Vietnam Voices: Jim Beecher

Jim Beecher, 59, North Babylon. Only months earlier, Beecher had been a senior at North Babylon High School, but during the Summer of 1969, he found himself working at the Army Mortuary at Danang, which handled the dead from U.S. military units fighting in the northern half of South Vietnam.

There was a helplessness you felt. You'd open a bag, and it could be someone you knew. I was completely destroyed the first time it happened, and it happened a couple of times. I don't want to talk about it because some of their families still live on Long Island.

One of them I knew, a guy from Pennsylvania, was a fellow who had been the best shot in our training company. I was just in country maybe three weeks when he came in. We had been in the same squad of maybe 30 guys in basic. It was a shock. I saw his name on the wall . . . [of the Vietnam Memorial in Washington].

One of the hardest things emotionally was identifying someone. You never assumed an identity, even if they came in with dog tags. So you'd go through their pockets, look for photographs or letters. And then you'd see his parents, or realize that he had just gotten married or just had a baby girl, and they would never see him again, his kids would grow up without a father.

You try to find a way that it doesn't overwhelm you. You try to get a mind-set where you were not working for the Army anymore, but were working for their mom and dad back home. The emotional toll it took. The guys from my unit who are still alive, it's amazing how [messed] up we are.

We were pariahs over there. No one would want to be around us. You'd walk into a mess hall, and everyone would move away. It was the smell of the decay. . . . And when we came back to the United States, we were pariahs all over again.