into the fray

My arrival in Vietnam was notable. I was assigned to a Navy ship that was sailing to Subic Bay in the Philippines to be relieved by another ship, the USS Princeton. I hopped a chopper out to that ship and deplaned (or dechopped) on the flight deck right by a cadaver in a body bag. The occupant had been lost at sea for a few days and, after that much time in warm salty water, completely filled the normally roomy bag. And he stank. Human decomp is the worst thing you’ll ever smell. You’d never forget it.

I found my unit and was delighted to find that Tom Borgert, a buddy from basic training, had just arrived as well. Two of the other Marines in our unit wanted to bring on a wall locker from the old ship, so they threw a blanket over it and told the gangway watchman that it was a corpse. He let it pass without any further examination.

It took a few days to get back to Vietnam, time I used to get acquainted with my new co-workers and my new work. We provided administrative and communication support for a helicopter squadron and a battalion landing team (BLT). The BLT, nicknamed “The Magnificent Bastards”, had just taken on several battalions of the North Vietnamese Army at the Battle of Dai Do. They suffered 81 dead and about 300 wounded, while killing 600+ enemy. The casualty clerk I was replacing told me the clerks had so much to report that they were getting speed from the ship’s pharmacy to stay awake.

The small office I shared with four other Marines was just below the flight deck. There was a wire catwalk underneath the deck that we could take to quickly get to the hangar deck, where the casualties were lowered on a huge elevator after being taken off helicopters. The first time I heard “Medevacs! Inbound!” called on the ship’s P.A. system, the other clerks and I scrambled to the catwalk. The elevator was still lowering when we got there, and what followed hurtled me into a new world.

(WARNING: The rest of this post is exceedingly graphic.)

One of the dead had his feet on his chest. Another had bled out and his scrotum was as big as a grapefruit. Yet another was quite dead but his stomach seemed to be churning like the mother of all bellyaches. As I got closer, I realized that it was a mass of maggots. The wounded were the exact opposite: screaming, cussing, crying. It was as close to hell that I hope I ever get.

When we had the wounded tended to and the dead in the ship’s morgue, the other clerks and I returned to our office. I took the catwalk back alone, and stopped to have the dry heaves for about twenty minutes.

And so it went. I struggled to stuff my feelings until the day we had the BTB. A BTB is a “believed to be”, a cadaver so badly mangled we weren’t perfectly sure of his identity. Usually we had his dog tags and the visual acknowledgement by two of his battle mates. But this poor bastard broke all the rules. His unit had been hit at night and he was inexplicitly barefoot. Marines were issued two sets of dog tags, and a lot of us put one set in our bootlaces.

The BTB’s killing blow was an explosive device in the middle of his chest. Everything from below his nose to above his navel was mincemeat, with the stump of his tongue sticking up in the middle. This left us with the task of meticulously searching the mincemeat with forceps for pieces of dog tags. We found none.

I took his record book back to our office to type up a death notification and started sifting through it. I felt terrible getting to know him like this. Then I learned that he had just re-enlisted and his wife had had their first child. “Well, fuck it!”, I screamed to myself and slammed the book shut, “He asked for this!” Thus began my numbing from the war that would resonate throughout my life to this date.

Everyone in his unit knew who it was, but we still had to send him out as a BTB due to regulations. I don’t know what the government told his family, but his name is not on The Wall. I have just recently begin to realize and appreciate that what I did in ‘nam was the beginning of the grief process for people I would never meet. As mind-wrenching as it was, I’m glad to know that I did it right.