The discovery was made by workers repairing the Sa Lung railway bridge, who uncovered a suspicious unexploded ordnance (UXO) just 30 cm below the soil. The site in Linh Hải Village sits approximately 1.6 km south of the Sa Lung railway station and only 5 kilometers north of the 17th parallel — the historic Bến Hải River and DMZ line. During the war, this area was the heart of the Vĩnh Linh Special Zone, a territory that endured some of the heaviest aerial bombardments in history, forcing civilians to live in tunnel complexes for years. This M117 bomb had lain just 5 meters from the railway tracks for over half a century.
Provincial Ops Manager Mai Văn Việt and Team Leader Hoàng Kim Chiến identify the ordnance as a U.S. M117 aerial bomb.
Following a report to the QTMAC hotline, NPA/RENEW’s EOD team arrived before lunch on May 6. The investigation, led by Provincial Ops Manager Mai Văn Việt and Team Leader Hoàng Kim Chiến, identified the ordnance as a U.S. M117 aerial bomb.
- Total Weight: 340 kg (≈ 750 lb)
- Explosive Fill: 183 kg of Minol 2 or Tritonal
- Condition: Broken nose fuze and oxidized tail fuze
After stability was confirmed, the bomb was loaded onto a pickup for the journey to NPA/RENEW’s central demolition site at Hoi Yen village.
After confirming the bomb was stable enough for transport, the team carefully loaded the 750 pounds of steel and high explosives onto their pickup truck. It was relocated to NPA/RENEW’s central demolition site at Hoi Yen village, Vinh Dinh commune, where a demolition pit reinforced with 1,500 sandbags were being prepared. At 12:05, the M117 was safely destroyed. The resulting crater — 20 meters wide and 5 meters deep — offered a sobering answer to what would have happened to the railway and nearby families had it detonated in situ. By 13:00, the EOD team and supporting personnel had collected every fragment of shrapnel and cleared the site.
The crater after demolition — 20 meters wide and 5 meters deep. A sobering measure of what the Sa Lung bridge had been spared.
Back in Linh Hải, the trains kept running, and bridge workers resumed their jobs just 50 meters from where the threat once lay. No homes were damaged, and no one was hurt. The workers made the right call to the commune military. A morning of coordinated work ensured that call ended the only way it should: safely.
The M117 was the U.S. Air Force’s standard 750-pound general-purpose bomb of the Vietnam War, dropped in vast numbers by tactical aircraft — F-4 Phantoms, F-105 Thunderchiefs, A-6 Intruders, A-7 Corsairs — and, after 1968, by B-52 strategic bombers in their “Big Belly” configuration, which could carry up to 108 of them per aircraft. Tens of thousands fell on the railways and bridges of Vĩnh Linh district between 1965 and 1973.
The Theater History of Operations Reports (THOR) — a declassified U.S. Department of Defense database released in 2016 — records every documented U.S. air operation in Southeast Asia, including target coordinates, aircraft type, ordnance dropped, and mission identification numbers. Recent research by Dr. Philipp Barthelme at the University of Edinburgh has corrected a long-standing datum error in the THOR coordinates and combined the records with declassified KH-9 reconnaissance satellite imagery from March 1973. With those tools, individual strikes can begin to be matched to the craters and unexploded bombs found today. Fifty-three years after the war, the silent geography of the bombing is becoming, line by line, legible again.
Fifty years after the war, the work continues. Piece by piece, the land of Vĩnh Thủy is being returned to its people.
We sincerely thank the Government of the United States, through the U.S. Embassy in Hanoi, and the Government of Norway for their valuable support for our meaningful mission in Vietnam.
📞 UXO Hotline (Quang Tri): 0901 941 941 - 18001741
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