AN EXPLOSIVE JOB,
EVERY INCH OF IT
By Spec4 Jim Clare
S&S Correspondent

Da Nang, Vietnam- The shells and shell casings stick out of the ground like small crosses in a large cemetery. The land itself is burnt and littered with twisted metal like a junkyard. Giant mounds of earth cover not tombs nor treasure, but bombs of unknown type and number. And there are craters 100 feet across, 100 feet deep, and big enough for several swimming pools.

The Da Nang ammo dump disarmed itself with the proverbial bang. The present problem is cleaning it up. A Vietnamese- if his name were known, he might be as famous as Mrs. Leary’s cow- was burning trash on the morning of April 27. The trash set the grass on fire, and the grass fire swept a short distance to the U.S. Marine ammo supply area. The munitions started to explode. The troops pulled out. The air filled with smoke, fire and hunks of metal. Some of the bombs were buried across the road where they set off secondary explosions in the Air Force ammo dump.

The explosion continued for 15 hours. Cleaning up the mess is taking a lot longer. The amount of munitions stored here and the totals of what was lost have not been released. But right after the explosion the estimated cleanup time was about six months. By this week the job was about one-third done.

The Marine ammo dump covers 332 acres, the Air force dump is about one-third that size. Munitions are separated by type and sorted in revetments, areas about 40 yards square and surrounded on three sides by high, thick walls of dirt. There were 215 revetments in the Marine dump and 60 more on the Air Force side. One guess is that about one-half of the stored munitions exploded. Some of the ammunition is still usable. It was either untouched or buried by dirt from other explosions. Other munitions were thrown through the air. Marine ammo landed in the Air Force dump and vice versa. Most of the ammo that didn’t explode has been subjected to enough heat or stress to make it highly dangerous. Some of this ammunition, scattered on the ground as casually as pickup sticks, has taken all the temperature or tension changes it can. One more nudge and it will explode. There’s no way to tell which piece of explosive is about to go off. So it’s all treated the same. Most Explosive Ordnance Disposal (EOD) work is classified, so the men don’t talk about the tricks of their craft. But it looks like a giant police call.

A man slowly picks up an explosive and carefully carries it to a group of the same kind. If it’s small, like a hand grenade, he’ll cradle it in sand inside a box. These will be boxed and trucked away, to be dumped at sea or blown up in specially designed holes. In the meantime, the men continue the cleanup. Nobody rushes, they take frequent breaks. They work only a half a day to cut down on accidents caused by fatigue. There is a look of casualness about the work, but of course it’s not like a police call.

"Everything you pick up is different. You remember that it might kill you," said S/Sgt John L. Lorentz, with the Marine EOD team. "You must treat everything like it was the first time you touched it. You never let it become routine. I like the work," he continued, "not everyone can do it. And I’d go crazy if I had an office job, filing the same papers day after day."

It would be safer for the men to simply blow up everything in place, but there are so many explosives that it could set off another holocaust like the one of April 27. Jobs as big as this are rare for EOD men. Typical would be a load of bombs in a plane that crashed. For the EOD men cleaning up the ammo dump it is like a small town fire company having to battle a four alarm blaze everyday.

"First the EOD teams cleared the roads that ran past the revetments. Then they cleared the ground and piled the munitions along the roads for the trucks to pick up. The last phase is digging out the buried revetments," said Capt. Gary J. Williams, chief of the Air Force EOD team.

The Air Force has 24 EOD specialists from all over Vietnam and the Pacific on temporary duty in Da Nang to help the base’s nine-man EOD team clean up the ammo dump. The TDY personnel are in Da Nang for two-week stretches, so that every Air Force EOD specialist in the Pacific theater can probably expect to be sent there.

Lt William R. Sullivan leads about 50 men working mornings and afternoons to clean up the Marine dump. Five are U.S. Army EOD specialists working one-week shifts. Twenty-six are Marine EOD from Vietnam and the Pacific area. Another 25 are ammo technicians who worked in the dump before it blew up and who have volunteered to help clean it up. The same Marines will stay on the job until it’s finished.

One other important fact; Not one of the men actually cleaning up the munitions in both dumps has been injured on the job.

(Note by R. D. Foster: Two things I know are wrong in this article. The explosions went on for over 24 hours, not 15. Not all of the troops pulled out, as my pictures can attest to that.)