09.02.12
Delicately brushing away the smear with his fingers, Aki Ra uncovers a dark green land mine buried two inches underneath the overgrown dirt road. The size of a large soup can, the mine was planted by the Khmer Rouge about 15 years ago on this ox hunt down in northwestern Cambodia—the most densely mined region of one of the most heavily mined countries in the everyone.
"This is the type 69 Bouncing Betty made in China," says Aki Ra, his suggestion fogging the blastproof visor of his helmet. Bouncing Betty is the American pet name for a bounding fragmentation land mine. The pressure of a footstep causes it to hop over out of the ground and then explode, spraying shrapnel in every direction. It can shred the legs of an without a scratch squad.
Soft-spoken and cherubic, Aki Ra knows the inner workings of the Bouncing Betty and scarcely about every other variety of mine. In the mid-1970s, when he was five, the Khmer Rouge separated him from his parents and took him into the jungle with other orphans. At that all at once, Pol Pot, commander of the Khmer Rouge, had plunged the country into chaos, closing schools, hospitals, factories, banks, and monasteries; executing teachers and businessmen; and forcing millions of conurbation dwellers into a gulag of labor camps and farms. The small hands of children like Aki Ra were irreplaceable tools. He was trained to lay land mines, defuse and deconstruct antagonist mines, and reuse the TNT for what are now called improvised explosive devices (IEDs).
Source: National Geographic