Retirement for Bill Morse looked exactly like it should: A house in Palm Springs, sunny days by the pool, travel on the calendar. But then, the quiet began to feel a little too quiet.
“I was sitting around one day reading a book,” Morse says. “And I just sort of looked around and thought, ‘So I just do this until the stroke comes?’”
There had to be more to life, he told himself.
It was the moment that nudged him out of the desert and all the way to Cambodia, into a second act of life shaped by purpose.
From Palos Verdes to Siem Reap
Morse grew up among the dramatic bluffs of Palos Verdes — a kid with salt in his hair and the Pacific Ocean in his backyard. He was in the first graduating class of Rolling Hills High School (now Palos Verdes Peninsula High School).
“I loved growing up in Palos Verdes. It was like a TV show. It was gorgeous, we were right on the ocean. Everything was wonderful,” he says. “But it was — what’s the word I’m looking for? — Sheltered.”
Like a lot of people in his generation, Morse imagined his future in uniform. He went through military school expecting to go to Vietnam, and continuing his service for decades afterward. But something shifted when he went to military school in 1968.
“I had to write a paper in my history class,” he says. “I chose to write in Defense of American Foreign Policy in Southeast Asia. And by the time I finished the paper, I was opposed to the war.”
Still, Morse was commissioned into the U.S. Army at the tail end of the conflict, then transitioned into the reserves. After that came a stint in teaching, followed by three decades at the helm of his own manufacturing business.
In 1999, Morse sold his company and retired to the desert with his wife, Jill. He expected to relax, to feel like he’d won at life. But he felt anything but satisfied.
“I didn’t feel useful anymore,” he says. “I felt replaceable.”
From a colleague, he heard about a man in Cambodia, a former child soldier under the Khmer Rouge, now an adult on a mission. The man’s name was Aki Ra, and he’d started his own DIY demining operation, disarming explosives with nothing but a stick and a screwdriver.
For Morse, this resonated. He knew the U.S. had dropped more than 3 million tons of bombs on Cambodia between 1965 and 1973. That campaign destabilized the nation, helped usher in the genocidal Khmer Rouge, and left behind countless mines, bombs and unexploded ordnance (explosives that didn’t explode when fired).
“This was our war,” Morse says. “And yet this man was doing penance for what he had done as a soldier.”
He booked a flight and found Aki Ra. “I was so moved by what he was doing,” Morse says. “I told him I’d start a charity to support his work.”
In return, Aki Ra rolled his eyes. He’d heard that kind of promise before. But Morse is a man of his word.
Selling the house
It started small. At first, Morse sent money for proper mine detectors. Then he made return visits to Cambodia. One trip turned into two, two into five. Soon, he was navigating the Cambodian bureaucracy to help Aki Ra get the necessary legal credentials to continue his demining work safely and officially.
Money wasn’t enough, though. Morse recognized the need for real infrastructure. So he started a U.S.-based nonprofit — the Landmine Relief Fund — to raise funds and increase awareness back home. That evolved into co-founding Cambodian Self-Help Demining (CSHD) alongside Aki Ra, a non-governmental organization aimed at empowering Cambodian teams to do the work themselves.
“I agreed to stay a couple of years,” Morse says. But life had other plans.
At the time, Aki Ra was running a landmine museum outside Siem Reap. The place doubled as a shelter for kids — some orphaned, some landmine survivors, others from rural villages where schools didn’t exist. Jill Morse stepped in to run an English program, helping with homework and building a curriculum.
Two years stretched into three, then four. Eventually, Jill looked at her husband and said what had already become obvious: “We’re not going back.”
The couple sold their house in Palm Springs and hired an estate company to liquidate everything they owned. And just like that, they closed the chapter on their comfortable life in the desert, opening a new one in the middle of a former war zone.
Real demining is not a movie
There’s a misconception that landmines are a problem of the past. But Morse is quick to dispel that.
For example, as recently as this summer, live artillery rounds were located in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. In 2016, a Civil War-era landmine was found in Arkansas. Fields in Belgium and France, especially around the former Western Front, continuously yield large quantities of unexploded WWI shells, bullets and grenades.
“Landmines don’t expire,” Morse says. “They just wait.”
(Photo courtesy Bill Morse)
Hollywood hasn’t helped. In the movies, a character steps on a mine and hears a foreboding click. Then comes the suspenseful wait, an exhale before disaster. But that’s not the reality.
“There’s no click,” Morse says. “You step, and then boom. That’s it. Your leg, your foot, sometimes both — gone.”
Most mines are deceptively small. They’re plastic discs no larger than a coffee cup saucer, just a few inches deep in the dirt. They’re hard to see, but easy to trigger, and they’re designed maim, not to kill. The wounded person is more likely to die from losing blood than from the actual explosion.
The vast majority of landmines in Cambodia are along the Thai border, which is too remote and not cost-effective for many landmine-clearing organizations.
“But people live here. Kids walk through these fields to get to school,” Morse says.
So his team steps in where others step back. Since founding CSHD, they’ve cleared more than 200 minefields and trained dozens of Cambodians in explosive ordnance disposal. Many of them grew up in the very villages they now help to clear.
“Cambodians are solving this problem,” Morse says. “We’re just giving them the tools and standing beside them.”
It’s not just about mines
What Bill and Jill are doing in Cambodia goes beyond clearing landmines. Their work is about building the foundations for a better future.
Through the Landmine Relief Fund and its partner NGO, the Rural School Support Organization (RSSO), Bill and Jill have helped raise funds to build 46 schools across 35 villages, most of them along the mine-riddled Thai border.
What started as simple classrooms on cleared minefields has grown into full-fledged campuses. One school began with just 30 students; now it serves more than 250.
Their impact doesn’t stop at education. They’ve assisted with food programs, scholarships, and a teaching farm called The Together Project. The project helps Cambodians grow their own chemical-free crops, using greenhouse gardening and mushroom cultivation as tools for economic independence.
“Something as small as a tiny mushroom house can double a family’s income,” Morse says.
And this is what transforms villages, he says. Students bring mushrooms home. Curious parents visit the farm. They learn. They teach others. A new kind of rural economy takes root. And all of this is free.
“We’re not here just to help people survive,” Morse says. “We want them to thrive.”
A life rewritten
It would be easy to call Bill Morse a hero. But he’ll flinch at the word, shift in his seat, and insist otherwise.
He’ll tell you he’s just a guy who couldn’t sit still. A guy who one day gazed at the serenity of retirement and realized he still had so much more to give. A guy who said yes to the unknown in Southeast Asia because it was the right thing to do.
“Never in my wildest dreams did I imagine this,” he says.
He’s 78 now. Still living in Cambodia with Jill and a community of friends. Still building teams. Still answering emails from donors at all hours of the night. And when he talks about what’s next, it’s not about stepping away, it’s about leaning in.
“There are still people dying every single week in Vietnam, in Laos, in Cambodia from the actions that we (the U.S.) took. It is our responsibility,” he says. “Even if we had nothing to do with it, it’s still our responsibility.
“Everybody matters or nobody matters.”
For more information about the Landmine Relief Fund, including the Cambodian Self-Help Demining and Rural Schools Support Organization, visit landmine-relief-fund.com.