obstacles in the middle of the night having barely slept the night and day before. As the M113 armored personnel carrier moved forward it drug a sandbag on a measured line. As the sandbag passes the first mine another mine is passed from the vehicle and placed on the ground. A trailing soldier arms the mine as the vehicle zig zags through. The squad leader had the toughest job though, mapping each and every mine on a form that will be turned in.
With the use of these complex obstacles and premade fighting positions such as tank defilades and reinforced concrete bunkers we hoped to delay the North Korean’s million man army long enough in a conflict to get reinforcements onto the peninsula. Without it, the North could conceivably overwhelm the fifteen thousand or so American troops (I’m guessing here) and the hundreds of thousands of South Korean troops before enough reinforcements arrived to turn the tide.
Not every military is as careful to map its mines and most of these mines can lie in wait for decades, detonating years after the conflict under some unsuspecting farmer or tourist. There are pictures after pictures here of children missing limbs. I’ve seen many men missing a leg or both in the country, begging for money at the many markets, bus stations, and on the streets.
Although it is a valuable asset to the military, perhaps wars should be kept amongst the soldiers. Better yet, let the politicians do the fighting…and the dying.
January 6th, 2008 at 1:55 pm
i thought the use of land mines was banned, how were you laying land mines in korea?
January 6th, 2008 at 1:56 pm
how was that guy disarming the mines with shovels and 2×4s? was he hitting them and blowing them up?
January 8th, 2008 at 9:04 am
That’s blowing them up. Disarming means disassembling the components. The US is not part of the land mine banning treaty. Cuba is the only other country in the Americas that still produces mines if I recall correctly.
January 8th, 2008 at 1:18 pm
how do you disarm a landmine with a crude tool like a 2×4 or a shovel? so besides the us and cuba, who else still makes and uses land mines?
January 9th, 2008 at 9:02 am
Mines are triggered via pressure plate, tilt rod, or trip wire typically. You can add booby traps to them to cause them to explode when someone tries to mess with them. To disarm you have to separate the detonator from the main explosives. Usually it’s just screwed on. Then it’s very simple to open up the case and pull out the explosives.