boat anchored a safe 200 yards from the divers is Allen Dodgson Tan, the country head of Golden West, a U.S. non-profit that funds demining activities and that trained the dive team. Recovering UXO is inherently
dangerous, says Tan, a former U.S. Army explosives expert, and under normal circumstances a country would train a military dive unit to recover underwater UXO. This, he notes, is the first time a dive team tasked with humanitarian work like this has been trained from scratch to carry out “some of the most dangerous diving you can do”. Tan says the team spent the
past fortnight working on the May mission: “Planning, talking about what they do in this scenario, what they do in that scenario – and the
whole team is involved in that. It’s not one guy dictating it.” The team’s goal is to remove only
the underwater UXO that poses a risk. Most of what is in Cambodia’s waterways, Tan says, will never be recovered. “We’re not trying to clear the river
of all the ordnance and explosives in there – it’s not possible,” he says. “There are probably hundreds of thousands of pieces of ordnance in Cambodian waterways, and they’re fine right where they are buried under lots of mud – unless someone’s going to build something there, it doesn’t have a lot of impact.” Instead, they make an assessment
based on each UXO that is found. “Is a fisherman getting his net caught in it? Is a boat going to
Watching
detonation from a safe distance
hit it? Are they going to build something like a bridge where they need to clear an area for a pylon? Are they going to dredge there?” he explains. “These are the kinds of things we look at.”
“Tools of peace” In this case, because the bomb was close to shore and to the ferry crossing, they decided to remove it. And so, after Lorn Sarath surfaced, having completed his task in just 4 inches (10cm) of visibility, “the best we’ve ever had on the river”, says Nisi, team leader Sok Chenda descended. Chenda is a stocky 38-year-
old CMAC veteran with 17 years experience at the demining agency – first as a deminer, then as a researcher, and finally as a technical
www.divermag.com 45
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