A brief glimpse at Aldo

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A brief glimpse at Aldos workbench
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My friends have found it difficult to understand
what I do within the Global Landmine Survey.In
Vietnam, during my third trip (May 2004), a
succession of encounters and half-products
offered an opportunity to make this more
graphic.This trip exposed both cognitive and
emotional parts of my involvement in this
survey.It was conducted jointly by the
Vietnamese army and the Vietnam Veterans of
America Foundation.
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I had visited two communes in central Vietnam
before, for a pre-test of the questionnaire.

• In May 2004, I worked chiefly on statistics of
  the contamination - to aid the selection of
  communes to survey.

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The army canvassed provincial administrations for
contamination ratings of over 550 communes in our
survey region.
I was anxious to see how these administrative
opinions were validated by the historical record
and by conditions on the ground.
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With map shapes, US Air Force bombing data and
recent population data that a colleague supplied,
I set out to build maps and statistical
models.Here is the map of one province
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What is heavily contaminated?

• In the map, you can easily discern clusters of
  communes that the provincial administration rated
  as heavily contaminated.
• These clusters lie along one of the Ho Chi Minh
  Trail supply lines in North South direction.
• They were continuously attacked. On one of the
  communes, US war planes dropped 143,000 bombs.

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My colleague, Mrs. Hien, was decidedly lighter
than any of the cluster bomb canisters piled up
at the scrap metal dealer we visited.On a
serious note what mixture of data should we then
use for selecting communes for the survey?
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Expert opinion, history, and the census

• I reasoned that local administrations must have
  formed their assessments on the basis of a number
  of factors
• They would certainly be influenced by the
  magnitude of the bombardments before 1975.
• The more densely populated a commune, the more
  serious the problems that a given number of
  unexploded bombs creates.
• Unknown local factors would enter, too.

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Remembering how I watched a local guide explain a
pattern in the B-52 bombing craters, ..
.. I built this model
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You should be able to easily see two things
As we move from None to Light to Heavy, the
average magnitude of the bombing too goes up. Let
me shows this with animated arrows
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The second conspicuous pattern is the directed
cloud that increasingly forms as we move from the
left to the center and to the right panel. In
fact, in the Heavy panel, there is a clear
negative correlation visible. In other words, as
predicted, the historic bombing intensity and the
contemporary population density compensate for
each other in prompting the official rating. The
red line indicates this
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Based on this analysis, we went back to the
military to propose criteria for the selection of
districts and communes to survey in central
Vietnam.
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What shocked me at the time, was not the
monstrosity of the violence, but how cold I felt
when I did these analyses.Neither did I feel
any sorrow for the victims, nor any anger toward
the perpetrators. I suspected myself capable of
the same absence of emotion if I had been a B-52
mission planner.Only once did I crack. This
was when ..
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.. we were asking elderly men who had spent the
war years in the town under survey, to confirm
the bombing zones on a map that we brought to
them. And they said
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Your map is wrong.We know this, because the
bombs fell on the neighboring village, not
us.They killed every one men, women and
children. We had one burial ceremony for all
the following morning.
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Who can know the tragedies hidden in a
statistic?Only a few reveal themselves, in
non-statistical moments.And yet, a measure is
needed of the terror inflicted, and of the work
remaining.This is what we try to do in the
Landmine Survey.