Elbow Grease and Lots of Kevlar

We’re a sucker for unintentionally wry headlines, so we were delighted to come across this gem last night: “Demining efforts to make Taiwan’s Kinmen island more tourist-friendly.” Why, yes, that seems quite logical—few tourists are fond of vacationing amidst landmines.

Yet once we stopped chortling, we couldn’t help but become engrossed in Taiwan’s project. Kinmen was a site of savage fighting exactly 60 years ago, as Chiang Kai-shek’s retreating Chinese Nationalists were pursued by Mao Zedong’s