Giving the lost a voice

Morning Greetings

Laundry Time

View from the road down the river we commute every day

Kids seeing a white person for the first time

Taj MaTarp nearing completion

First of all, I recovered pretty well from the night of drinking with our Vietnamese hosts. I thought the Koreans could drink... those guys have nothing on the Vietnamese. In my drunken state I did accidentally bash the crap out of my eye so now it's all swollen and cut up. Our team chief told our workers today that he punched me in the face. That got quite a good giggle from all the girls.

Today was actually quite fabulous. I've spent most of my time clearing massive areas of explosives. I'm pretty sure that our workers believe that I'm a witch doctor. As far as they can figure I have a magical green stick that can see into the ground. I'm also fairly certain that they believe the detector has the ability to shoot out laser beams. I run it over their feet and they all scream and run off. One of the kids sat there watching me very intensely. I didn't pay too much attention to him because there's is always someone staring at me here. I was sweeping an area behind our building when my metal detector went crazy. I started digging to find out what was causing the alert and found a huge pile of nails hidden under a dirt clod. Suddenly I heard the silliest laughter ever. Turns out the boy who had been watching me was awfully clever and had figured it out. It was hilarious.

When we first arrived on the site I took the metal detector out to the crash site to see if we could find a basic footprint of where to start looking. I was really disappointed because the crash site seemed to be completely sterile. I think it was a little demoralizing for everyone. Our knowledge of the site is basically based on a dying Viet Cong's 40 year old memory. But today I had a lot of downtime so I decided to take out the detector that JPAC issued me and try to figure out it's complexities. I took it out to the crash site to see if it would pick up something that my EOD detector missed. Disappointingly I had no luck. So I figured I'd just keep experimenting and kill some more time. I was meandering through the field when I started getting beeps and buzzes from my headphones. At first I wanted to dig for them but I was still in the same field as the crash coordinates so I figured that would be a very bad idea. Instead, I just kept walking around and sure enough, it was beep after beep after beep. It was the most unbelievable feeling when I realized that I had found it. Right below me is the wreckage from 40 years ago. It had laid in this cruddy field for all this time in silence. And now it felt like it was speaking to me. I know it sounds cheesy but I felt so privledged to be the only one that could hear it. Everyone else was back at the camp so I couldn't even let anyone else hear it. I stayed out in the field for the entire afternoon criss crossing my tracks and listening to all the rings and beeps. When I got back to the camp I grabbed the team leader and told him, "Sure enough, I think there's a plane out there". I explained the new location and I could tell he felt relieved too. It was such a wonderful triumphant moment. I can't wait until the rest of the team arrives so we can start excavating.