danang vietnam beach during the vietnam war

#Danang vietnam beach during the vietnam war series

Some bodies would be easier to identify than others, due to the severity of their injuries. We would take their clothes and effects to join with the personal artifacts collected from their base,” Tony explained.

“When the person was brought to the mortuary, in a jeep or was helicoptered in from the field, the remains were taken out of the body bag and an inventory was done of everything that they had on. Upon receiving a body, the morticians used a detailed procedure for identifying remains. From the collection point they were then transported with an escort to the mortuary.” “They were wrapped in linen and put in a black body bag in the field and from there they went to the collection point. His work in the mortuary presented more evidence of the horrors of war as the bodies of soldiers were brought in from the battlefield. No one was injured, but this was Tony’s introduction to the dangers of a war zone. If you got up to run to the bunker, you could be cut down.” Whenever you heard that first explosion, you hit the ground. The compound was under a rocket attack, and shrapnel was flying. Sunday morning, I went out to the embalming fluid barrels to fill my bucket with embalming chemical and as I’m walking back soldiers are running out of the office toward the bunker yelling, ‘Get the hell out of here!’ So this E6 (a staff sergeant) hollers, ‘Get down!’ That was all it took. At midnight, we had breakfast, and then we came back to the mortuary and I went to my second body. We worked the night shift because civilian embalmers worked the first shift. “We went to the mortuary to work the night shift, Saturday night, from 7 p.m. Tony started work in the mortuary the following night.

You never know who you'll meet the in theater of war. “As I'm walking to the barracks, someone yells ‘Hey, Anton!’” And there was a friend of Tony's from Cleveland, Denny Lazuta, a dental technician that Tony had attended mortuary school with. “Because the eight embalmers were going into the embalming room the next night, the other 12 soldiers unpacked our bags and got our lockers together. “We loaded up our personal stuff and were driven to our barracks in the Army compound, which was about five miles away from the airport,” he continued. We exited the tailgate of the aircraft in a secure area, so we were given the impression we would have nothing to worry about,” Tony recalled. “We carried bullet clips in our pockets, but no weapons, because the rifle boxes were nailed shut in their shipping crates. He arrived with 19 other soldiers, eight of whom were embalmers. Tony Dostal arrived in Vietnam at the Air Force Base in Da Nang aboard a C-141 transport plane on Friday, Aug.

#Danang vietnam beach during the vietnam war series

This is the second in a series of articles about one local veteran, Bay Village resident Anton (Tony) Dostal, who served as a mortician during the Vietnam War.