Why are landmines still killing people in previous war zones? How long do they stay active?

A land mine can remain active for up to 50 years. Land mines are cheap and effective when deployed but are expensive and dangerous to remove. Most mines can be boobytrapped, and some of them are just to make the game more interesting.

After Marine Corps boot camp in 1950, I was assigned to Camp Pendleton for advanced weapons training. I was trained on the flame thrower, 3.5 bazooka and demolitions. Demolition training consisted of the handling of explosives, principally TNT and C4 as well as deploying land mines, booby traps and removing same. The removing part was a whole lot more difficult than the deploying part. Metal detectors make the location of mines easier, but there are mines that have little or no metal in them.

Our mine clearing exercises typically consisted of creeping forward (a baby creeps before it crawls) and probing the ground in front and to the sides with a bayonet. If an object were hit by the probing, the procedure was to carefully dig around the object being careful not to disturb it, or anything attached to it. After clearing the object, if it was a mine, a trench was dug around it to a foot or more deep. Then the dirt under the mine was carefully removed from one side. If nothing was attached to the mine, the dirt was replaced and removed from another side until all sides had been cleared. Once it was determined that nothing was attached to the mine, it was carefully moved and the detonator extracted, large firecrackers were frequently attached to the mines so that you had a nasty surprise if you did something wrong. It was pointed out that if the firecracker went off, in combat, so would the mine and you were dead or badly wounded as well as being a dumb ass.

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