This churns out thousands of charges monthly. The 250 pounds of explosives in this bomb was converted into more than 1,000 small charges. The program is key to Cambodia’s
efforts at mine clearance: when deminers uncover a landmine, they don’t dig it up; instead they leave it in the ground, place a piece of explosive close to it, then detonate the charge. That causes the landmine to blow up. And because moving explosives
around the world is “a logistical nightmare”, says Tan, having a local stock of charges pays dividends. It means just-in-time production of explosives, and that means the hundreds of deminers working in Cambodia don’t have to stop work for weeks or months at a time. “It produces these explosives from
bombs and old ordnance, so you’re killing two birds with one stone,” says Tan, adding that the program has manufactured 350,000 such charges in a decade. “Weapons of war into tools of peace.” The team’s next job will be to
inspect an ammunition barge that was sunk in the early 1970s during the civil war. CMAC believes ordnance remains on the barge, which is on the river floor under three feet (one metre) of mud. Diving on a barge will be another
first for the team, but careful planning combined with their fearless nature and the ever- important patient approach means Nisi has complete confidence. “You know, of all the different
men I dove with in the U.S. and other countries, these guys are right up there – they have that same
CMAC Dive Team members have
skill sets equal to any military dive team in the world
skill set,” Nisi says of the nine- man team. “They went through the same weeding out process at the beginning, and also we incorporated the same type of training [as in the U.S. military]. I’m comfortable putting them in any conditions, anywhere, doing just about anything.”
Contributors
Charles Fox is a British photographer who has lived in Asia since 2006. His work has been published widely in newspapers and magazines around the world.
www.charles-fox.com
Robert Carmichael is a South African journalist who has lived in Cambodia for nine years, and is the author of When Clouds Fell from the Sky: A Disappearance, A Daughter’s Search and Cambodia’s First War Criminal (Asia Horizons Books, 2015).
www.robertcarmichael.net
www.divermag.com 47
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