The only people Chuck Searcy encountered on the broad, barren field were two young boys. Nearly a quarter-century earlier, the field had been the scene of the battle of Khe Sanh, one of the bloodiest standoffs of the Vietnam War (1954-75).
The boys led Searcy to an unexploded rocket lying by a ditch. One of them reached out to give the bomb a kick when Searcy cried out, “No, stop!”
“It was my first encounter with unexploded ordnance,” Searcy says of that moment in 1992. “I had no idea that I would be dedicating my life to removing them.”
Searcy had served as a U.S. Army soldier in Vietnam in 1968, the same year as the battle of Khe Sanh, and came away
“We got to see almost everything,” he says. “And I saw that our friends back home were being given information that was not just misleading but deliberate lies.”