Sappers Seek to Zap a Most Menacing Enemy

Fred Estall is a sapper. That is to say, he spends his days inching along the ground on his belly, carefully running a metal detector over the soil and probing it with a stick as he searches for land mines. On a good day, he can cover about 60 feet an hour like this. On others, he might cover only three.

On one hand, his is a job with unlimited prospects. There are literally millions of land mines waiting to be uncovered and destroyed. On the other, it is a job with an utterly finite future, one where death or horrific injury are always one wrong move away.

Land mines litter 68 countries. Afghanistan is among the most affected, with about 10 million land mines lying in wait beneath the rocky, dry terrain. Last Sunday, three U.S. Marines were injured--one lost a leg below the knee--when one stepped on an explosive device during a search for mines and booby traps at the war-ravaged Kandahar airport. They are among the latest to join the list, hundreds of thousands of names long, of those caught in the trap land mines set.

Estall was part of the United Nations’ first mine-clearing effort in Afghanistan in 1989. He has also worked in other countries with significant land mine problems--one of thousands of de-miners employed by various humanitarian groups. Their goal: rid the world of the 110 million land mines that have been planted since World War II, when they were first extensively used.

Many de-miners are regular citizens of mine-affected countries who have been trained for the task. Others, like Estall, are former military personnel who were taught how to lay and remove mines as part of their training. Estall had been in the New Zealand army for 13 years before joining the U.S. Department of Defense Humanitarian De-Mining team, which operates in heavily mined countries during peacetime.

Sappers, as they are traditionally known, have a long history. They date back to the Roman Empire and siege warfare, when soldiers dug trenches to advance upon enemy lines. Trenches were called saps, and those who dug them were called sappers.

Today, sappers are better known as combat engineers, a term that came into existence when the Army Corps of Engineers was founded during the Revolutionary War to build roads and fortifications.

Their affiliation with land mines dates to the Civil War, when soldiers adapted artillery shells and buried them in the ground with a fuse or trip wire to explode on contact. These explosives were not mines, per se, but a precursor. Land mines, as we know them today, were first designed in the 1930s.

Today, there are dozens of varieties of anti-tank mines--meant to explode military vehicles that run over or near them--and anti-personnel mines, designed to either maim or kill humans.

By far the most common are the anti-personnel type. Many are made from metal, but increasingly they are plastic and ceramic to avoid detection. Some look like hockey pucks and batteries. Others resemble pineapples, even toys.

Estall makes it his business to know the difference. He has to. His sole piece of protective gear is a pair of safety glasses. His only tools are a prod and a metal detector.

“You’ve got to have a lot of faith in your metal detector,” Estall said. “If it makes a sound, you go to investigate. You can’t just take it for granted that it’s a piece of metal.”

The sound a mine makes is exactly the same as the sound any other piece of metal makes, he said. He often goes for weeks finding nothing but spent shell casings, shrapnel, horseshoes, false teeth, food cans, bicycles and anything else that registers on his metal detector. But no mines.

“It’s nerve-racking,” said the 48-year-old who has cleared mines in Bosnia, Cambodia and Mozambique. “Some moments you’re getting excited, you’re getting frustrated, you’re also getting bored. There’s no one emotion. You go through the whole gamut three or four times an hour.”

Not unlike what it is like for the tens of millions of people worldwide who live in the shadow of land mines. In Cambodia, one of the world’s most mine-affected countries, they are so common that ordinary citizens use them to fish and to protect their property.

Most, though, were planted during military conflicts as a deterrent to the enemy. But when the wars are over, the mines remain--rendering valuable farmland useless and killing livestock and humans. Each year, 10,000 to 20,000 people are killed by land mines, and as many are disabled.

Why are there so many land mines?

“They’re effective,” said Larry Roberts, historian for the U.S. Army Engineer School at Ft. Leonard Wood in Missouri. “A truism of warfare is that those things which no longer are effective or useful on a battlefield are discarded. How many armies today have archers? How many have cavalry with lances? Things that are effective are still in the inventory. That’s why armies keep [land mines].”

Counter-mining is the practice of detecting and destroying mines in a wartime environment. The goal is much different from de-mining, which is done during peacetime to make areas safe for the people who live there. Counter-miners clear only the mines that are necessary to enable troops to traverse a particular area.

It is estimated that land mines cost as little as $3 apiece to manufacture and as much as $1,000 apiece to remove. And while mine-clearing efforts get rid of about 110,000 each year, many times more than that are planted annually. Even if no new mines are planted, at the current rate of removal, the United Nations estimates it will take more than 1,000 years and nearly $33 billion to safely clear the world’s minefields. It’s easy to see why the agency calls land mines “an insidious and persistent danger.”

New technologies are in development to deal with the problem. Metal detectors are still the most common method of detection, but they are decreasingly effective as mines become more sophisticated. Dogs sometimes work in the field alongside de-miners to sniff them out, and honeybees are being studied to see if they can do something similar. X-ray and acoustic detection systems are among the more cutting-edge technologies.

Meanwhile, Estall relies on his metal detector. And instinct.

“If you have common sense you can do this. It’s not rocket science,” he said.

Estall said he has only had one close call. It left him “wobbly in the knees,” but otherwise unaffected.

“I’m just as likely to get run over by a taxi than get blown up by a mine. You’ve got to keep perspective,” said Estall, who lives in Missouri with his wife and three children. “I’ve known guys who have trod on mines and they haven’t gone off, and that’s just phenomenal luck, but that’s just the way it is.”