US veteran teamed up with former enemy colonel decades after fighting in Vietnam war. Their mission was to remove bombs

The year was 1967 when Chuck Searcy arrived in Vietnam as a young US Army intelligence analyst. Little did he know then that decades later he would return to the country not as a soldier, but as part of an effort to remove the unexploded bombs left behind by the war. His unlikely partner in that mission was Bui Trong Hong, a former North Vietnamese army colonel and explosives expert. However, when the Vietnam war was going on, the two had been on opposite sides of that conflict.

Year later, Searcy and Hong worked together through Project RENEW, a programme focused on unexploded ordnance (UXO) clearance and helping people affected by the weapons.

From wartime intelligence to bomb removal

Searcy served with the 519th Military Intelligence Battalion in Saigon from June 1967 to June 1968, working as an intelligence analyst at the Combined Intelligence Center, Vietnam, according to Landmines.org.


His experience during the war changed his view of the conflict. The New York Times reported that Searcy had access to raw intelligence, including information about enemy casualties and claims of American progress.

“We got to see almost everything,” he told the publication. “And I saw that our friends back home were being given information that was not just misleading but deliberate lies.”

After leaving Vietnam, Searcy returned to the United States, studied at the University of Georgia and became involved with Vietnam Veterans Against the War. He later worked in journalism and politics before eventually returning to Vietnam.

His first post-war visit came in 1992, when he travelled through the country with an Army friend. During that trip, he encountered an unexploded rocket near Khe Sanh. Two children had led him to it, and one was about to kick the device when Searcy stopped him, according to The New York Times.

“It was my first encounter with unexploded ordnance,” Searcy said. “I had no idea that I would be dedicating my life to removing them.”

An American veteran and former North Vietnamese colonel

Searcy eventually moved to Vietnam and began working on humanitarian projects. In 2001, he helped launch Project RENEW in Quang Tri Province, an area heavily affected by wartime bombing.

Bui Trong Hong became the project's chief technical officer. During the war, Hong had served with the North Vietnamese army and later became an engineering officer. The former adversaries were now working on the same problem: making communities safer from bombs and mines left behind by the conflict.

Hong recalled the danger of American bombing during his wartime experience.

“Any time we were under bombing, the noise, all the earth was shaking and a lot of smoke, so flying all over the place,” he said in a PBS NewsHour report. “Not until the bombing mission was over that we knew we were alive.”

Project RENEW's work went far beyond just physically destroying unexploded weapons as their teams also taught the residents, including schoolchildren, how to recognise dangerous objects and report them safely. The programme also provided prosthetics and job training for people injured by UXOs.

Hundreds of thousands of bombs removed

The scale of the problem remained they were dealing with was very quite enormous. The New York Times reported that Project RENEW had, by the time of its 2025 report, dealt with about 815,000 pieces of unexploded ordnance, including aerial bombs, cluster bombs, artillery shells, grenades and mortar rounds.

Quang Tri had been particularly affected as the province lies near the former Demilitarised Zone and was among the most heavily bombed areas of the war.

Searcy told PBS that the US military had dropped about 15 million tons of ordnance in the region. The New York Times cited his estimate of almost eight million tons dropped on Vietnam between 1965 and 1975, reflecting differing figures in the reporting.

Even after their efforts, the danger has not disappeared. The New York Times reported that Project RENEW and its partners had helped reduce the number of UXO-related incidents in Quang Tri from more than 70 annually to zero in 2019, but newly discovered weapons continue to be reported.

Flooding can also shift the ground and expose previously buried ordnance, making it difficult to declare an area completely clear.

Different kind of postwar mission

Searcy has described his work not simply as an attempt to make amends, but as a responsibility to address the consequences of the war.

He has remained in Vietnam for decades and has also worked on improving relations between the former enemies. In 2004, he received Vietnam's National Friendship Medal, according to Landmines.org.

For Searcy, the work represents a very different role from the one he had when he first arrived in Vietnam as a soldier.