Bomb Disposal
the 32-year-old Nisi, who comes from San Diego, California. Aside from the black water
nature of Cambodia’s rivers, the currents are a challenge too; in fact, for around half the year when the monsoon rains come, the flow is simply too strong for missions. “We have to dive around the
seasons in order to avoid the really strong currents,” says Nisi. “Also, there are few regulations affecting boat traffic and other hazards in the waterways, so that’s constantly a challenge.” Getting tangled in discarded fishing nets and dealing with the river debris is another challenge of the job. “The guys are trained just to
deal with it, and we always have back-up divers ready to jump in at any time,” he says. “We have good communications through the water. So it’s those types of challenges out here that I never really had to
42 Magazine
deal with very much in the ocean.” As the May sun tracked higher,
shortening the shadows of the coconut palms lining the banks, the team’s boat puttered across the Mekong, to a spot directly over the sunken bomb. The first diver down was Lorn Sarath, a lean, softly spoken 26-year-old with a thin moustache. His job was to dig away the mud from the bomb’s nose. Sarath has worked with UXO
since joining the government’s demining agency, the Cambodian Mine Action Centre (CMAC), in 2006. As the oldest of six children born to poor rice farmers in the western province of Battambang, he had to
Getting tangled in discarded fishing nets and dealing with the river debris is another challenge of the job
CMAC’s elite dive team
headed by Mike
Nisi, a former US Navy Diver
quit school after completing Grade 9 to get a job, a common outcome for many impoverished families. “At that time in my village there
were a lot of bombs and mines, so CMAC created a community group in the village to deal with that problem,” he says of his decision to join CMAC. Sarath has stayed with CMAC
since then, working first as a deminer and then conducting baseline surveys of mine prevalence. Two years ago he heard CMAC wanted to form a UXO dive team. “I signed up because, first of all, I
find it interesting and this is valuable work. Secondly, Cambodia hasn’t had this kind of expertise until now,” he says. “Also there’s a lot of UXO in the rivers.” Sarath says when the course
started he couldn’t swim. He wasn’t alone: of the 40 volunteers, none could swim properly and most, like
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