I found out what they do with the bodies.

You know – like in the movies when dead soldiers are strewn all over the battlefield and you wonder, "What happens to the bodies?" I mean, they don’t just leave them there, do they?

Well, I found out what they do with the bodies.

When the North Vietnamese lifted their month-long siege at Dak Seang, someone had to go out in the jungle to collect, identify and count the bodies of helicopter crewmen that had been shot down.

My helicopter unit was given the job of carrying the Graves Registration people out to the crash sites to perform their grisly work.

This was my first contact with Graves Registration. The words were always ominously capitalized and for a long time I thought it was just the name of some company owned by somebody named Graves; you know, like Brinks Armored Car Co., or Sam’s Grocery, or something like that. I just thought Graves was some guy with a company that registered things, and I never bothered to wonder any more about it . . . until this day.

The Graves Registration people were just ordinary looking soldiers – too young to be away from the mothers – except they didn’t smile much and they were real quiet types.

We didn’t talk to them. Usually when we picked up people to take them somewhere we’d get to talking about something – where you from, how long you been here, when you goin’ home – you know, the usual things soldiers talk about.

But we didn’t talk to the Graves Registration people.

They got on the bird carrying these things that looked like a cross between a large Hefty garbage bag and one of those canvas things you put hanging clothes in when you’re going on a trip.

My crew chief was angry – or at least he looked angry. I guessed, correctly, that the reason for his stern manner that morning had something to do with the nature of the day’s mission.

"Body bags," he said bitterly when he saw the odd-looking objects the Graves Registration people were bringing along with them. It was really strange, too, because when he said it he sounded and acted just like he had on another mission a few days before when he found out we’d get shot at that day.

So I asked him, "We gonna take fire today?"

"No," he replied, "worse."

When we arrived at the first crash site I found out what he was talking about. They never show this part in the movies. John Wayne never played this role.

First comes the visual part – when you’re hovering above the site and looking for a spot to put down in the dense undergrowth while checking for VC booby traps.

I didn’t want to look at the bodies, but I just couldn’t tear my eyes off them. They weren’t even bodies anymore, really – just skeletal remains lying there inside uniforms and flight helmets like the one I was wearing. They’d decomposed badly in the steamy jungle floor. They were now just piles of bone and . . . ooze. What looked like little clumps of flesh still clung here and there to pieces of bone.

The Graves Registration people worked quickly, stuffing the remains into the body bags and heaving the bags into the helicopter.

That’s when the stench hit me. There isn’t anything that smells like a decomposed human body. There isn’t anything that smells worse.

The scene was surreal, realizing they used to be helicopter crewmembers. I was a door gunner and those dead bodies used to have the same job as I did. My mortality struck me like the shock of diving into cold water on a hot summer day. Suddenly I could think of lots of better ways to die.

The one thing I couldn’t reconcile, though, was thinking of them as Americans – maybe even someone I knew – so I told myself that they were South Vietnamese chopper crews. They were just gooks, so it was all right for them to be dead, somehow.

A year or so after I had returned to the States I would finally admit to myself that they were Americans, because I remembered that the South Vietnamese didn’t fly helicopters, at least not in the Central Highlands, and certainly not operating out of Pleiku.

But for that moment, there in the jungle, I could live the fantasy in order to hang on to a little bit of sanity.

We visited several such crash sites that day, ferrying the bodies back to the 71^st Evacuation Hospital in Pleiku.

To keep from throwing up in the helicopter, the crew chief and I rode back in a half-standing position on the landing skid, facing the onrushing air of our forward motion. Even that didn’t keep the smell totally away. It would be days before the stench left the nostrils of my mind.

That night, alone in my hootch, I cried.

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