Injury Date: August 31, 2003

Injuries: Thigh injuries from UXO fragments

CPI Assistance: Emergency medical treatment, nutritional support.

Cuong waited until nearly 8:00am to take his cows out to graze. Truth be told, he was ashamed of his decision to drop out of school a year earlier and didn’t want his ex-classmates to see him doing such a menial chore. Cuong was 14 years old at the time, and the year before he attended 7th grade. Dropping out of school seemed like the most logical decision: he didn’t enjoy it that much; there were too many subjects to master, and there was just too much homework to do. Even though he didn’t have homework to think about, Cuong now regretted his decision. It made him feel even worse when he watched his classmates calling to each other every morning on the way to school. Cuong was lonely.

He is the third child in his family, and he has four other siblings. His father is 50, but he has a severe case of tuberculosis that has stopped him from working any more on the family farm. His mother is 48 and she is in the individual in charge of supervising the work in the family. She makes sure that all of her older children help her take care of the five sao of land that the family owns and relies on for food and income. The land is suitable for growing corn, but Cuong’s family can only produce one crop a year: it is too risky to plant anything during the rainy season. After dropping out of school, Cuong’s new responsibilities at home included looking after two cows, the family’s only asset of any real value.

The morning of August 31, 2003, as he left his family’s house with the two cows in tow, Cuong met his friend, Pham van Tien. Tien had his family’s cows as well, and they decided to head to the usual grazing spot. After arriving, the boys let the cows free and headed down to the rocky river bank next to the field. They thought this would be the ideal location to collect dried branches to bring back as firewood for the family. They always managed to come up with some fun games to play too, as they were looking for firewood. By 9:30am, they had invented a new game: they’d both climb to the top of a large, flat rock, and whoever could throw a pebble the farthest into the river would be the winner. They each collected several handfuls of stones, and once they’d gone through them all, they got off the rock to look for more.

As they pushed through the reeds near the river, Cuong saw what he thought was a large, dried guava. As he got closer he realized that it was more like a rusty steel ball that was stuck in a narrow crevice between two large rocks. He reached for it with his hand, grasped it, and pulled hard. No such luck.

He looked up and called for his buddy. Tien ran up to Cuong, brandishing a stick in his hand. The boys thought this would do the trick. They used the stick to try and pry the ball out of the crevice, but with no success. The boys looked at each other, shrugged, and admitted defeat.

As Cuong turned to walk away, Tien took one last shot at the ball, and hit it as if playing baseball. The resulting explosion terrified the two kids, and both were flung backwards.

One metal fragment penetrated Cuong’s right pant leg and imbedded itself in his thigh; Tien was hit with a larger fragment that broke his left leg.

The boys were taken to the local hospital for treatment. CPI covered the medical costs for both boys (well over 3,000,000 VND) and they are both reportedly doing well after their treatment.