I remember the first time that I left my forward operating base (FOB) in Afghanistan. I was heading out with a Civil Affairs Team to a local orphanage. About five minutes into leaving the base we came across a large number of Afghanistan men standing in a long line walking slowly across a large field (in what we in the military typically refer to as a police call line where we pick up trash or look for items). After I returned to base I asked what they were doing and was told they were looking for landmines. That was the first time I was actually introduced into the war between Afghanistan and Russia.
Throughout the war, the Russians dropped millions of landmines throughout the country. The majority of these were small anti-personnel mines, called Butterfly Mines, that were designed to maim. The worst part of these mines, however, is that they are covered in green plastic, so to children they look like toys.
Even though the war with Russia ended in 1989, the countryside is still littered with an estimated 10 million land mines. Over the years these mines were buried by dust and mud. However, over time, they would return to the surface, often after a strong rainstorm. While I was there, it was nothing to have old ordnance spotted or even hear the explosion off in the distance.
While deployed in 2003, I was able to see the effects of these munitions first-hand. In addition to being a writer and a miracle worker with Excel documents, I am also a very skilled close-up magician. I spent almost every Tuesday and Thursday morning volunteering at the Egyptian and South Korean hospitals. I would go in and do magic for the kids who were waiting to see the doctors. While the majority of the children there were being seen for minor infections or immunizations, there were many that were there directly due to injuries sustained by these land mines.
As a father myself, seeing these mothers carrying their children wrapped in bloody sheets struck a very deep cord within me. When I speak of them carrying their children, I am not talking about across the street, or loading them up into the back of an ambulance for transportation. These women would carry their children for miles at a time in order to get them seen at the hospitals. Volunteering those two days a week was one of the most significantly humbling experiences in my life. Yet the number of cases that I saw was simply a sliver of the total number of injuries. According to the Daily Mail, there are currently approximately 100,000 amputees in the country.
So the government decided that they needed to do something to rectify the situation in Afghanistan. They hired teams of men to put on bomb suits and walk forward inches at a time picking the ground in search of mines. This job is as taxing physically as it is mentally, especially considering the desert conditions of the country. Then, of course, there is the very real mortality issue that is inherent within this job field. Even with the work that these people are doing, it is estimated that it will take hundreds of years to fully rid the country of mines.
A few days ago while scrolling through Facebook, I saw something that stopped me in my tracks. I at first assumed that it, like ninety percent of the stories on social media, was fake. After all, how could you see a title like, “Meet the giant rats that are sniffing out landmines,” and not scoff. Yet the more I read, the more amazed I became.
Meet the African Giant Pouched Rat. These creatures are about the size of a medium house cat. Trained by a Belgian nonprofit company called APOPO, these rats sniff out the TNT used in the explosives. The most amazing thing about these rats is that a single rat can search an area of 200 square feet in under 20 minutes. The same area would take a person up to four days to clear, and unlike their human counterparts, the rat is light enough that it will not set off the mines.
How do these monstrosities accomplish this task? The rats are selectively bred to hopefully get the desired traits, with each litter containing anywhere from one to five rats (called pups). After three weeks, the pups are slowly introduced to their human handlers and an increasingly chaotic environment. After five weeks, they go into their main training phase, where they are trained with a clicker (they cannot understand verbal commands) to sniff out the TNT. During this time, they are trained how to conduct rope grid searches. Once they are trained, they are sent out to the field where they are hooked up to leashes and they lead their human partner through their designated area. Because they react to the actual chemical signature of the mine, they save countless hours of false alarms from buried scrap metals. According to a 2015 article in the National Geographic, the rats have helped locate over 13,200 mines since their inception in 1997.
Not only can the rats sniff out landmines, they also can detect tuberculosis in patients. Granted, there are labs that can do these tests as well, but the rats can, according to the company, “search for TB in sputum samples 96 times faster than a lab technician.” The countries utilizing these animals for this purpose have had a forty-percent detection rate. TB is a major concern for third world nations, and it is estimated that a carrier of TB will infect approximately ten to fourteen additional people per year. The disease is usually fatal if not treated, but can often be cured when detected early enough.
Unfortunately, it is expensive and time-consuming to train the rats. It takes a solid nine months for the rats to be trained to sniff-out mines, and they only live up to eight years. This limits the amount of time that the rats can be used in the field and necessitates the continuous production of these animals. Plus, just like with the training of any service animal, only a percentage have the necessary traits to actually be of use.
According to the APOPO website, there are currently only thirty-five rats in the field detecting landmines with an additional 35 currently being used to detect TB in patients. As of now, there are 70 more rats that are in training.
When it comes to the living conditions in other countries, I am usually one who believes that you need to extricate yourself from your own condition. Reagan held a belief that we would help others in fighting their wars, but not fight the wars for them. However, when it comes to the suffering of children, I admit that my resolve in this matter wavers. When it comes to children being maimed and killed due to residual tools of war, I find that repugnant and beyond anything that we, as a civilized nation, should tolerate. The United States no longer uses permanent landmine fields. In fact, their use is prohibited by the United Nations. According to the “Amended Protocol on Prohibitions or Restrictions on the use of Mines, Booby-Traps and Other Devices” minefields are only supposed to have a period of emplacement of seventy-two hours. Unfortunately, as seen in countries like Afghanistan, this rule is not followed by everyone.
To APOPO I give a sincere Thank you. It gives me faith to know that in a world where the most vulnerable of our species are often the unintentional victims in our capacity of self-destruction there are some organizations out there that are working hard to solve these injustices.
