The Blast Resuscitation and Victim Assistance (BRAVA) team from the US Naval Hospital in Okinawa, Japan, and the Tripler Army Medical center in Hawaii had landed in Hanoi on June 9 for a 20-day mission.

"Between 30 and 40 patients have been operated (on) with more patients scheduled during the week" in two hospitals in Hanoi, Captain D.C. Covey told reporters on Tuesday.

The team, including two medics of Vietnamese origin, treated both former soldiers and civilians. Some were injured during the Vietnam war which ended in 1975, while others more recently by War-era landmines and unexploded ordnance.

"We are bringing a state-of-the art western experience but we learn a lot as well from the Vietnamese team. It is a give-and-take experience," the lead physician of the mission said.

The US medics said they learned how to use herbs and plants for dressings designed to control infection.

"We would like to come back in the future. It is just a first step and we could make it a regular program," Covey said.

"This visit is a step forward in developing more substantive bilateral defence relations between the United States and Vietnam," the US embassy had said when the team landed.

Formal US-Vietnam relations were only established in 1995, a year after then-president Bill Clinton lifted a trade embargo on the Southeast Asian nation.

Relations between the former military foes remain lukewarm, however, with Hanoi particularly suspicious of what it considers Washington's imperialist global foreign policy.

At least 18 people have been killed and scores more injured in Vietnam so far this year from landmines and unexploded ordnance.

Estimates from the US Pentagon and the Vietnamese defence ministry suggest there are between 315,000 and 720,000 tonnes of unexploded munitions strewn across all or most of the country's 61 provinces.

A further three million landmines are also believed to litter the countryside.

WAR.WIRE