Geneva, PSSM, A New Mission
When Clearance Was Almost Finished
In 2008 we were close to the end of clearance, and the money was moving to other countries. Every year I went to Geneva to present our progress in Humanitarian Mine Action (HMA) and ask for financial help to finish the work. A Canadian Ambassador asked me what I would do if the funds did not come. I explained to him that coming to Geneva was the hardest part of my job. I could carry a man out of a crater with blood on my hands more easily than I could stand in that room and ask for money with a straight back. If the program funding stopped, then I would take my small team into the fields, and we’d finish it ourselves. The delegates applauded and they sent enough to finish the clearance work sometime in 2009. I owe our success to the many donors, and the men and women who worked with discipline in dangerous conditions and went home in one piece.
From Fields to Depots
After Gërdec everyone could feel how dangerous poor stockpile management could be. Lethal piles of ammunition were everywhere, tunnels and depots full, some of them damaged, many of them mapped badly or not at all. That is when the work shifted, and I shifted with it.
I was invited to a seminar, again graciously funded by the United States Department of State (PM/WRA) on physical security and stockpile management with officers from the United States and had the good fortune to meet with an old friend who I knew from our days during the buildup to the Convention on Cluster Munitions, Lee Moroney, and Mark Lasley from an American NGO called Golden West Humanitarian Foundation. I spoke about our depots, our tunnels, our practices, our gaps and together we made an assessment and a list of priorities to modernize PSSM across Albania.
A good program touches many lives, from the soldier who will go home to his family unscathed, to the ambulance that will not have to drive a man with a neck wound through traffic, or the village that will not jump awake at night to a raging explosion.
Building a System That Prevents the Next Disaster
By 2020 the program, funded by the United States European Command (USEUCOM) HMA Program was well underway. It was never just about constructing safer storage depots. We also trained people, developing capacity, best practices and putting in place international standards.
After I finished my work for the UXO Hotspots program in 2021, I was free to leave. My friend, Lee Moroney, from Golden West asked me to come on board and help. I said yes. I loved the idea of finishing what we had started, it felt like it was the last stage to make the system safe. I stayed in the same office with the same hat and the same shoes, and no one could tell the difference! We trained and we improved places where rain used to come in and rats used to sleep under pallets of leaking ammunition. We taught the simple things that keep men alive, how to store, how to separate, how to test, how to report a problem before it becomes a tragic accident, like Gërdec years before.
The work became safer.
Life at home carried its own weight.
Continue to Chapter 10 – Family.