Not So Fast, Mrs. Jones!

"Not So Fast, Mrs. Jones!"

By Eric Raits
Written November 25, 26, 2007

_CAUTIONThis story has graphic descriptions of mutilated bodies...skip the red italics portions if you don't want to be changed forever!
The story will still be complete without those sections...

The first time I saw bodies in Vietnam, they were in bags. I was about to cross the airstrip at Camp Holloway to get to work at the Avionics shop (70th Signal Detachment) when I saw a large stack of body bags. To get across the airstrip, I had to walk by that stack. It was a sobering and sickening sight: body bags stacked like large obscene rubbery feed sacks. Hints of what was in them dragged my eyes from point to point. It was not hard to imagine heads and shoulders and elbows. I can't remember now if they were olive drab or black. They were dark, I know that.

I was a photographer even back then. I was tempted to go back to my hooch and get my camera and take a picture of this stack of body bags. For some reason having to do with decency, I couldn't and I didn't. I walked on by that stack. When I came back across the flight line some hours later, the stack was gone. They had been loaded onto a C-130 or a Chinook helicopter and taken to wherever bodies in bags were taken.

The next time I saw a body, it wasn't in a bag. We got an early call to evacuate some wounded from an artillery base on top of a mountain that had been attacked during the night. We were about the fourth or fifth chopper in line to land. When we landed, there were only a few ambulatory wounded standing around in a daze. Some had bloody bandages on arms and legs. Mist was still hanging in pockets here and there. As the wounded were clambering aboard, I noticed a body on the ground, covered by a poncho. I got on the radio and told the pilot about it so we could haul the KIA off the mountain and save somebody, perhaps us, a return trip. The pilot said, "Go ahead and load him up."

I jumped out and the crew chief headed around the chopper to my side to help. I went to the far side to where the KIA's boots were sticking out from under the poncho. I bent over and grabbed his ankles, ready to pick him up. My crew chief was on his knees probing frantically and ineffectively under the poncho. I couldn't understand what was taking him so long and remember thinking, "C'mon, let's get going."

Just then the rotor wash from the Huey began to pull the poncho off our KIA, in a direction away from me, so the lower part of his body was exposed first. Legs, thighs, lower torso, and when the poncho moved in slow motion further up, I remember thinking, "My God, his whole arm is gone." The poncho fluttered once and blew completely away like a curtain jerking up to reveal that the man's head was gone as well. One arm remained attached to his torso by some underarm tendons, a little muscle and a patch of skin with his underarm hair standing out like a little scalp.

My crew chief pulled back and turned away and began throwing up. I motioned for him to take the boot end where I had been. I moved around to the headless end and slid my hands under the corpse's back and discovered why my crew chief had not been able to pick him up. There was nothing to grab hold of. It was like trying to close a grip on cold red Jell-O. I kept sliding my hands and arms farther under him until I was able to reach his belt. I turned my head to the side as my face was up against the cavity where his neck had been. The smell of raw meat was strong. I got my fingers under his belt and stood up. We carried him over to the helicopter and I put my end on the floor and went around to help push his body into the chopper. Once again, my crew chief turned away and bent over, to throw up on the ground. Every time I would push the stiffening corpse farther into the helicopter, his remaining arm would get caught under a seat upright. I had to reach up and pull his arm free and then shove his body a foot farther. The walking wounded on the helicopter were no help. They shied away from helping me. I finally got the body in place so we could leave.

That night, we were on RON (Remain Over Night) duty at Dak To. Usually we would fly up there and conduct missions out of Dak To for a few days rather than flying back to Camp Holloway in the interest of saving time. We had always slept in the helicopters before. This time, the deck of our Huey was covered with blood and gore and we had no place to wash it out. We made plans to sleep on the sand underneath our Huey. We felt almost naked to be out in the open that way, but there was no way we were going to put our sleeping bags down on a bed of dried blood and bits of flesh.

The pilots had a place to sleep across the airfield in tents but one of them, a new pilot, just recently arrived in country, who had been the peter pilot on this mission, came ambling across the runway and sat down with the door gunners and crew chiefs who had gathered.

We filled ammo boxes with sand and then drained fuel into them from the choppers to make a couple of little campfires. Some warmth and light was needed against the things that were definitely going bump in the night.

We were all in shock to some degree, at the horrors we had seen that day. Finally someone said something about a closed- casket ceremony. Another crewman shook his head and wondered out loud how in the world you could tell a mother that her son had gotten his head blown off in combat. This statement brought silence for a few moments. Then the new pilot surprised us by breaking that silence.

"I know how they could tell her," he said. We looked at him and thought, who is this new guy who dares to speak out with no combat experience?

"The pastor could tell her in church." he said. "He could say, `All you mothers with children in Vietnam who have heads, stand up!'" The pilot paused and then whirled to point his finger at someone in an imaginary congregation: "Not so fast, Mrs. Jones!"

It took a moment for us to realize we had really heard what we thought we had heard. We were shocked and then we began to laugh in relief that the ghosts beyond the firelight were at least temporarily pushed back into the dark.

Postscript:

I got in touch with the peter pilot mentioned above a few years ago. He told me that incident had haunted him ever since it happened and hearing my version of it had given him closure. He told me of puking out the window of the helicopter as he watched what was going on. He's had many adventures in the years since and is a tenured professor with a doctorate and is head of a department at a large university.

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