The Vietnam War ended 25 years ago this week, but for 32year-old Le Suc it is still taking its toll.
He was only seven years old then, but the horror of the fighting has left him shell-shocked and he is reduced today to selling old coins, bullets and US army dog tags to a trickle of visitors who come to Khe Sanh.
There is so much unexploded ordnance left lying around the remote battlefield on a barren plateau just south of the old DMZ separating North and South Vietnam that villagers are regularly maimed.
"Some people have stepped on mines when planting coffee," said Le Suc. "One of my friends was killed last year when he was searching for scrap metal with a detector and he disturbed an old grenade."
Since the fighting stopped in 1975, more than 5,400 people have been killed or injured by landmines and unexploded ordnance around Khe Sanh, out of a total of over 100,000 throughout all of Vietnam.
Because of the prohibitive cost, the Vietnamese army has been able to clear only a few hundred acres of the thousands of small bombs and mines left by the Americans - some of whom have returned to help operate a landmine education centre in Quang Tri province.
Khe Sanh lies off Route 9 among forested hills. The road crosses the Ho Chi Min trail, now a tarmacadam track, where a new metal span is being constructed to replace the poorly built Cuban Friendship Bridge of the 1970s, which collapsed last year. It runs past thatched houses on stilts belonging to the diminutive Bru people, who used to fire darts at American soldiers tipped with fermented urine and Cobra venom.
The site of the most famous siege of the American war in Vietnam lies at the end of an uphill stony track, across land devastated by phosphorous shells, Agent Orange and napalm.
More than 53,000 tonnes of napalm were dropped in February 1968 at the height of the 75-day siege of the American Marine base by North Vietnamese troops, helping to make it the most heavily bombed target in the history of warfare. Even today only scrub will grow where Agent Orange defoliated the dense jungle.
At the edge of a long arid strip of brown earth that was once a US airfield, there is an abandoned M48X tank without tracks and the twisted propellers of a C130 aircraft.
A single-storey building houses a shabby museum, where a Vietnamese official charges $2 entrance fee.
The feeling of utter futility which strikes anyone who comes here finds expression in the dank pages of a visitors' book. "It wasn't worth one dollar or one American life," scribbled a US tourist.
"Who won? Who lost? Who knows?" asked another visitor. "Lesson to America's `world police' theory - stay at home", wrote an Irish visitor, signed `Dub'.
Of the Vietnam vets who have returned to the scene of the battle, Larry Millen, an artillery sergeant from Oklahoma, wrote, "Am truly sorry for what we have done. Have learned much here."
Others are stirred to strike a more defiant note. "Ultimately the American way is winning," wrote Gary McHargue from California. "That's true, there's nothing like a Big Mac," replied the next visitor, "We love you America."
Five hundred Americans, 10,000 North Vietnamese and countless civilians died at Khe Sanh in a vicious battle which achieved no strategic gain for either side, but helped to break the will of the Americans to stay in Vietnam.
The American singer Bruce Springsteen expressed the inevitable outcome in Born in the USA, the anthem to the war which he composed in 1984: "Had a brother at Khe Sanh fighting off the Viet Cong, They're still there. He's all gone."