Fear of nuclear war was drilled into American kids like me during the early 1960s. Back at Hoover Elementary School, in addition to orderly fire drills, we learned to “duck-and-cover” under our school desks in case of an A-bomb.

Today, children who live around the old battlefields of central Vietnam are taught to fear the unexploded ordnance – or UXOs. The remnants of a war that ended 37 years ago have killed thousands and maimed thousands, and even today the lessons can be heartbreaking.

A few days ago, the post-war body count went up by four, all children, when an old mortar detonated in southern Vinh Long province amid a group of people who apparently assumed it was a dud. Four other persons, including two more children, were seriously injured. The incident left anti-UXO advocate Jonathon Guthrie of Norwegian People’s Aid wondering if there is adequate education in the south.

“There is no international attention or support on this issue in the south. All international assistance is to central provinces only,” Guthrie told me. This is due to limited resources and selecting those provinces that are the most highly contaminated.”

To me, the UXO problem may be the most outrageous legacy of what the Vietnamese call the American War. The effects of Agent Orange is more insidious, and the American attitude more hypocritical. But a case can be made that the full impact of the chemical defoliant was unknown, and even now causality of illnesses and birth defects can be debatable amid abundant anecdotal evidence. But there is nothing debatable about 500-pounds dropped from B-52s, or cluster bombs, mortar rounds, grenades or land mines. They are designed to blow up and kill – and fact that ordnance that dates to the 1960s and ‘70s is still killing is unforgivable.

U.S. forces bombed Vietnam (and Laos and Cambodia) with such intensity that hundreds of thousands of explosive remnants were left behind. Today, I think most Americans regret intervening in Vietnam.

It’s hard to fathom why UXOs remain such a large problem – why, for example, it’s reported that 84 percent of central Quang Tri province is still contaminated by explosive remnants.

Many accidents don’t rise to the level of international news, but the Vinh Long tragedy was reported in the U.S., where it should strike the tender spot of American guilt. Even so, the U.S. Congress has failed to make UXOs a priority, not in my view. Instead of acts of U.S. Congress, the hope seems to come more from private citizens like Chuck Searcy, who served in the U.S. Army in Vietnam before going home and protesting the war, has spent many years in Hanoi calling attention to the danger and cajoling governments and nonprofits on the issue. Searcy now represents the Humpty Dumpty Foundation – a name that may seem to suggest a lost cause. But as Searcy points out, the nursery rhyme faults “all the king’s horse and all the king’s men” – that is, the state – so perhaps charities and NGOs are the key to putting things together again. As for Guthrie, he served as a sapper in the Australian military, defusing bombs one by one, before taking on Vietnam’s huge problem. Now he tries to untangle the arcane international politics of UXOs. The last time I saw him, he was upbeat, describing some progress.

One of Guthrie’s goals is to persuade the Vietnam government to embrace an international convention on cluster munitions, which are responsible for 40 percent of the accidents in Vietnam. “If Vietnam were to accede to the convention,” he said, “it would draw international attention and hopefully more assistance to the Vietnam National UXO Program.”

And someday the post-American War body count will finally stop growing.