Traveling Light

A funny thing happened at the Jesse Griego Kindergarten dedication. My friend Jim suddenly discovered he'd lost a lot of weight.

Because he says it so beautifully, I asked Jim if I could quote him here. With his permission, I share his words.

"The first time I went to Viet Nam, I experienced things and came home with a set of memories. I have carried those memories like a heavy pack for a long time. Now I have gone back to Viet Nam and experienced new things and have a whole new set of memories to dwell upon. At the moment the dedication plaque at the Jesse Kindergarten was unveiled, I felt the pack was not so heavy anymore. There is just a lightness about all of it. Peace.

"Jesse's mission is complete and I hope thousands of children pass through the school doors to learn and have fun. I was able to set Jesse's spirit free and in doing so, realized that for the first time in forty-one years, it is OK to be alive."

And how very, very glad I am that you are.

Bless you, my friend Jim. Now and always, I wish you peace.

NGO...EOD...UXO...QTP

While I'm prone to get most excited about schools and trees and micro-credit loans, those are only part of what PeaceTrees does so well. The other part -- without which the rest would be moot -- has to do with UXO and EOD.

For many of us (and by "us" I mean "me"), all those letters sound a bit like alphabet soup. So here's a quick primer.

PeaceTrees is a Non-Governmental Organization (NGO) that sponsors Explosive Ordnance Disposal (EOD) teams to remove UneXploded Ordnance (UXO) in Quang Tri Province (QTP). OK -- I made up the QTP. But the rest of the acronyms are correct.

Now -- the ABCs of what it all means.

UXO is Unexploded Ordnance, described by the UN as "Explosive munitions such as mortars, artillery shells, grenades and mines, that have been primed, fused, armed or otherwise prepared for use or used. They could have been fired, dropped, launched, or projected yet remain unexploded either through function or design." This is the ugly, nasty, leftover stuff of war. It doesn't dissolve or biodegrade or disappear. It stays dangerous. It can look like a toy to a child, a source of profit to a poor entrepreneur, or it can simply be invisible to the farmer plowing a field. Pictured above are some mock-ups that PTVN (that's PeaceTrees Vietnam) uses for training children.

I've read varying statistics on the amount of ordnance used in Quang Tri Province from 1965-75, but it's almost always measured in tons per person. Tons. Per person. One source says the amount in Quang Tri -- which is roughly the size of Rhode Island -- exceeded all the ordnance used in Europe during World War II.

PeaceTrees' EOD team is a group of Vietnamese UXO-removal specialists who are trained to UN standards. They clear acreage for specific projects like the new Kindergarten; they also respond to calls from Quang Tri residents who find UXO. Highly volatile items might be destroyed on-site. Other items are removed, cached, and destroyed weekly.

The EOD team is responding to anywhere from 1,200 to 1,400 calls per month. There are plenty of false alarms, but the majority are real. If memory serves me correctly, they're destroying about 900 pieces of UXO monthly. And -- to their very great credit -- no one has ever been injured on the job.

We visited the team on March 21 after the Jesse Kindergarten dedication; they were working in an area near Khe Sanh. They led us to the cache site and showed us what they'd collected -- three days' worth.

We also learned that at the Jesse school, the EOD team had cleared 48 pieces of UXO prior to construction. Quite literally, none of the PTVN projects would be possible without them.

A very big thanks to this amazing team of EOD professionals for their life-saving work. They are, without a doubt, a TCA (Total Class Act).