![]() It could have been an animal's carcass for all you knew. That was a little easier to take, they didn't have a face. They'd come in and there would be nothing more than this shell of a person. We used to call them "crispy critters" to keep from getting depressed. ![]() There were GIs exposed to flame throwers or gas explosions. The corpsmen were told to take care of the wounded first, instead of spending time getting the dead in the bags. Evidently, they had lain out on the ground awhile before someone could get to them. It had blown his heart, his lungs, everything to shreds. I remember he had a large hole in his chest and I knew it was a gunshot wound or a grenade injury. One was a young guy who had had his face blown away, with hundreds of maggots eating away where his face used to be. It was my first exposure to maggots, something I had never seen before in my life. That's something I still have flashbacks about- unzipping those bags. What you had to do was open the bag, look inside and see what possibly could have killed this person, and then write down on the tag what you felt the cause of death was. ![]() Of course, they couldn't release the doctors for such trivial work. One of the nurses' responsibilities was to look inside these body bags to determine cause of death. And this Chinook came in with 25 body bags aboard. You know, the Chinook is this great big helicopter, this two-blade deal that can carry 100-150 people. We received 25 body bags in on this giant Chinook helicopter. My first real exposure to the war came five days after I landed.
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