Chapter Eight – “Wait until they open this one in Dover
“The workings of the human heart are
the profoundest mystery of the universe.
One moment they make us despair of our kind,
and the next we see them in the reflection
of the divine image.”
Charles W. Chestnut
Guyana is located on the northeast shoulder of South America. It covers about 83,000 square miles and is bordered by the countries of Venezuela to the northwest, Brazil on the west and south and by Surinam on the east. The northern border is the Atlantic Ocean.
All but about 30 percent of Guyana is made up of tropical rain forest. The country is located just north of the equator. It rains 80 to 100 inches a year and the temperatures are usually in the high 80s and 90s during the day.[1]
Guyana is said to be one of the most beautiful countries in South America, with many rivers and waterfalls. But for most of the Americans taking part in this mission, beauty is not what they remember about Guyana.
Although the jungle that surrounded Jonestown was abundant in fauna and rich in exotic flora, the natural beauty of the country was overshadowed by the ugliness and horrible stench that accompanies mass death. Extremely bloated bodies, deformed by so many hours of exposure to the heat of the tropical sun that they sometimes literally burst, depositing copious amounts of their putrid, foul-smelling contents to the ground, have a tendency to strike one blind to anything lovely.
As soon as the entire GREGG team was together, all the soldiers working in Jonestown were briefed by Colonel Gordon. The preliminary work of identifying and evacuating the remains commenced. Jonestown was divided into grids and the bodies found in each individually numbered section were catalogued and tagged. Graves registration soldiers were team leaders of three to five man teams, consisting of infantry soldiers from the 193rd Infantry Brigade in the Canal Zone.
With teams of soldiers fanning out in all directions from the pavilion where the majority of the bodies lay, the full extent of the carnage became evident. Many who participated in this unique mission thought the identification process alone would be next to impossible. Comparatively few of the 913 bodies bore the homemade ID bracelets many family members attached to their wrists before ingesting the poisonous concoction that killed them and even fewer had been identified by Odell Rhodes and his team of Jonestown survivor volunteers.
The condition of the bodies four days after the mass murder/suicide made further visual identification impossible. Jim Jones was one of the few whose features and clothing provided enough proof of identity that the team felt confident when the put his body in the body bag. He was among the first to be catalogued.
This inability to identify more victims was very disconcerting to the GREGG soldiers whose lives were dedicated to the processing of human remains after catastrophic events and who prided themselves on being able to identify most of the bodies at any mass death site.
In wartime, the ID tags worn by the combatants invariably provide positive proof of identity. In today’s modern military, service members’ DNA is collected, catalogued and kept on file, ensuring there will never be another unknown soldier. In airplane crashes and natural disasters like Katrina, that involve the loss of many lives, wallets and jewelry often can be used to place a name to a victim.
But the remains of the residents of Jonestown posed the GREGG team had never encountered in such huge numbers. Very few of the dead carried wallets or wore jewelry. By Tuesday, the bodies were badly bloated with heads resembling those of severely hydrocephalic children. They were in such an advanced state of decomposition, recognition was impossible. The skin color of almost every victim was a dark blue-black, making it difficult to determine even the ethnicity or race of a corpse.
The fact that nearly everyone who perished was either Caucasian or African-American and they now shared the same color was a strange irony because the man they followed to their eternal grave, Jim Jones, remained recognizably Caucasian. It was as if members of the Peoples Temple finally achieved a form of equality in death and the evil pastor who masterfully orchestrated their demise did not share. Jim Jones, who preached racial equality from pulpits in Indianapolis to Ukiah and San Francisco all of his life, in the end became the only person in his flock that did not achieve it.
Name tags were sewn into most of the clothing worn by the residents of Jonestown. Unfortunately, the communal lifestyle makes for the sharing of wardrobes. Many of the dead wore clothing with three or four different names, none of which actually were their own.
The task of identifying the bodies was more foul than placing the remains into the body bags. During the identification process, bodies had to be individually checked, pockets turned inside-out and any ID bracelets read and recorded. This meant handling and touching each rapidly decomposing remains, many of which already displayed millions of eggs lain by the incredible horde of flies drawn to the scene. Maggots covered the entire area where the Jonestown dead lay.
One common form of life usually found wherever death occurs in the tropics was conspicuously missing from the skies over Jonestown. One can only speculate about the absence of buzzards or vultures. These scavenger birds are as common in the warmer climes as cardinals in Missouri.
Perhaps these birds that feed off carrion and keep the environment clean, realized the men, women and children of Jonestown died from the ingestion of a deadly poison. We may never know what caused the buzzards to stay away from Jonestown, but for me, an old tropical soldier and long time resident of South Texas where the big birds are common, their absence added to the surreal scene.
The first attempts to pick up the bodies by grasping their heads and limbs and lifting them into the body bags, more often than not, caused a limb or two, or even the head, to become disconnected from the bloated liquid-filled torso. When this happened, a foul, thick, serous fluid would stream from the body part being held by a hapless soldier and an even larger amount would flow from the torso as it landed on the ground. Because the bodies were in such close proximity to one another, it wasn’t long before the soil in Jonestown became a muddy mixture of dirt and smelly body fluids.
I sat in our aid station at Matthews Ridge as the first bodies were being bagged. I was grateful to be breathing fresh, non-polluted air and was even happier the prevailing winds flowed towards Jonestown, 14 miles to the northeast.
In Jonestown there was no escaping the odor. Men and women who a week ago were anticipating a Thanksgiving with family and friends were hard at the job of tagging and bagging bodies where they lay and then loading them onto the same flatbed trailer used a few days before to carry Peoples Temple assassins to Port Kaitumba to kill a congressman and some of his entourage. A tractor then pulled the loaded trailer to the landing zone at the adjoining soccer field.
The bodies were then placed directly onto the Jolly Green Giants and flown 150 miles to Timheri Airport. They were then put on trucks for a short ride to an area where the would be logged in and placed in aluminum coffins for transport to Dover Air Force Base in Delaware.
Every hour, the U.S. Army communications specialist in Jonestown radioed the number of bodies that had been bagged in that time. Our U.S. Air Force communications station at Matthews Ridge received the tally and kept a running total, relaying the data to task force headquarters in Timheri Airport.
The first hourly report said fewer than 10 bodies were bagged. A similar count came in for hour number two. Then, when we were expecting the hour three total to come across the radio, Jonestown sent us what we thought was an unusual request.
“Tell HQ we need snow shovels,” was the curt request. Snow shovels? Guyana is a tropical country that has never seen snow. Now they wanted as many snow shovels as we could provide them. A call for six dozen of the cold weather implements was dutifully relayed to the task force headquarters at Timheri Airport. From there a call went out to the U.S. Air Force Base in Charleston South Carolina for snow shovels. The first shipment of snow shovels reached Jonestown within six hours of the original request.
With the arrival of these simple tools, so alien to this region of the world, the process of placing the rotten remains into body bags was streamlined considerably. Usually six or eight soldiers, three or four on each side of the very fragile body, lifted it in unison, a foot or so off of the ground. Two other soldiers then slid an open body bag under the suspended corpse, snow shovels were lowered, and the remains gently deposited into the body bag.
This procedure sounds simple, but it wasn’t always successful. Body fluids continued to flow freely from orifices and breaks in the skin, creating a gooey, slippery, smelly mess. Sometimes a heavy head, swollen to twice its normal size, slipped from the shovel and fell to the earth with a thud after being severed from the fragile neck.
After employment of the snow shovels, there was a definite and noticeable increase in the GREGG team’s productivity that was reflected in the numbers. By the end of Day One, nearly 100 bodies were evacuated to Timheri Airport.
Wednesday, Day Two of the processing, found almost 300 more bodies processed and evacuated from Jonestown. Those of us who stayed at Matthews Ridge, away from the gruesome scene being played out in Jonestown, found the figure curious. On Monday, didn’t the GDF tell me 400 Americans had perished in the massacre? Here it is two days and 400 bodies later and the GREGG team reports it’s barely scratched the surface. I decided to take a ride to Jonestown.
From the air, it was obvious a number of bodies were gone, especially on the fringes of the area where they had lain. Upon closer observation, it was obvious the figured provided by the GDF was a gross underestimate. After evacuating the remains of about 450 residents, most of whom were adults, the bodies of teens and adolescents were found beneath where the adults had lain after ingesting the cyanide-laced fruit drink that quickly killed them.
Much speculation has been made by the original discrepancy in the number of dead. The first released numbers took into account the GDF estimation coupled with the fact that only 400 passports were found. Members of the GREGG team, who had first hand, hands on experience in Jonestown learned how that estimate was so wrong.
It appears the infants and toddlers, who had the poisonous potion forced down their throats by their mothers using needleless five and ten ml. syringes. Their convulsing bodies were placed on the bottom of a rather large but fairly shallow concave area next to the pavilion. Larger children followed the younger ones in death and lay themselves on top of the little ones. Next came preadolescents and adolescents, making up more layers of victims. Then the teens took their last drink on earth and their place among their friends and siblings who died before them.
While all the younger residents of Jonestown were dying, some of the mothers were encouraged by Jones to join their offspring, so the distraught parents began joining the deadly act of communion. The senior citizens were the next group Jim Jones commanded to drink the devil’s brew. These people became part of a pile that was not discerned as a pile because of the concavity of the terrain. The last group to participate in the white night was the able bodied members of the cult, men who had carried out Jones’ dirty work. Those who held weapons on the others while forcing them to drink the deadly Flav-or-Ade. Most of their bodies were found on the periphery of the mass of dead in the concave area.
November 23, 1978, was Thanksgiving Day, perhaps the most miserable one ever spent by the 100 or so American troops who had been in Jonestown retrieving the remains of their dead countrymen. By now, the evacuation process had become old hat and the GREGG soldiers and the troops from Panama who were assigned to help them were getting a little goofy. They began creating harmless diversions to make this tedious work in the hot sun more bearable.
One team of baggers raced against another to see who could fill the most bags in an hour. Kool Aid jokes were making the rounds and some of them were pretty sick. These politically incorrect jokes forever but falsely stigmatize the beverage as the drink of choice in Jonestown. One talented GREGG soldier with a musical inclination composed a song about Jonestown in his spare time. Needless to say, it didn’t make the top 40.
There was a rather young crew chief on one of the U.S. Air Force Jolly Green Giants. The airman appeared to be in his late teens or perhaps 20. Everyone commented on how nervous the young airman appeared each time his bird came in to receive body bags.
It was obvious that this crew chief’s discomfort was caused by a fear of the dead, so one day, the GREGG team loaded a body bag that contained a living, breathing soldier onto his helicopter. Once the bag was on the deck of the aircraft, the contents of the bag came to life and wriggled about the deck of the helicopter.
Seeing an animated body bag rolling on the deck of his aircraft, the scared crew chief peeled off his helmet and earphones and jumped out of the chopper. The young man had to be physically put back onto his bird. He didn’t appreciate the practical joke one bit.
Even the jokes, impromptu contests and songs could not take the minds of the Americans in Jonestown that Thanksgiving off of the football games and related parades they were missing. They also missed Mom’s home style turkey dinner with all the fixings and even the holiday fare served at the mess halls in the Canal Zone and stateside bases.
The troops in Georgetown and Jonestown did enjoy their first hot meal since the mission started on that Thanksgiving day. It was in the form of Swanson’s TV dinners, heated at Timheri Airport and flown to the troops in the field.
By Friday Jonestown was back to its normal routine and the evacuated body count reached 650. The absence of body bags brought the operation to a temporary halt. More were quickly flown in from the United States. Most of the adult victims had been removed from the village by this time. The GREGG team was shocked to realize the remains that were left amounted to mostly children. There were around 270 little corpses still left in Jonestown to process. Sadly, most of the massacre’s youngest victims were the last to be processed, were never identified and now occupy a mass grave in a plot at the Evergreen Cemetery in Oakland, California.
Since body bags were in short supply and the remains of the babies were unidentifiable, the resourceful GREGG personnel began placing the remains of two or more children in one body bag. By this time, the job was getting exhausting and even the most dedicated mortuary affairs specialist was ready to clean up and go home.
On November 26, 1978, by the time the last Jolly Green Giant of the day lifted from the Jonestown soccer field, all but about 50 of the massacre’s victims had been evacuated out. The next time one of these big birds lifted out of Jonestown, the 913th body and last member of the Peoples Temple would leave the damned commune.
November 27 marked our last day in Guyana and the official end to the mission that brought more than 200 American servicemen and women to this tropical country that seemed a million miles from home. I stood on the hot tarmac at Timheri Airport, thinking of how this country that I had never heard of before would be remembered by most of my generation. It will always be the place where the Jonestown Massacre happened, at least in my mind.
I watched as the last helicopter that left Jonestown touched down. I remained an observer as extremely tired and thoroughly stressed out young American soldiers began removing the last remains.
The repetitive robot-like movements of these men and women as they picked up body bags from the helicopter, walked to the tailgate of a nearby truck and deposited their human cargo, was punctuated by their masklike faces, completely devoid of any emotion. Their uniforms were soaked with body fluids and sweat, damaged beyond repair.
As I gazed upon the scene, Colonel Gordon, the gruff no-nonsense joint task force commander approached. “Brailey,” he barked as he returned my salute, “Did y’all bring a psyche tech with you from Panama?”
“No sir,” I answered. “Why?”
‘They were trying to put that dead go-rilla into a body bag,” he claimed.
Jones had a huge chimpanzee he kept in a cage near his cottage. He called him “Mr. Muggs.” It was rumored that small children were placed in the cage with the old primate as a form of punishment.
During my first tour of Jonestown, a week earlier, I saw Mr. Muggs. He had been shot to death. That dead chimp smelled much worse than any of the human remains.
Gordon went on, “They kept tryin’ to push that big go-rilla’s shoulders into the body bag but they just couldn’t get it zipped up. I watched them for a few minutes until one of them graves registration guys was gonna hack its shoulders off with a machete.”
“Hold it, I commanded,” said Colonel Gordon in a loud voice to replicate the one he was using in Jonestown, “Why are you gonna hack that go-rilla up?”
“Because he won’t fit into the body bag, sir,” came the respectful reply from the ringleader of the practical jokers.
“But why are you putting him in a body bag anyway?” came the exasperated question of the colonel.
“Why sir? WHY? Just wait until they open this one in Dover!” was the devilish reply of the leering GREGG soldier.
“Gordon said he looked down at the group and said, “Look men, I don’t mind you playin’ a joke on them folks up in Dover. But I won’t let you mutilate that poor go-rilla just to fit him into a body bag.”
Colonel Gordon said he watched the four GREGG soldiers work for several more minutes trying to stuff Mr. Muggs into the bag. Then he walked away, shaking his head and believing Mr. Muggs was left behind in Jonestown.
In the first edition of this book, written in 1998, I reported that Mr. Muggs was the only Jonestown resident who came to Guyana from the United States who remained in Guyana. I was wrong. The mortuary affairs specialist who opened a body bag at Dover that was occupied by a go-rilla told me the truth after he read my book.
[1] Tim Merrill, Ibid.
Wednesday, September 10, 2008
Wednesday, September 3, 2008
Chapter Seven
Chapter Seven – Innocent Detachment
“How fascinating is death, the extinction of life. One moment here and the next gone. The light put out and only the empty bag of the body left”
Unknown
The lengthening shadows of the tall trees on the western edge of the clearing that the pioneering Peoples Temple members cut out of the thick Guyanan jungle to create Jonestown told me that my first day in this place of death would soon be drawing to a close. I was grateful to be ending my tour of the compound with LT Abbott. In the waning light, a huge U.S Air Force Jolly Green Giant appeared in the eastern sky. Soon, the first off several helicopters that would be used to transport Jonestown’s dead to Georgetown landed in the soccer field and began depositing passengers and cargo. The clouds had dissipated and the sun had sunk below the tree line, but the daylight was not noticeably diminished at that time of the evening.
It was obvious that the residents of this American enclave literally carved out of the dense South American rain forest were denied the opportunity of enjoying the beauty of a tropical sunrise or sunset as long as they began and ended their day in Jonestown. The tall trees blocked any semblance of what could be considered a horizon and the sun was high in the sky before it reached the cleared area where the village sat. Sunset came every day long after the shadows of the trees completely covered the ground and long before daylight left the rest of the region.
I watched as the members of the GREGG team collected their personal gear and equipment from the still running helicopter and deposited it in a central point along the edge of the soccer field. Six tough and extremely professional soldiers from the U.S. Army’s Special Forces who had accompanied the mortuary specialists stood not far from me, heavy rucksacks on their backs and M16 rifles in their hands. After a quick meeting and survey of the immediate area, these men fanned out to learn the terrain and look for vehicles and other equipment that may make the jobs of the GREGG soldiers easier.
By now, I had completed the shocking tour of Jonestown and was discussing the distribution of the malaria prophylactic medications with the Green Beret medic whose fellow team members were providing security and assistance to the GREGG team in Jonestown. Since generators, fuel and light sets had been brought in on the Jolly Green Giants that had, by this time, departed, no one was worried about the impending night that was quickly enveloping the jungle enclave.
Three of the Special Forces troops were preparing the generators to light up the night. Someone wondered out loud if this would help dissuade the ghosts of the recently dead residents from haunting the soldiers this first of eight nights they were to spend as uninvited guests in their town.
The commune had become eerily quiet. The GREGG soldiers, settled in to their sleeping area, were having a meeting with their platoon leader. The GDF soldiers were far enough from our location that their voices were inaudible, although some did seem to be engaged in animated conversations. As my medic friend and I finished up our business, we observed the scene around us. While the surrounding jungle teemed with the sounds of awakening wildlife, mostly birds and other small creatures of the night, the entire environment was free of any human originated sounds.
Suddenly, without warning – a loud snap! It was somewhat reminiscent of a rifle being fired, and it came from a large barnlike building nearby. Before any of us could hit the dirt, as was our immediate inclination, the sound of the Jonestown generator could be heard as it started and the outside lights of the commune became illuminated.
“Photo electric cell,” murmured one of the Green Berets to no one in particular. Our generator was puny and unnecessary after discovery of the sophisticated and powerful system already operating in Jonestown.
The GREGG soldiers and the Special Forces soon settled in for the night. Their living area was set up what the NCOs of the task force hoped was upwind from the mass of bodies near the pavilion. By November 20, the smell was almost unbearably sickening, especially to the uninitiated infantry soldiers from the 3/5th Infantry Battalion from Fort Kobbe, in the Canal Zone of Panama. My Green Beret friends from Fort Gulick stoically tried to present an image of calm and control despite their unfamiliarity with the awful stench of death.
None of the GREGG personnel were heard to complain about the odor, or anything else, for that matter. It almost was as if it was expected, something that came with the job, an element they would have felt strange if it was missing. It was further evidence they were in the zone. No matter how ugly or difficult things got, these amazing soldiers, whose main mission in the military was to serve the dead, took things in stride. They seemed silently proud to be unaffected by sights and smells that made other, less-prepared soldiers physically ill.
It was interesting to observe the various men and women who made up the GREGG team. Viewing them from afar, I was most impressed with their professionalism.
According to the Ode to the 92M, written by Tommy Boullier, director of the Mortuary Affairs Center at Fort Lee, “They surround themselves with sorrow, tragedy and grief, and call it their job. They do it willingly, ‘not for themselves, but for their country.’ The words dignity, reverence and respect are more than just words, they are their creed.[1]
Charles Huff claims to have been one of seven Special Forces soldiers who were alerted on November 18, 1978, that Congressman Le J. Ryan was killed.[2] He and these other six soldiers were sent to Jonestown, says Huff, arriving five or six hours after they left Fort Gulick.
Huff further avers he was in Jonestown the night of the 18th of November.[3] This was impossible. Congressman Ryan was killed around 5:15 PM.[4] Ironically, residents of Jonestown began their murder/suicide spree between 5:15 PM[5] and 6:00 PM.[6] The last deaths occurred between 7:45 PM and 9:45 PM.
While there is some confusion over who alerted the U.S. government of the massacre, the announcement could not have reached the Canal Zone until after 9:45 PM. the earliest Odell Rhodes could have made it to Port Kaitumba on foot. This gives Huff and his six companions two hours and 15 minutes to travel from Fort Gulick in Panama to Jonestown in Guyana.
The fastest way to travel between these two points is to fly in a helicopter from Fort Gulick to Howard Air Force Base, about a 55 mile trip west. Then Huff would have boarded a military transport plane from Howard, fly approximately 1200 miles east to Georgetown, Guyana, passing over Jonestown, arriving at Timheri Airport. From Timheri, Huff would need to fly in another helicopter 350 miles west to Jonestown. It would be daylight November 20 when I arrived from Panama.
Even if a U-21, the Army’s fastest military aircraft, carried Huff and his team directly from Fort Gulick to Jonestown, the flight alone would take more than two hours. It is physically impossible for Huff and crew to leave Panama after being informed of the massacre and and arrive in Jonestown on the 18th.
If Huff lied about when he arrived in Jonestown, his entire story must be suspct. I have been unable to find any evidence that a Special Forces soldier named Charles Huff was even a member of the task force.
I cannot say for a fact that Charles Huff was not in Jonestown before I was. Six Special Forces soldiers disembarked from the first American helicopter to land in Jonestown on November 20. I do know that for a fact because I was on the ground waiting for their arrival and had been there four hours. I believe I was the third American soldier to enter Jonestown and the first to receive a comprehensive tour of the village.
Huff also has made the statement that 16 members of the task force committed suicide within a year of the end of the mission.[7] I have only been able to validate three suicides by task force members and this was through anecdotal information.
It’s difficult to believe any of the GREGG troops would have taken their own lives. The soldiers who talked to me at the end of the mission were, to a man, and woman, proud of their performance under the most severe conditions. “This job is like any other job in the Army, you do it right, you feel the pride of a job well-done,” one told me.
At times, the detachment of the GREGG soldiers bordered on bizarre. Whether this was evidence that the soldier was employing some type of psychological defense mechanism or perhaps we were the odd ones, the fact is the two separate groups of soldiers each thought the other acted strangely.
On November 21, just as the GREGG team was preparing to begin its mission, an American television news crew arrived unexpectedly in Jonestown. Since the GDF was tasked with keeping the curious public and press out, no one was quite sure how these journalists got into the commune. A public affairs officer from the Southern Command in the Canal Zone, a lieutenant colonel, was on the ground in Jonestown. Colonel Gordon asked him to meet with the media.
The idea was to get the unwanted press to leave as quickly as possible so the Army flack agreed to allow the crew to interview one member of the GREGG team. The reporter chose one of the two female members, a pretty blonde from South Carolina. She and a black soldier, who happened to be from Guyana originally, were opening bundles of body bags at the time.
Both of the women were young, 19 or 20 at the most. Both seemed enthusiastic about what lay ahead. It wasn’t a nervous excitement. It was more like the energy exhibited by a lawyer at his first trial or a rookie state trooper issuing his first speeding ticket.
While his crew set up to film the interview, the reporter prepared the cute young 92M for the interview. He told her the type of questions he was going to ask and told her to just be herself and pretend she was talking to a friend and to answer him in a clear, normal paced voice.
The blonde GREGG soldier didn’t seem at all nervous. She asked if her parents in South Carolina would see her on the news and the journalist assured her they would. This seemed to make her beam as the reporter and she discussed what station was the local network affiliate in Columbia, where she lived.
The public affairs officer reminded the soldier that she was representing the United States Army. He said, “I know you will conduct this interview with dignity and professionalism.” The cute blonde assured the nervous officer she would.
The interview was about to start. The shot was set up in front of the area where the team was opening bundles of body bags and other supplies that would be used to perform the mission. Everybody was in place. Sound and light were checked.
The lieutenant colonel stepped behind the camera man. He folded his arms across his massive chest and a broad smile came to his face. Obviously, the military PR man felt he made the right decision.
He seemed to be in a reverie. I watched him and imagined what was going on in his mind. I am sure he was envisioning a great recruiting coup, a pretty blonde soldier who will cause young American men to rush to the recruiting office and sign up.
Everything was going so well. The girl was stunning. She wasn’t all that articulate, but her voice wasn’t bad and her answers appropriate. The Army flack became even more confident that he made the right decision.
The reporter’s next question turned what had started out as a sunny day into a monumental cloudburst. The young blonde soldier stood erect, waiting for one more question. It came:
“I imagine this is a pretty traumatic experience, for you, a 19-year-old kid from South Carolina, to have to come down to this steamy jungle and bring the bodies of all these dead Americans home,” opined the journalist.
“Oh no sir, I am really looking forward to it,” said the bubbly private-first-class, beaming brightly. “I wasn’t in the Army in time to go to the Canary Island disaster, so this is the first chance I’ve had to work with real bodies. I am really looking forward to it.”
A look of horror came over the public affair officer’s face as he saw his military career flash before his eyes, along with his chances of making bird colonel before he retires. The reporter stared at the young soldier, unprepared for her response and unable to formulate an appropriate follow-up question. Colonel Gordon simply watched the scene quietly without reaction.
I feel that deep down inside, the task force commander understood and appreciated this young woman’s enthusiasm and in a way was proud of her. Later I heard him ask the reporter if that comment would be on the evening news. The answer was, “No way!” The lieutenant colonel, who was also watching the exchange, breathed a sigh of relief.
That evening on the reporter’s network newscast, he was seen doing a standup that was accompanied by footage of the dead residents of Jonestown waiting to be taken away and the living GREGG soldiers preparing to do just that. The cute blonde soldier from South Carolina never had her moment in the spotlight. Her parents never saw the interview. The GREGG soldiers that had been working in the background never indicated they thought her answer was anything less than normal.
Dispassionate and innocent detachment provide psychological protection for the men and women whose job it is to handle the bodies caused by natural and man-made catastrophes. Our young blonde soldier seemed to be imbued with a healthy dose of detachment. With the passage of nearly 30 years since the Jonestown Massacre, one might wonder if she remained in the military and if she maintained her innocent detachment throughout her adult life.
The GREGG team and its Special Forces contingent spent a restless and sleepless Monday night in Jonestown. While the Green Beret from the Canal Zone were familiar with the strange and exotic sounds emanating from the jungle that night, the troops sent down from the United States to collect the remains of American expatriate cult members, were not. Animals and birds of the night signaling one another in the darkness, became foreboding and unknown wild creatures. Fear of the unknown is the worst kind of fear.
At this early stage of the Joint Task Force’s humanitarian mission, it was felt many of the residents of this American enclave had taken to the jungle around Jonestown to avoid participating in the Peoples’ Temple final deadly ritual. The ever-alert Green Berets kept a close watch on the fringes of the clearing in which the commune was built along with the encompassing tree line.
They were looking for any survivors who may find their way back to Jonestown. The sounds the soldiers hoped to hear from the jungle were not the normal noises of the animals, insects and birds, but the alien human cries for help from anybody who survived the evilness that consumed so many of their family and friends.
The only human sounds heard that night were from the men and women who were visitors in this city of the dead. The handful of Jonestown residents who had managed to escape into jungle were rescued by Sunday morning. Some had walked the railroad tracks to Matthews Ridge to the south. A smaller number, including Odell Rhodes, took their individual chances walking along the dirt road and railroad tracks that led to Port Kaitumba, five miles to the north of the carnage.
The GREGG team was troubled by the sounds made by the denizens of the jungle. Unaccustomed to the strange animal calls of the tropical rain forest, with imaginations that were more dangerous than reality, they spent much of the night, opining and arguing about the identification of the native fauna. The Special Forces troops who had difficulty sleeping spoke only of the macabre and unbelievable scene of horror and death.
The dead residents of the doomed commune were no cause for fear by those with hands-on experience processing actual cadavers, all believed that once they became lifeless, they lost their ability to feel or inflict pain.
This was not a superstitious group of young American soldiers. They did not fear ghosts or spirits, for they shared the belief that death was a final and finite end to existence for the mortal body, formerly inhabited by a living being. They had seen and heard the natural and unnatural results and consequences of death but never had experienced the super natural.
The six Green Berets who shared the Jonestown experience with the GREGG soldiers that night did have reason to fear the dead residents of the enclave. Terrorists or anyone else bent on causing harm to the task force members present that night, could very easily use the corpses as camouflage and infiltrate the very areas the living of Jonestown now occupied.
With so many bodies lying in every direction from where the American troops were bivouacked, all a dedicated terrorist would need to do would be to advance ever so slowly among the corpses, stopping and lying stone still on top of or beside them as he inched his way toward anyone he wished to harm. So, while the Green Berets didn’t actually fear the nearly 1000 dead Jonestown residents who surrounded them, they remained very wary of any movement by living human beings who might want to wreak havoc on the American troops.
Rumors already circulated that the cult had “hit squads” that had taken to the jungle in search of last minute defectors who were unwilling to participate in the final sacred ritual ordered by Reverend Jones. By this point, the U.S. Embassy was well aware of the contact Jones had with the Soviet Embassy during his nearly two years in Guyana. It also was common knowledge that the Cuban government provided a great deal of technical support to Guyana’s Marxist government.
The GREGG troops feared the animals and the Green Berets feared the dead. To the former, the dead represented normalcy and the jungle creatures posed a danger. To the latter, it was the dead that represented peril and the animals, birds and insects of the jungle that created a bit of normalcy in a world gone mad.
The deep darkness of the night was finally defeated by the first gray shadows of the dawn as the sun intruded on the eastern sky. The whining engines of three U.S. Army UH-1 helicopters barely could be heard as the choppers accompanied the sun on its westward journey. Working all night at Timheri Airport, soldiers from the 195th Infantry Brigade efficiently assembled the metal birds that had been transported from Panama as cargo inside U.S. Air Force C-130s. By 0330 hours on November 21, the crews of the helicopters were going through their preflight checks in preparation for their 150 mile flights to Jonestown.
At the same time, more troops sent from Fort Lee were waking up and packing their personal gear so they could ride the newly assembled Hueys into Jonestown. Colonel William Gordon, the Joint Task Force commander, also prepared to join the advance party, with his small staff from the U.S. Army Southern Command in Panama.
The three olive drab helicopters took off from Tiheri Airport in Georgetown, allowing for an estimated-time-of-arrival in Jonestown to coincide with the first light of day. And now, in the early morning of November 21, the American troops who were already on the ground arose from their abbreviated rest. Lying under poncho liners that kept them dry from the thick early morning dew, they slowly acclimated their senses to place and time. They heard the familiar sound of the whop, whop, whop, of the approaching choppers and knew the first of many demanding days was about to commence.
With the arrival of the rest of the GREGG troops came the first day of actual recovery of the human remains that littered Jonestown. Nine hundred and thirteen people who had lost their lives three days earlier were waiting. They were still a long way from their final resting places and would be the objects of an intense identification and evacuation effort. The identification process had begun Sunday, before any American troops arrived in Jonestown.
Odell Rhodes and a few other survivors who were resourceful or fortunate enough to be spared from the massacre, returned to this place of horror on Sunday to assist the GDF and Guyanan government officials in the identification of the already badly bloated bodies. They did the best they could, often only being able to offer nicknames or first names of their former friends.
The names were then scrawled onto pieces of cardboard that were attached to the bodies. This effort, by people who must have been in shock and scared to death, was admirable, but it was too little too late. If the deceased had not already fashioned their own bracelets and placed them on their wrists before they died, chances were identification would not occur for many days or weeks at Dover Air Force Base.
The helicopters dropped off their passengers and immediately took off and began slowly crisscrossing the sky above the surrounding jungle. Jonestown reverberated with the rhythmic roar of the chopper engines punctuated by booming voices on the aircrafts’ loud speaker systems, urging any survivors who fled into the bush to come out, all was safe.
The helicopters swept the area for about three hours, landing only for fuel at the airfield at Matthews Ridge. The search for more survivors turned out to be an exercise in futility. The dozen or so survivors had been out of the area before the task force even arrived.
This was a puzzling turn of events for the American rescuers. The GDF told them there were approximately 1000 people living in Jonestown, yet only about 400 passports had been found.
The task force was convinced more than 500 Peoples Temple members had avoided the massacre, yet only a handful came out of the jungle. No one knew their fate at the time but within a few days, it became very clear.
[1] U.S. Army Mortuary Affairs Center, Ode to the 92M, retrieved July 11, 2004 from http://www.quartermaster.army.mil/mac/ode.htm.
[2] Freedom Magazine, Viewpoints, retrieved July 12, 2004 from http://www.freedommag.otg /English/vol2704 / viewpoints.htm.
[3] Ibid; Alternate Considerations of Jonestown and the Peoples Temple, Reconstructing Reality: Conspiracy Theories About Jonestown, retrieved July 12, 2004 from http://jonestown.sdsu.edu./About Jonestown/Articles/conspiracy.htm.
[4] John Peter Nugent, White Night, (Rawson Wade Publishers, New York, 1979) 196.
[5] Ethan Feinsod, Awake in a Nightmare, (W.W. Norton & Co., New York, 1981), 188.
6 John R. Hall, Gone from the Promised Land, (Transaction Publishers, New Brunawick, NJ, 2001) 280.
[7] Freedom Magazine, Ibid.
“How fascinating is death, the extinction of life. One moment here and the next gone. The light put out and only the empty bag of the body left”
Unknown
The lengthening shadows of the tall trees on the western edge of the clearing that the pioneering Peoples Temple members cut out of the thick Guyanan jungle to create Jonestown told me that my first day in this place of death would soon be drawing to a close. I was grateful to be ending my tour of the compound with LT Abbott. In the waning light, a huge U.S Air Force Jolly Green Giant appeared in the eastern sky. Soon, the first off several helicopters that would be used to transport Jonestown’s dead to Georgetown landed in the soccer field and began depositing passengers and cargo. The clouds had dissipated and the sun had sunk below the tree line, but the daylight was not noticeably diminished at that time of the evening.
It was obvious that the residents of this American enclave literally carved out of the dense South American rain forest were denied the opportunity of enjoying the beauty of a tropical sunrise or sunset as long as they began and ended their day in Jonestown. The tall trees blocked any semblance of what could be considered a horizon and the sun was high in the sky before it reached the cleared area where the village sat. Sunset came every day long after the shadows of the trees completely covered the ground and long before daylight left the rest of the region.
I watched as the members of the GREGG team collected their personal gear and equipment from the still running helicopter and deposited it in a central point along the edge of the soccer field. Six tough and extremely professional soldiers from the U.S. Army’s Special Forces who had accompanied the mortuary specialists stood not far from me, heavy rucksacks on their backs and M16 rifles in their hands. After a quick meeting and survey of the immediate area, these men fanned out to learn the terrain and look for vehicles and other equipment that may make the jobs of the GREGG soldiers easier.
By now, I had completed the shocking tour of Jonestown and was discussing the distribution of the malaria prophylactic medications with the Green Beret medic whose fellow team members were providing security and assistance to the GREGG team in Jonestown. Since generators, fuel and light sets had been brought in on the Jolly Green Giants that had, by this time, departed, no one was worried about the impending night that was quickly enveloping the jungle enclave.
Three of the Special Forces troops were preparing the generators to light up the night. Someone wondered out loud if this would help dissuade the ghosts of the recently dead residents from haunting the soldiers this first of eight nights they were to spend as uninvited guests in their town.
The commune had become eerily quiet. The GREGG soldiers, settled in to their sleeping area, were having a meeting with their platoon leader. The GDF soldiers were far enough from our location that their voices were inaudible, although some did seem to be engaged in animated conversations. As my medic friend and I finished up our business, we observed the scene around us. While the surrounding jungle teemed with the sounds of awakening wildlife, mostly birds and other small creatures of the night, the entire environment was free of any human originated sounds.
Suddenly, without warning – a loud snap! It was somewhat reminiscent of a rifle being fired, and it came from a large barnlike building nearby. Before any of us could hit the dirt, as was our immediate inclination, the sound of the Jonestown generator could be heard as it started and the outside lights of the commune became illuminated.
“Photo electric cell,” murmured one of the Green Berets to no one in particular. Our generator was puny and unnecessary after discovery of the sophisticated and powerful system already operating in Jonestown.
The GREGG soldiers and the Special Forces soon settled in for the night. Their living area was set up what the NCOs of the task force hoped was upwind from the mass of bodies near the pavilion. By November 20, the smell was almost unbearably sickening, especially to the uninitiated infantry soldiers from the 3/5th Infantry Battalion from Fort Kobbe, in the Canal Zone of Panama. My Green Beret friends from Fort Gulick stoically tried to present an image of calm and control despite their unfamiliarity with the awful stench of death.
None of the GREGG personnel were heard to complain about the odor, or anything else, for that matter. It almost was as if it was expected, something that came with the job, an element they would have felt strange if it was missing. It was further evidence they were in the zone. No matter how ugly or difficult things got, these amazing soldiers, whose main mission in the military was to serve the dead, took things in stride. They seemed silently proud to be unaffected by sights and smells that made other, less-prepared soldiers physically ill.
It was interesting to observe the various men and women who made up the GREGG team. Viewing them from afar, I was most impressed with their professionalism.
According to the Ode to the 92M, written by Tommy Boullier, director of the Mortuary Affairs Center at Fort Lee, “They surround themselves with sorrow, tragedy and grief, and call it their job. They do it willingly, ‘not for themselves, but for their country.’ The words dignity, reverence and respect are more than just words, they are their creed.[1]
Charles Huff claims to have been one of seven Special Forces soldiers who were alerted on November 18, 1978, that Congressman Le J. Ryan was killed.[2] He and these other six soldiers were sent to Jonestown, says Huff, arriving five or six hours after they left Fort Gulick.
Huff further avers he was in Jonestown the night of the 18th of November.[3] This was impossible. Congressman Ryan was killed around 5:15 PM.[4] Ironically, residents of Jonestown began their murder/suicide spree between 5:15 PM[5] and 6:00 PM.[6] The last deaths occurred between 7:45 PM and 9:45 PM.
While there is some confusion over who alerted the U.S. government of the massacre, the announcement could not have reached the Canal Zone until after 9:45 PM. the earliest Odell Rhodes could have made it to Port Kaitumba on foot. This gives Huff and his six companions two hours and 15 minutes to travel from Fort Gulick in Panama to Jonestown in Guyana.
The fastest way to travel between these two points is to fly in a helicopter from Fort Gulick to Howard Air Force Base, about a 55 mile trip west. Then Huff would have boarded a military transport plane from Howard, fly approximately 1200 miles east to Georgetown, Guyana, passing over Jonestown, arriving at Timheri Airport. From Timheri, Huff would need to fly in another helicopter 350 miles west to Jonestown. It would be daylight November 20 when I arrived from Panama.
Even if a U-21, the Army’s fastest military aircraft, carried Huff and his team directly from Fort Gulick to Jonestown, the flight alone would take more than two hours. It is physically impossible for Huff and crew to leave Panama after being informed of the massacre and and arrive in Jonestown on the 18th.
If Huff lied about when he arrived in Jonestown, his entire story must be suspct. I have been unable to find any evidence that a Special Forces soldier named Charles Huff was even a member of the task force.
I cannot say for a fact that Charles Huff was not in Jonestown before I was. Six Special Forces soldiers disembarked from the first American helicopter to land in Jonestown on November 20. I do know that for a fact because I was on the ground waiting for their arrival and had been there four hours. I believe I was the third American soldier to enter Jonestown and the first to receive a comprehensive tour of the village.
Huff also has made the statement that 16 members of the task force committed suicide within a year of the end of the mission.[7] I have only been able to validate three suicides by task force members and this was through anecdotal information.
It’s difficult to believe any of the GREGG troops would have taken their own lives. The soldiers who talked to me at the end of the mission were, to a man, and woman, proud of their performance under the most severe conditions. “This job is like any other job in the Army, you do it right, you feel the pride of a job well-done,” one told me.
At times, the detachment of the GREGG soldiers bordered on bizarre. Whether this was evidence that the soldier was employing some type of psychological defense mechanism or perhaps we were the odd ones, the fact is the two separate groups of soldiers each thought the other acted strangely.
On November 21, just as the GREGG team was preparing to begin its mission, an American television news crew arrived unexpectedly in Jonestown. Since the GDF was tasked with keeping the curious public and press out, no one was quite sure how these journalists got into the commune. A public affairs officer from the Southern Command in the Canal Zone, a lieutenant colonel, was on the ground in Jonestown. Colonel Gordon asked him to meet with the media.
The idea was to get the unwanted press to leave as quickly as possible so the Army flack agreed to allow the crew to interview one member of the GREGG team. The reporter chose one of the two female members, a pretty blonde from South Carolina. She and a black soldier, who happened to be from Guyana originally, were opening bundles of body bags at the time.
Both of the women were young, 19 or 20 at the most. Both seemed enthusiastic about what lay ahead. It wasn’t a nervous excitement. It was more like the energy exhibited by a lawyer at his first trial or a rookie state trooper issuing his first speeding ticket.
While his crew set up to film the interview, the reporter prepared the cute young 92M for the interview. He told her the type of questions he was going to ask and told her to just be herself and pretend she was talking to a friend and to answer him in a clear, normal paced voice.
The blonde GREGG soldier didn’t seem at all nervous. She asked if her parents in South Carolina would see her on the news and the journalist assured her they would. This seemed to make her beam as the reporter and she discussed what station was the local network affiliate in Columbia, where she lived.
The public affairs officer reminded the soldier that she was representing the United States Army. He said, “I know you will conduct this interview with dignity and professionalism.” The cute blonde assured the nervous officer she would.
The interview was about to start. The shot was set up in front of the area where the team was opening bundles of body bags and other supplies that would be used to perform the mission. Everybody was in place. Sound and light were checked.
The lieutenant colonel stepped behind the camera man. He folded his arms across his massive chest and a broad smile came to his face. Obviously, the military PR man felt he made the right decision.
He seemed to be in a reverie. I watched him and imagined what was going on in his mind. I am sure he was envisioning a great recruiting coup, a pretty blonde soldier who will cause young American men to rush to the recruiting office and sign up.
Everything was going so well. The girl was stunning. She wasn’t all that articulate, but her voice wasn’t bad and her answers appropriate. The Army flack became even more confident that he made the right decision.
The reporter’s next question turned what had started out as a sunny day into a monumental cloudburst. The young blonde soldier stood erect, waiting for one more question. It came:
“I imagine this is a pretty traumatic experience, for you, a 19-year-old kid from South Carolina, to have to come down to this steamy jungle and bring the bodies of all these dead Americans home,” opined the journalist.
“Oh no sir, I am really looking forward to it,” said the bubbly private-first-class, beaming brightly. “I wasn’t in the Army in time to go to the Canary Island disaster, so this is the first chance I’ve had to work with real bodies. I am really looking forward to it.”
A look of horror came over the public affair officer’s face as he saw his military career flash before his eyes, along with his chances of making bird colonel before he retires. The reporter stared at the young soldier, unprepared for her response and unable to formulate an appropriate follow-up question. Colonel Gordon simply watched the scene quietly without reaction.
I feel that deep down inside, the task force commander understood and appreciated this young woman’s enthusiasm and in a way was proud of her. Later I heard him ask the reporter if that comment would be on the evening news. The answer was, “No way!” The lieutenant colonel, who was also watching the exchange, breathed a sigh of relief.
That evening on the reporter’s network newscast, he was seen doing a standup that was accompanied by footage of the dead residents of Jonestown waiting to be taken away and the living GREGG soldiers preparing to do just that. The cute blonde soldier from South Carolina never had her moment in the spotlight. Her parents never saw the interview. The GREGG soldiers that had been working in the background never indicated they thought her answer was anything less than normal.
Dispassionate and innocent detachment provide psychological protection for the men and women whose job it is to handle the bodies caused by natural and man-made catastrophes. Our young blonde soldier seemed to be imbued with a healthy dose of detachment. With the passage of nearly 30 years since the Jonestown Massacre, one might wonder if she remained in the military and if she maintained her innocent detachment throughout her adult life.
The GREGG team and its Special Forces contingent spent a restless and sleepless Monday night in Jonestown. While the Green Beret from the Canal Zone were familiar with the strange and exotic sounds emanating from the jungle that night, the troops sent down from the United States to collect the remains of American expatriate cult members, were not. Animals and birds of the night signaling one another in the darkness, became foreboding and unknown wild creatures. Fear of the unknown is the worst kind of fear.
At this early stage of the Joint Task Force’s humanitarian mission, it was felt many of the residents of this American enclave had taken to the jungle around Jonestown to avoid participating in the Peoples’ Temple final deadly ritual. The ever-alert Green Berets kept a close watch on the fringes of the clearing in which the commune was built along with the encompassing tree line.
They were looking for any survivors who may find their way back to Jonestown. The sounds the soldiers hoped to hear from the jungle were not the normal noises of the animals, insects and birds, but the alien human cries for help from anybody who survived the evilness that consumed so many of their family and friends.
The only human sounds heard that night were from the men and women who were visitors in this city of the dead. The handful of Jonestown residents who had managed to escape into jungle were rescued by Sunday morning. Some had walked the railroad tracks to Matthews Ridge to the south. A smaller number, including Odell Rhodes, took their individual chances walking along the dirt road and railroad tracks that led to Port Kaitumba, five miles to the north of the carnage.
The GREGG team was troubled by the sounds made by the denizens of the jungle. Unaccustomed to the strange animal calls of the tropical rain forest, with imaginations that were more dangerous than reality, they spent much of the night, opining and arguing about the identification of the native fauna. The Special Forces troops who had difficulty sleeping spoke only of the macabre and unbelievable scene of horror and death.
The dead residents of the doomed commune were no cause for fear by those with hands-on experience processing actual cadavers, all believed that once they became lifeless, they lost their ability to feel or inflict pain.
This was not a superstitious group of young American soldiers. They did not fear ghosts or spirits, for they shared the belief that death was a final and finite end to existence for the mortal body, formerly inhabited by a living being. They had seen and heard the natural and unnatural results and consequences of death but never had experienced the super natural.
The six Green Berets who shared the Jonestown experience with the GREGG soldiers that night did have reason to fear the dead residents of the enclave. Terrorists or anyone else bent on causing harm to the task force members present that night, could very easily use the corpses as camouflage and infiltrate the very areas the living of Jonestown now occupied.
With so many bodies lying in every direction from where the American troops were bivouacked, all a dedicated terrorist would need to do would be to advance ever so slowly among the corpses, stopping and lying stone still on top of or beside them as he inched his way toward anyone he wished to harm. So, while the Green Berets didn’t actually fear the nearly 1000 dead Jonestown residents who surrounded them, they remained very wary of any movement by living human beings who might want to wreak havoc on the American troops.
Rumors already circulated that the cult had “hit squads” that had taken to the jungle in search of last minute defectors who were unwilling to participate in the final sacred ritual ordered by Reverend Jones. By this point, the U.S. Embassy was well aware of the contact Jones had with the Soviet Embassy during his nearly two years in Guyana. It also was common knowledge that the Cuban government provided a great deal of technical support to Guyana’s Marxist government.
The GREGG troops feared the animals and the Green Berets feared the dead. To the former, the dead represented normalcy and the jungle creatures posed a danger. To the latter, it was the dead that represented peril and the animals, birds and insects of the jungle that created a bit of normalcy in a world gone mad.
The deep darkness of the night was finally defeated by the first gray shadows of the dawn as the sun intruded on the eastern sky. The whining engines of three U.S. Army UH-1 helicopters barely could be heard as the choppers accompanied the sun on its westward journey. Working all night at Timheri Airport, soldiers from the 195th Infantry Brigade efficiently assembled the metal birds that had been transported from Panama as cargo inside U.S. Air Force C-130s. By 0330 hours on November 21, the crews of the helicopters were going through their preflight checks in preparation for their 150 mile flights to Jonestown.
At the same time, more troops sent from Fort Lee were waking up and packing their personal gear so they could ride the newly assembled Hueys into Jonestown. Colonel William Gordon, the Joint Task Force commander, also prepared to join the advance party, with his small staff from the U.S. Army Southern Command in Panama.
The three olive drab helicopters took off from Tiheri Airport in Georgetown, allowing for an estimated-time-of-arrival in Jonestown to coincide with the first light of day. And now, in the early morning of November 21, the American troops who were already on the ground arose from their abbreviated rest. Lying under poncho liners that kept them dry from the thick early morning dew, they slowly acclimated their senses to place and time. They heard the familiar sound of the whop, whop, whop, of the approaching choppers and knew the first of many demanding days was about to commence.
With the arrival of the rest of the GREGG troops came the first day of actual recovery of the human remains that littered Jonestown. Nine hundred and thirteen people who had lost their lives three days earlier were waiting. They were still a long way from their final resting places and would be the objects of an intense identification and evacuation effort. The identification process had begun Sunday, before any American troops arrived in Jonestown.
Odell Rhodes and a few other survivors who were resourceful or fortunate enough to be spared from the massacre, returned to this place of horror on Sunday to assist the GDF and Guyanan government officials in the identification of the already badly bloated bodies. They did the best they could, often only being able to offer nicknames or first names of their former friends.
The names were then scrawled onto pieces of cardboard that were attached to the bodies. This effort, by people who must have been in shock and scared to death, was admirable, but it was too little too late. If the deceased had not already fashioned their own bracelets and placed them on their wrists before they died, chances were identification would not occur for many days or weeks at Dover Air Force Base.
The helicopters dropped off their passengers and immediately took off and began slowly crisscrossing the sky above the surrounding jungle. Jonestown reverberated with the rhythmic roar of the chopper engines punctuated by booming voices on the aircrafts’ loud speaker systems, urging any survivors who fled into the bush to come out, all was safe.
The helicopters swept the area for about three hours, landing only for fuel at the airfield at Matthews Ridge. The search for more survivors turned out to be an exercise in futility. The dozen or so survivors had been out of the area before the task force even arrived.
This was a puzzling turn of events for the American rescuers. The GDF told them there were approximately 1000 people living in Jonestown, yet only about 400 passports had been found.
The task force was convinced more than 500 Peoples Temple members had avoided the massacre, yet only a handful came out of the jungle. No one knew their fate at the time but within a few days, it became very clear.
[1] U.S. Army Mortuary Affairs Center, Ode to the 92M, retrieved July 11, 2004 from http://www.quartermaster.army.mil/mac/ode.htm.
[2] Freedom Magazine, Viewpoints, retrieved July 12, 2004 from http://www.freedommag.otg /English/vol2704 / viewpoints.htm.
[3] Ibid; Alternate Considerations of Jonestown and the Peoples Temple, Reconstructing Reality: Conspiracy Theories About Jonestown, retrieved July 12, 2004 from http://jonestown.sdsu.edu./About Jonestown/Articles/conspiracy.htm.
[4] John Peter Nugent, White Night, (Rawson Wade Publishers, New York, 1979) 196.
[5] Ethan Feinsod, Awake in a Nightmare, (W.W. Norton & Co., New York, 1981), 188.
6 John R. Hall, Gone from the Promised Land, (Transaction Publishers, New Brunawick, NJ, 2001) 280.
[7] Freedom Magazine, Ibid.
Chapter Six
Chapter Six – Graves Registration
“Let us so live that when we come to die
Even the undertaker will be sorry.”
Mark Twain
Dr. Steven E. Anders, a physician who serves as the historian for the U.S. Army Quartermaster General, wrote an excellent history of the Quartermaster graves registration mission that appeared in the Quartermaster Professional Bulletin of September 1988. It provides the best chronology of the development of mortuary affairs as it exists in the U.S. Army today.
During the early 1800s, it was the Quartermaster officers, the storekeepers of the Army, who cared for the dead. There wasn’t any regulation assigning them this important job. It apparently became their responsibility because “someone had to do it.”[1]
These officers, assigned to the forts along our young country’s frontier, constructed cemetery plots, buried the dead in marked graves and kept fairly uniform records of burial. This was acceptable, as long as the Army stayed near the fort and was not in some far away region of the territory. The practical experience these officers received and the methods they devised in no way prepared them for the challenge of handling massive combat casualties resulting from large scale conflict. At this point in our nation’s history, its military had not even thought to address a formal policy to react to that contingency.
The Mexican War of 1846 to 1847 changed all of that by providing the Army’s first real test to care for its war dead. To put it bluntly, it failed the test miserably.
General Zachary Taylor ensured the dead were properly collected and buried on the battlefield following his victory at Buena Vista. However, he neglected to mark the site of the graves on his official report. The locations of these long lost makeshift cemeteries containing those Amer4icans who fell at the Battle of Buena Vista have never been found.[2]
During the same war, General Winfield Scott landed troops at Vera Cruz and marched them to Mexico City. Hundreds of American soldiers died and were buried along the march route. Only a few dozen graves were ever located after the war, and none of the remains in them ever were identified.[3]
With the U.S. Civil War came the foundation of the Army’s Graves Registration mission. This one conflict caused more combat casualties and accounted for more battlefield deaths than all the nation’s other major wars combined. The public expressed a greater concern for the soldiers on both sides whom were fighting in this war, perhaps because it was fought where they lived.
While concern for the dead was evident during the Civil War, the methods for burial did not immediately change. The dead, on both sides, were almost always buried by details of soldiers chosen at random. The graves were dug at or very near the scene of battle. After the armies left, the temporary markers identifying the grave sites and remains were left to deteriorate, leaving little chance for family members to locate the exact resting place of loved ones.[4]
Another problem that contributed to the proper identification of remains buried after the battle was that often, prisoners of war made up the burial details. These captured soldiers were somewhat less than motivated to accurately and permanently mark the gravesites of their enemies. Often POWs were illiterate and could not properly mark the graves despite their best intentions. During the fighting at the Wilderness and Spotsylvania Courthouse, around 1,500 were killed. Fewer than 400 graves were ever identified.[5]
On May 4, 1864, when the Union Army of the Potomac crossed the Rapidan River and entered Virginia, the soldiers were horrified to find the bleached bones of others who wore the blue in battle the year before, lying exposed on the ground. Many of the grief-filled soldiers methodically searched through the remains hoping to discover clues that would provide positive identification of fallen friends.[6]
They searched for marks on clothing and equipment, evidence of fatal wounds and peculiarities of tooth structure during their often futile quests. These methods of identifying the remains of the dead would become part of the standard operating procedures for future graves registration soldiers.
Finally, before moving into the wilderness, the living troops who were concerned about their dead comrades, took time to bury their remains. The fear of being and “unknown soldier” was constantly on the minds of the combat troops during the Civil War. While the War Department had yet to even think about issuing identification tags to its troops, many of them began to carry things on their persons to ensure they would be accurately identified should they fall mortally wounded on the battlefield.[7]
Many soldiers carried identification markers fashioned from wood. Others wore medallions around their necks that bore their names and other identifying information. Prior to attacking the Confederates at Mine Run in the winter of 1863, the men of the Union Army’s Fifth Corps wrote their names on pieces of paper and pinned them to their uniforms. Despite these individual unofficial efforts, the remains of only about 58 percent of the soldiers who died in the Civil War were ever identified.[8]
The U.S. Army establishment of that day did not appreciate the need for some form of permanent identification for combatants, nor did it understand the obvious need for specially trained units and personnel who could properly care for war dead. Only once during the Civil War, after the Battle of Fort Stevens, outside Washington, D.C. in the summer of 1864, did a group similar to the modern mortuary services company come into being.
Captain James M. Moore, the newly appointed commander of the Quartermaster Cemeterial Division took a group of his personnel to the site of the fighting after the battle ended. For the first time in history, Moore’s team systematically searched for and recorded the remains and personal effects of fallen soldiers and was able to identify everyone that had been killed.[9]
While it took decades for subsequent graves registration units to match the accomplishment of Captain Moore’s team, the Civil War did motivate the Army to clearly designate the Quartermaster Corps as the official entity responsible for caring for war dead. Between 1866 and 1870, the Cemeterial Division transferred the remains of almost 300,000 soldiers to 73 newly created national cemeteries.[10]
Almost three-and-a-half decades after the Civil War, during the Spanish American War, Graves Registration was to become more professional. As a result of experiences in Cuba, it was determined that successful identification of remains depended mostly on shortening the time span between death, original burial and registration of graves.[11]
Chaplain Charles C. Pierce, who established the Quartermaster Office of Identification in the Philippines, formalized some of the basic principles and techniques needed to identify war dead. He recommended that soldiers wear an “identity disc,” and he supported the establishment of collection points where mortuary records could be gathered, filed, checked and corrected.[12]
In 1913, new regulations established a firm commitment by the U.S. Army to identify and bury all war dead. The regulations required filing detailed maps of all gravesites at the time of the initial burial to make the process of disinterment more efficient. By 1917, the War Department required all combat soldiers to wear identification (dog) tags.[13]
General John J. “Black Jack” Pershing requested establishment of the first Graves Registration (GRREG) Service during World War I. Chaplain Pierce, by then long retired from active military service, was recalled to duty two decades after his establishment of the Office of Identification in Manila, Philippines.[14]
His job was to train GRREG troops and units at the Philadelphia Quartermaster Depot. By October 1917, Pierce’s headquarters was moved to Tours, France, from where 19 Quartermaster GRREG companies were dispatched to every sector of the combat zone.
While the headquarters of the Graves Registration Service consolidated and preserved mortuary records and maintained cemeteries at the rear of the battlefield, the GRREG companies supported the troops on the line. The dedication and espirit de corps of these soldiers, whose mission was to care for those comrades who had eternally lost their capability to soldier any longer was extraordinary. These men often took incredibly dangerous risks in their efforts to ensure proper identification of fellow soldiers who had fallen. General Pershing wrote about one unit in the spring of 1918:
They began their work under heavy shell fire and gas, and, although troops were in dugouts, these men immediately went to the cemetery and in order to preserve records and locations, repaired and erected new crosses as fast as the old ones were blown down. They also completed extension of the cemetery, this work occupying a period of one-and-a-half hours, during which time shells were falling continuously and they were subject to mustard gas. They gathered many bodies which at first had been in the hands of the Germans and were later retaken by American Counterattacks. Identification was especially difficult, all papers and tags have been removed, and most of the bodies, being in terrible condition beyond recognition.[15]
During World War I, the relatives of fallen U.S. servicemen agreed to have the remains of their loved ones interned in the country where they had fallen. President Theodore Roosevelt encouraged this alternative by requesting that his son, Quentin, be buried near the ground where he was killed. “Where the tree falls, let it lie,” were the poetic words Roosevelt used as did many other grieving American families.[16]
Eight cemeteries had been established in Europe by the end of World War I. Six were in France, one in Belgium and one in Britain. Approximately 30,000 of America’s dead from that war are buried in those cemeteries. More than 47,000 bodies were returned to the United States for reburial at the conclusion of World War I.[17]
During that war, the percentage of unknown remains was around three per 100 bodies recovered. This still was not acceptable to the families of nearly 2,400 men who perished in The Great War and were never identified. But graves registration was becoming more scientific and systematized. Future conflict would challenge the talents, perseverance and ingenuity of the GRREG personnel in ways they never have been challenged.
More than 250,000 Americans died and were buried in temporary cemeteries around the globe during World War II. On the continent of Europe alone, the remains were interned in over a million-and-a-half square miles making the recovery process extremely difficult. Newer and more devastating weapons often made those killed in combat unrecognizable.[18]
A graves registration company in World War II consisted of 260 enlisted men and five officers to support three combat divisions. One platoon was assigned to each division, and each platoon had two sections, a collecting squad and an evacuation squad. These companies collected, evacuated, identified and supervised the burial of the dead. They also collected and properly disposed of personal effects and selected sites for temporary cemeteries.[19]
The work performed by the GRREG teams in World War II was just as stressful and hazardous as that done by their predecessors in World War I, if not more so. During the fierce battle for Anzio, graves registration soldiers were forced to take shelter in freshly dug graves.[20]
During the D-Day invasion, men from the GREGG Company who were with the First Army, gathered bodies from the beaches, ocean and inland, actually extricating them from submerged landing craft. By the end of the second day of the invasion, one platoon had buried 437 dead American servicemen.
After World War II, most graves registration units were disbanded and most overseas GREGG services ceased to exist. This created an enormous problem in June of 1950, when war broke out in Korea. Only the 108th Graves Registration Platoon in Yokohama, Japan was available to deploy to Korea during the emergency buildup. The platoon consisted of 30 men, most of who were without combat experience.[21]
Other GREGG personnel were rounded up from the 565th Quartermaster Graves Registration Company at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. Five men were attached to the three combat divisions deployed to Korea, the 24th 25th and 1st Cavalry. They were ill-supplied. The fluid tactical situation made recovery of remains extremely difficult. A centrally located Army cemetery could not be set up, so separate divisional-level cemeteries were established instead[22]
By the fall of 1950, these cemeteries were forced to be closed down due to a renewed and intense communist offensive. The dead were then evacuated to more secure rear areas and then sent to Japan for subsequent processing and shipment to the United States.
This was the first time in American history that a mass evacuation of combat dead took place while hostilities were still being conducted. By the end of January 1951, nearly 5000 bodies had been removed from temporary cemeteries in Korea to a newly formed central identification unit (CIU) in Japan.
By mid-1951, this had become standard operating procedure. A 72-acre United Nations was opened in Tanggok, Korea, along with the Eighth Army’s Central Identification Laboratory. During the last two years of the conflict, refrigerated railroad cars transported remains from forward collecting points to Tanggok. A pattern developed that had the bodies of the US Korean War dead recovered and returned to the USA within 30 days.
The Vietnam War was America’s’ longest conflict and the proficiency of the army’s GREGG units improved considerably when compared to their performance in all prior wars. This war had less unaccounted for dead. Helicopters allowed remains to be evacuated from the battlefield in a matter of minutes, rather than in many hours or days.
Combat units became responsible for initial recovery. Two well-equipped mortuaries were established in Vietnam, one in Da Nang in the north and one in Tan Son Nhut near Saigon in the south. Positive identifications were made in these facilities using new laboratory methods along with fingerprint and dental comparisons.[23]
By the end of the war in Indochina, only 28 bodies of American soldiers remained unidentified. By 1984, the remains of but one serviceman continued to be classified as “unknown.” On Memorial Day of the year, the remains were interned at the “Tomb of the Unknowns” at Arlington National Cemetery.[24]
Fourteen years later, in 1998, the identification process had become so accurate and sophisticated that positive identification of this Vietnam War unknown soldier was made through DNA testing. The now-identified Air Force pilot’s remains were returned to his hometown for burial.[25]
More recently, U.S. Army mortuary specialists have served humanity and their fellow soldiers in Somalia and Bosnia as well as both Iraq wars and Afghanistan. As wars and rumors of wars continue to persist, the special services of these very unique men and women remain in demand.
The U.S. Army Mortuary Affairs Center at Fort Lee, Virginia is Once again busy training new 92-Mikes, the Military Occupational Specialty assigned to mortuary affairs specialists. The center trains more than 250 soldiers a year to become mortuary specialists and provides professional training and continuing education to NCOs and officers who have already been working in the mortuary field.
The 54th Quartermaster Company of Fort Lee, Virginia provides the mortuary affairs teams operating in the southeast Asian countries of Iraq and Afghanistan. Virtually all of the American military casualties from that theater of operations, are flown to Dover Air Force Base in Delaware, the same mortuary that the 913 Jonestown dead were taken to.
The mortuary section from the 16th Field Services Company of the 240th Quartermaster Battalion, from Fort Lee had the mission to assist in the identification of the Jonestown dead. The team consisted of 12 enlisted personnel and one officer. They were augmented by mortuary sections from Fort Bliss, Texas and Fort McClellen, Alabama. Mortuary services specialists from the FBI, State Department and all the other military services rounded out the quickly formed task force. They worked for a week and identified approximately half of the remains. Infants and children represented the majority of those bodies the task force could not identify.[26]
The three dozen or so men and women soldiers who made up the GREGG team deployed to Guyana were also from Fort Lee. When they went to Jonestown, they were operating according to procedures found in the U.S. Army Field Manual 10-63-1, entitled Graves Registration Handbook. This now obsolete publication was last issued in July 1986.
The Joint Humanitarian Task Force to Guyana was the largest recovery operation ever performed by GREGG troops. Eighteen months prior to this mission, the remains of around 530 civilians who perished in a horrible airplane crash at Teneriffe in the Canary Islands were collected, processed, identified and evacuated by some of these same 92-Mikes. Jonestown represented a challenge about twice as large and much more physically daunting than the one they faced in the Canary Island disaster.[27]
Tommy Boulier, Director of the Mortuary Affairs Center at Fort Lee, has written an accurate description of the Mortuary Specialists (92M):
92Ms are often thought of as cold and unemotional. They are human though, with feelings and emotions like everyone else. But they can’t die with each remains that they handle. Often they hide their true feelings, just to get through the day. Inside are scars and wounds, invisible to the eye, silent grief to be dealt with on a personal level on another day. These wounds often go untreated because it isn’t macho to say it bothers them.[28]
From 1988 to 1991, actor Michael Boatman played Graves Registration Specialist Samuel Beckett, on ABC’s celebrated television series, China Beach. The show was about the lives of service men and women working in a field hospital near Da Nang during the Vietnam War. Beckett was the first graves registration specialist to be portrayed in a television series.
I was a medic in Vietnam, not all that far from Da Nang. I worked for over a year in an evacuation hospital and I saw more than my share of death. But the humanitarian mission to Guyana in 1978, was the only time in a 20 year military career, that I had a chance to associate with graves registration (mortuary) specialists and observe them closely during the performance of their work. They were not like Beckett.
The men and women in Jonestown and at the Timheri Airport near Georgetown were not as serious and solemn as Beckett. While they performed the gruesome tasks that faced them with efficiency and professionalism, they exhibited wry and quick senses of humor. Yet they remained respectful of the remains they were responsible for. They brought honor to the jobs they performed.
Of course, Jonestown was a mass death scene of unduplicated proportions. The events that happened there occurred in an extremely hot tropical climate that in and of itself caused all sorts of complications and created the potential for many other serious problems that fortunately never materialized.
In the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology’s Oral History Program, oral surgeon, Colonel Kenton Hartman stated, “…those 913 sets of remains deteriorated very rapidly in that tropical climate. So removing the bodies and bringing them back to Dover… was a massive relocation effort.[29]”
“It took a lot of Air Force personnel and Army people to recover the bodies and transport them up here. The remains were in just unbelievable degenerative condition. They had completely skeletonized some sets of remains… in a period of one week. You could take a skull, for example, and just literally wipe the flesh right off of it. It had turned to a paste-like compound. It looked like mud.
“The odor was just horrendous. There was no way to control the odor. People working with this disaster not only had an overwhelming psychological difficulty of facing that many dead people, but the condition of the remains.”[30]
Hartman, who worked with the GREGG team at Dover Air Force Base, went on to report about the maggot problem. “There were maggots just crawling out of all these bodies. And out of frustration, some people went out and bought 50 pound bags of slaked lime, the type you put in outdoor johns, and they would throw it on the body… We found out about it and put a stop to it, because its been our policy, we always do full body x-rays as well as dental x-rays on every set of remains. That slaked lime just wiped out the radiographic image; you couldn’t take x-rays of these bodies. So they stopped doing that.
“Other people took fuel oil from the diesel engines, and poured fuel over them, to try to keep the maggot population down. Nothing worked. Eventually, people became conditioned after a couple of days, and just literally gutted it out and were able to complete the operation.” [31]
In Guyana, it was a tribute to the leadership skills of the NCOs who led the various participants in the task force and to the physical conditioning of those soldiers assigned to this repugnant mission, that only one member experienced a minor injury. They demonstrated a mental strength as well, accomplishing an ugly assignment without any noticeable residual damage to their bodies or psyches. Undoubtedly, for many members of the task force who were not trained mortuary specialists, the nine days in Jonestown left lasting psychological scars.
While I will tell you some rather bizarre stories in later chapters, I won’t comment on the overall psychological health of the members of the GREGG team, except to say, they seem to be very special people to be able to do what they do.
The GREGG soldiers did exhibit what many would characterize as “sick” senses of humor. To a normal person, their actions may seem macabre and grotesque, but they only mirrored the environment they were working in.
David Granirer is a speaker, trainer, therapist and comic from Vancouver, Canada. He teaches workers how to manage stress through humor. Laughter and frivolity can help people cope.[32]
I do not think I will ever forget the GREGG soldiers who had the task of bringing the residents of Jonestown home. This book has been written to honor their service to humanity and the honorable, yet humor-filled way they accomplished it.
[1] Steven E. Anders, M.D., With All Due Honors: A History of the Graves Registration Mission, Quartermaster Professional Bulletin, September 1988.
[2] Ibid.
[3] Ibid.
[4] Florence Cannon, Our Honored Dead, The Quartermaster Review, May-June 1952
[5] S. Anders, Ibid.
[6] Ibid.
[7] F. Cannon, Ibid.
[8] CPT Richard W. Wooley, A Short History of Identification Tags, Quartermasters Professional Bulletin, December 1988.
[9] S. Anders, Ibid.
[10] Ibid.
[11] F. Cannon, Ibid.
[12] S. Anders, Ibid.
[13] CPT R. Wooley, Ibid.
[14] S. Anders, Ibid.
[15] Ibid.
[16] Ibid.
[17] F. Cannon, Ibid., MAJ William R. White, Our Soldier Dead, Quartermaster Review, May-June 1930.
[18] S. Anders, Ibid.
[19] Ibid.
[20] Ibid.
[21] Ibid
[22] Ibid, COL John D. Martin, Homeward Bound, Quartermaster Review, May-June 1954.
[23] Mortuary Affairs Activies, Republic of Vietnam, retrieved from http://www.qmmuseum.lee.army.mil//mortuary/MA-Vietnam.htn, July 10, 2004; S. Anders. Ibid.
[24] Ibid.
[25] U.S. Army Quartermaster Museum, “Duty to the Fallen: The Army’s Mortuary Mission,” retrieved from http://qmmuseu.lee.army.mil/ma_gallery.html/history , July 10, 2004
[26] Armed Forces Institute of Pathology Oral History Program, Subject: Dr. Richard Froede, Interviewer: Charles Stuart Kennedy, October 27, 1994.
[27] Frank Wright and Maria Russo, 16th Field Services Company Helps Identify Bodies
[28] U.S. Army Mortuary Affairs Center, Home Page, retrieved Aprul 21, 2004 from http://www.quartermaster/army/mil/mac/.htm
[29] Armed Forces Institute of Pathology Oral History Program, Subject: Colonel Kenneth Hartman, DDS, Interviewer: Charles Stuart Kennedy, October 27, 1994.
[30] Ibid
[31] Ibid.
[32] David Granirer, Humor in the Workplace speaker, retrieved from http://www.granirer.com/1-Jimok.htm on July 11,2004
Wednesday, August 27, 2008
Chapter Five
Chapter Five: “I don’t want to go down there”
Nothing makes a man more aware of his capabilities and of his limitations than those moments when he must push aside all the familiar defenses of ego and vanity, and accept reality by staring, with the fear that is normal to a man in combat, into the face of Death.
Major General Robert S. Johnson
I’ll admit it. I was a reluctant witness to the Jonestown Massacre and would not have set foot in the enclave that bore Jim Jones’ name if I had any say about it. Hell, on November 18, 1978, the whole country of Guyana was the last place I wanted to be.
When Captain Skinner and Major Burgos returned from their short helicopter tour of Jonestown, the brigade surgeon instructed me to gather up enough malarial prophylaxis drugs to supply the hundred or so American soldiers who were scheduled to arrive in Jonestown within the next several hours. I quickly assembled the kit and Burgos directed me to board the helicopter he and my commander had just disembarked from. It was still sitting at the end of the runway with its rotors spinning. I was to fly into Jonestown to oversee the distribution of the anti-malaria medications to the troops who would be working there.
I was relieved when I first heard our medical aid station would be set up at Matthews Ridge, some 20 miles from the gruesome death scene. I had no desire to work around all those people who had killed themselves. I tried to convince the brigade surgeon to allow me to send Bernal or Fielder to accomplish this relatively simple task.
“No,” Major Burgos said firmly, “You are the senior medic, you will go.”
A light rain began to fall from a deeply overcast sky as I gathered my personal gear and the drug kit. Although it was the rainy season in Guyana, the precipitation was not as intense here as it was on the northeastern coast where Georgetown was located.
The awaiting helicopter was an American Bell 310, or in the lingo of the United States Army, a UH-1 or “Huey.” After saluting the GDF pilot and co-pilot in the traditional palm-down American Army style, it was interesting to note they responded with the British palm-up salute, a reminder that Guyana was once a colony of Great Britain. The chopper was devoid of seats, just as the Guyanese airliner that brought us to Matthews Ridge was.
The pilot informed me he would be taking off as soon as supplies for the GDF soldiers guarding Jonestown arrived. Within minutes, a battered old civilian truck pulled up alongside the helicopter. Two large, whole, unwrapped fish along with a bag of rice and some fresh vegetables, were deposited onto its deck.
I jumped into the chopper as the pilot and co-pilot strapped themselves into their seats. Thankfully, they offered me a helmet equipped with a microphone and ear pieces so we three could communicate easily during the short flight.
The pilot cranked up the engine while his co-pilot checked gauges. After engine run-up, we quickly became airborne, heading toward a place with more dead human bodies scattered about than any other place on earth I had ever been to. The thought that I soon would be the first member of the Joint Humanitarian Task Force to set foot on this killing field was very disconcerting. I truly wondered how my constitution and psyche would react to the sights and smells that would be assaulting me in a few short minutes.
The rain continued to fall relentlessly and our altitude was not all that high when we entered the cloud bank that was producing it. Speeding through the thick blanket of dark gray clouds in that small aircraft felt a lot like riding in a car through pea soup fog at over 100 miles per hour. It was impossible to see anything beyond the helicopter windshield. It was equipped with radar and an altimeter that seemed to be operational, so there was little danger of hitting a tree, crashing into a mountain, or being hit by another aircraft – I hoped.
To keep it light and demonstrate I was confident in their skill as pilots, I engaged in small talk with the GDF officers shuttling me to Jonestown. “Why is the helicopter painted a bright international orange rather than the traditional green, brown and black of American military choppers that operate over jungles?” I naively inquired.
“Easier to find us if we crash in the jungle,” deadpanned the pilot.
That made perfect sense but was not very reassuring to this passenger taking his first ride in a GDF helicopter over one of the thickest jungle forests in the world. The co-pilot smiled and assured me that neither he nor the helicopter commander had ever crashed.
Within a few minutes, we arrived over Jonestown and the pilot began his descent from the gloomy disorienting clouds. It was comforting to be able to see the ground once again. We were about 1000 feet over the community when we broke through the clouds.
“Where are all the bodies?” I asked, trying to sound as confident and professional as I could.
“Right down there, mate,” replied the co-pilot.
I told the two GDF flyers it was difficult to make out the individual bodies from this great height and before I finished getting the words out of my mouth, the pilot maneuvered the international orange GDF helicopter in a rapid descent to a hover about 150 feet above the pavilion.
From this lower elevation, what had appeared to be piles of trash in a landfill from 850 feet higher, was easily recognized as a mass of hundreds of bodies in multicolored clothing. Arms, legs and heads extended from bodies so bloated the formerly loose fitting shirts and trousers that were so comfortable to wear in the tropics were skin tight against the gas-filled bodies. Even the severe prop wash of our helicopter rotors hovering overhead did not make the taut clothing flutter.
It looked exactly like a scene from a macabre horror film, but the bodies below were not elaborate mannequins placed on the ground by some Hollywood set designer and his artistic assistants. Nor were they movie extras in make-up waiting for the director’s signal to rise up and begin walking in yet another remake of Night of the Living Dead.
They were the quickly rotting remains of dead humans, men women and children, who until a few short days ago, had been living breathing beings with dreams and aspirations that probably were not all that different from my own.
I learned much later that for the past two years and more, most of these people had been living a miserable existence, but at least where there is life there is hope. There was no hope left in Jonestown that rainy November day, only horror, and I said out loud, to no one in particular, “I don’t want to go down there.”
“I don’t blame you, mate.” The audible reply to my rhetorical question jerked me back into the present.
Within a minute or so, we landed in a large expanse that was to become known as the soccer field. The Guyanese no doubt called it a football field. No matter what its name, I had no desire to leave the chopper that felt like a protective cocoon.
At this moment, the Bell 310 GDF chopper was the only aircraft on the ground in Jonestown, but within a day, this field would become the busiest airport in Guyana, save the Timheri International at Georgetown. Jolly Green Giants would be shuttling American soldiers and their supplies into Jonestown and taking full body bags out, in the most bizarre military airlift in the history of the United States Armed Forces.
As unpleasant as Jonestown was, it was a relief to disembark from that small helicopter. The short ride through dark rain-filled clouds had been disorienting. The unfamiliar and pungent odor of the fish, while not as unpleasant as the aroma exuded by Jonestown, was a little sickening. I had to squat on my haunches, again without a seatbelt, to keep the fish’s natural juices from soaking my uniform. Little did I know at the time, all my uniforms would be discarded and burned at the end of this mission anyway. It was impossible to wash the scent of death from them.
I would have preferred the smell of fish to the putrid odors that penetrated my nostrils once the helicopter door was slid open. The bodies had been lying in the sweltering tropical heat for three days at this point. The temperature during the day on Sunday had been nearly 100 degrees Fahrenheit. Despite the rain, the thermometer was hovering at over 90 on the third day.
If you have never experienced the awful aroma of mass death produced by hundreds of rotting bodies in close proximity to one another, there is no adequate way to describe it with words. The best mind picture I can paint, and this is admittedly insufficient, is to ask the reader to close his eyes and think of the most grossly overpoweringly sweet scent you can imagine and combine with the foulest most flatulent odor you can ever recall. Then consider that you will be required to smell this completely disgusting, maggot-gagging aroma 24 hours a day for the next nine days and your imagination will not even come close to the smell endured by the soldiers working with the dead of the Jonestown Massacre.
The sickening sweetness of death was overwhelming. The tropical heat and humidity seemed to enhance it. Although there was a light breeze blowing through the enclave almost all the time, it was not capable of removing the fetid odor of death and replacing it with fresh air.
Nothing but time seemed to rid the olfactory senses of the assault of death. Its odor literally permeated the skin no matter how many times we bathed or what soap we used. What is worse, long after the smell left my body, even when friends and family denied smelling it, I still did. Clothing and military equipment could be burned and reissued, but only time could repair the damage the smell of death did to the human senses.
Some of the GDF soldiers at the soccer field that day wore kerchiefs over their mouths and noses. I tried it and the cloth had no affect whatsoever on lessening the odor. It only added to the claustrophobic feeling of being smothered by the kerchief as well as death’s aroma.
When the rest of the American contingent began arriving, some tried wearing their Army issued protective (gas) masks. They reported the odor of the dead permeated even the fiber filters of those masks made to protect soldiers from poisonous gases and biological agents.
I looked around at the faces and uniforms of the men I saw in Jonestown as some of them removed there rations from the GDF helicopter I arrived in. I saw no one but Guyanese around me. A GDF lieutenant approached me and we exchanged salutes. His name was LT Abbott and he was in command of the 20 or so troops who were guarding Jonestown since the morning after the massacre.
LT Abbott seemed tired and drawn. His speech was a monotone most of the time. He seemed emotionless, devoid of feeling. The young officer seemed to be suffering what World War I soldiers called “shell shock.” In later wars, the condition was called “combat fatigue” or “combat stress.” In my war, Vietnam, the nomenclature became “post-traumatic-stress disorder.”
“Are you alright, lieutenant?” I asked.
“What, oh yes. …haven’t slept since I don’t know when. None of us have really… difficult to sleep here,” was Abbott’s disjointed reply.
“I was told by your commander you would be coming. You are the medic they sent, correct?” asked the lieutenant, seemingly more in control.
“Yes, yes sir, I am,” I replied.
“Your colleagues have yet to arrive, I am told they should start flying in an hour or two from now,” Abbott informed me. I acknowledged the information and we stood staring at one another for a moment or so.
“Your captain and the surgeon did not have time for a tour, but you do. Would you care to see Jonestown?”
I really did not relish the tour but was very cognizant of the fact that this was an historical event. It occurred to me that I was now part of it. I had no idea at the time what affect the Jonestown Massacre would have on the rest of my life, but I agreed to take LT Abbot’s tour.
From where we stood, at the edge of the soccer field, row upon row of neat white cottages on stilts could be seen. They were freshly painted, some with bright blue or red trim, but most of them all white.
The open-air pavilion was about 100 yards away. It had the familiar tin roof of most buildings in Guyana and even the most gentle of rains played the tin like a drum. The structure was held up by bark trimmed logs and crossbeams made of timber. The logs were painted brown and the crossbeams white. Most of the bodies were in or near the pavilion.
Wooden walkways led from the pavilion to two buildings about the same distance from where I stood. A huge metal building containing at least one tractor with a flatbed trailer attached to it was near the soccer field.
“Those two cottages are the infirmary and Reverend Jones’ home,” Abbott informed me. “The tractor and trailer were used by the assassins who killed the government man for your country on Saturday,” he added.
“I’d like to see the infirmary,” I said.
“I have someplace else I want you to see first,” Abbott said with a serious look on his face.
He beckoned me to follow him. By the intent in his step and the look on his face, it was obvious this tired but handsome black officer already had an itinerary for my tour worked out in his mind.
As we passed rows of stilted cottages with neatly manicured yards, a few bodies were strewn here and there, not in large groups, singly and in twos or threes. They looked not unlike rag dolls little girls had tossed aside after tiring of playing with them. I often wondered if that wasn’t what happened that November 18 in Jonestown. Did the maniacal cult leader, Jim Jones, tire of playing with the brainwashed members of his congregation?
As he approached the open doorway of one of the cottages on the edge of the jungle, he directed me inside with a resolute, almost angry voice.
“I brought you here first because I wanted to show you Americans weren’t the only ones to die here. These are my countrymen. They were shot – murdered.” The lieutenant flatly stated.
In the stifling one room cabin, I saw several bodies, perhaps a half dozen. Each obviously was shot at close range, with a heavy-gauged shotgun. They were all blacks.
“What were so many Guyanese doing in this American commune?” I asked the lieutenant.
“I’m not certain. Maybe some of them worked here. Perhaps some had family members who did. They may be local residents who chose a most inopportune time to visit their neighbors,” he surmised.
The next stop was the commune’s radio tower. We ascended a vertical wooden ladder and entered the platform. It was on stilts that were 20 or so feet high, not unlike the guard towers I was familiar with in military camps in Vietnam.
A lone, Caucasian former member of the People’s Temple lay on the floor, a pad and pencil in his long-dead hands. It appeared the unknown man had taken the poisonous brew and began making a written record of his physical reaction to it. After three short paragraphs of increasingly difficult-to-interpret handwriting, this man’s final thoughts became illegible as the convulsive affects of the cyanide overtook him.
Climbing down from the tower, LT Abbott proceeded to take me to Jim Jones’ cottage. Although I had never seen a picture of the man in life, in death, he had the appearance of a leader. His shirt and trousers were black. That alone separated him from the rest of the dead. The strikingly strange position of the body, lying on the steps of his home, arms outstretched and sightless eyes wide open, Jones’ seemed to be appealing to the God he denied until the end.
Jones’ body did not fall at the steps he was now resting on. Marks on the ground indicated it had been dragged from about 20 feet away. His arms appeared to be stiff in rigor mortis, however, a Time magazine photo taken later, but while the corpse was still on the steps, showed the left arm resting over Jones’ head, the right one lying at its side, obviously after rigor left the body.
A bullet hole was on one side of his forehead. There was little blood around the hole. I didn’t move the body, but I didn’t notice any sign of an exit wound. I don’t particularly remember seeing a pool of blood on the ground from where the body was removed. I specifically looked for powder burns or residue around the entrance wound. There was none. This indicated to me Jones had been murdered and did not commit suicide as initially reported by the US government and the media.
Abbott stepped into Jones’ home, carefully avoiding touching his corpse. I followed. Lying in front of an open empty safe was a dead woman, also shot, through the mouth. I believe this woman to be Ann Moore, the nurse who had allowed Odell Rhodes to avoid death when he accompanied her to the infirmary to fetch a stethoscope for Dr. Schact.
On a bed in a room to the right was another dead woman. She lay on her back and although the front of her blouse had a good deal of dried blood on it, I noticed no apparent wounds. I believe this was Maria Katsaris, Jones’ mistress.
Mysteriously, the only children I saw during the tour were two little boys lying on the floor of Jones’ cottage. We know now that Kimo Prokes and John-John Stoen, children Jones’ claimed to have fathered, lived there.
The sight of the two children combined with the stench of death and the obvious enormity of what occurred here just two days earlier was incredibly shocking. My stomach was in a sorry state, ready to expel its meager contents and definitely not ready to replace it any time soon.
My head was swimming. Although the odor was no better outside the house, I had to escape its confines and at least put my face into the light breeze that was wafting through the commune. The rain had ceased, but the dark overcast sky indicated it could begin again at any time.
Our next stop on this bizarre tour of a literal city of the dead known as Jonestown was the infirmary. As a medic, this was the facility I was most interested in. Empty pill bottles and injection vials littered an otherwise clean floor. Many of the labels on the drug containers read ‘Librium,’ ‘Valium’ and sodium Phenobarbital.
The clinic boasted a modern x-ray machine and a sophisticated training microscope with two eye pieces. Other instruments and medical equipment were equally state-of-the-art. There were no bodies in the infirmary itself, but it was the first place I requested to visit and, because I was a medic, LT Abbott knew I would be interested in seeing it.
I didn’t stay very long there, but long enough to see Larry Schact’s medical degree on the wall. I wondered out loud how a man who studied for years to become a healer could have allowed himself to become an integral element in this gross insult to humanity. LT Abbott didn’t reply.
Interestingly, an organization of medically-oriented ham radio enthusiasts called the Medical Amateur Radio Council (MARCo) made up of physicians and dentists mentioned Dr. Schact in its April 2004 newsletter.[1] It appears he joined the council in order to take advantage of the medical advice and expertise of some of its members.
Historian, Joseph Dieckman, a researcher with the Jonestown Institute, has found numerous reports of Federal Communications Commission (FCC) violations by radio operators of the People’s Temple. FCC Case Number 77-R-71 was opened on August 25, 1977, many months after the initial violations were sent out.[2]
There were four members of the People’s Temple that had amateur ham radio licenses issued by the FCC. They included Albert Touchette [WB6MID (/8R3)], who operated in Jonestown; Paula Adams [WB6MNH (/8R1)] the operator in Guyana’s capitol of Georgetown; Elton Adams [WD6DVI] and Benjamin Bowers [WA6DTJ], who each operated in San Francisco.[3]
The United States Regulations regarding amateur radio are found in Part 97 of the US Codes. All of the violations Dieckman cited are found in the FBI’s RYMUR files.
Of the four radio operators, Bowers had the most reported violations. They included: No control operator present at time of operation; Exceeding maximum input power to the final amplifier; No station log/station log unavailable for inspection; Failure to notify at 10 minute intervals, Transmitting business traffic; Transmitting false, deceptive or unauthorized call letters; Failure to identify as required; and, Operating outside authorized US amateur band limits.[4]
Touchette and Adams had far fewer violations. Most were for operating their radios outside of approved bands, a violation of international radio operation regulations.[5]
According to MARCo, Dr. Schact was a sadist. “Louie,” who was the medical technician who worked at the Jonestown clinic with Schact said, “He didn’t like to use an anesthetic for suturing. If you asked for any pain relief, he stated you were not strong. Only natural childbirth was allowed in Jonestown.[6]
“He was a terrible doctor,” charged (Dale) Parks, who was one of Schact’s assistants in Jonestown. “He had no compassion, but members of his church saw the 30-year-old Dr. Schact as a modern-day Albert Schweitzer. When he first came he was totally strung out on drugs. He could not even carry on a conversation. He even had trouble remembering his name.[7]
Because he abandoned his internship, Dr. Schact lacked clinical experience. He turned to MARCo for help. The colony began using amateur radio for all communications outside the enclave since no telephones were permitted.
Jones himself would sometimes use the radio, using fictitious names. Sometimes he called himself “Al,” the name of the station’s licensee. However, he usually relied on female radio operators and Touchette, the station’s licensee. His name appears alongside other Jonestown murder victims and could very well have been the man I saw in the radio tower.
MARCo member, Bill Otten, [now KC9CS, formerly WD9AMW] recalls his conversation with “Al” one evening on 20 meters. “Early in March of 1979,[8] I was sitting in front of my radio on a cold northern Illinois evening. I was scanning up and down the 20 meter band and a station caught my attention. It was in Guyana, a country I had not yet logged toward DXCC, so I listened for a while. It soon became apparent that the station in Guyana was talking to another station in San Francisco, and as I was listening, I was intrigued, because nothing substantial was being said. I recall mentioning to my father that the stations I was listening o were being very vague, almost as if drug transactions were taking place over the ham bands.
“I returned to the radio and WB6MID/8R3 came back to my call. I told him I was a wildlife biologist researching upland game and habitat in northern Illinois. Several days later, I tuned the radio and once again found the Guyana station, but this time it was being operated by a distinctly different voice and he did not recall our conversation of a few days earlier. This time, I asked for the operator’s name and a QSL card. His name was Albert Touchette.”[9]
The operator of Bill’s first contact identified himself as the director of a compound in the jungles of Guyana. “I run the mission,” he stated. Apparently he was Jim Jones himself, a fact later substantiated by the FBI. In November, some months later, Bill and his wife were on a trip when they heard the sad news of the deaths of more than 900 people.
Contacts with the Jonestown station by W6JZU (now Robert Smithwick, W6CS) were equally cryptic, consisting solely of passing traffic or arranging phone patches between Jonestown and the San Francisco temple, through a station identifying itself as WA6DTG, operated by a “Martha Bown,” or “Debbie Evans.”[10]
From the log of W6JZU: “Typically, the WB6MID/8R3 station operator talks to a WADTJ in San Francisco. WB6MID is licensed to Al Touchette of Redwood, CA. They often start up about 14.300 kcs (the band edge at the time), then they would move up to the high end to 14.345. They often used a coded expression such as ‘Let’s take a break for 15 minutes,’ and then they would move further up and out of the band 15-20 kcs. When out of the band they used coded call signs with the same voices and not amateur call signs. Both the ARRL (Amateur Radio Relay League) and the FCC became aware of this bizarre operation, but were limited to what action to take since the principal station was outside the United States. All letters admonishing this illegal operation were ignored.[11]
MARCo member Don Key (K0IND) confirmed this style of operation after monitoring the station over several months. “At the time of the Jonestown Massacre, Laurence Eugene Schact, MD, submitted an application himself for MARCo membership. He listed his call signs on the application as being WB6MID/8R3. When this proved to be incorrect (the holder of that call sign was Albert Touchette) he was never granted MARCo membership. His application is dated March 9, 1978 and the massacre occurred eight months later on Nov. 18, 1978.[12]
Amateur radio was used extensively to maintain communications. Every evening, about sunset, the three stations would talk with each other, sometimes for hours at a time. Every now and then, they would break in on the MARCo nets and describe some medical problem that Dr. Schact encountered.
Responding to such requests was routine for MARCo, but it was the elementary nature of the questions that first alerted MARCo members that things were not quite right in Jonestown. Members’ concerns increased when some of the questions asked seemed so simple that even people on the lower levels of the medical field normally would be able to answer. MARCo members provided radio medical consultations on broken bones, skin rashes and other tropical problems one would expect to find in a jungle and agricultural environment. In addition to Schact, there were two registered nurses and a radiological technician in residence in Jonestown.[13]
It was not only the simplistic nature of the questions that raised eyebrows. Jonestown operators would talk in such confusing and inappropriate terms that nobody listening could tell what they were talking about. They would sometimes not put sentences together, just quote a few words or say things that had no relation whatsoever to what they had just finished saying.
For example, when the figure “35,000” was worked into conversations, that number did not seem to have a reference to what they were talking about. It was later learned that they were ordering a $35,000 Caterpillar tractor to be sent from the US. The word “tractor” was never used.[14]
Schact was a drug abusing young man when Jones originally chose him to be the cult’s physician. He paid for Schact’s undergraduate and medical school educations. Schact went to Jonestown in 1977.[15]
The tour of Jonestown continued. As we left the infirmary and were walking toward the pavilion where the main mass of fallen bodies were located, the unmistakable sound of incoming H-53 helicopter could be heard in the distance.
“That must be your comrades,’ LT Abbott said, “Shall we continue?”
“Yes,” I replied flatly and without enthusiasm. I didn’t know how long I had been on this bizarre tour, but I knew it had to end soon.
I noticed many of the bodies seemed to lie in family groups and several dozen that I saw wore handmade identification bracelets fashioned of paper and transparent tape. The lieutenant surmised and I agreed, the residents had made these primitive bracelets to facilitate identification by authorities so loved ones could easily claim them when they arrived in the United States. Unfortunately, by this time, the bodies were so bloated that the bracelets were actually imbedded in the skin and most were unreadable.
A few minutes after the Jolly Green Giants landed and shut down their engines, LT Abbott and I concluded our tour. I had seen Jim Jones, seemingly pleading to the God he defied, rejected and mocked until the end. I saw his wooden throne-like chair with the sign overhead that read, “Those who forget the past are condemned to repeat it.”
I saw the pot of bubbling purple brew, made from Flav-Or-Ade, not the grape Kool-Ade erroneously reported by the media. The deadly poison contained in it, had been forced down the throats of babies and little children with needleless syringes by the very mothers who had given them life. The instruments of their death were littered all around.
I saw dogs and a large chimpanzee that had been shot and killed and I wondered why all these mammals had been executed and yet two beautiful blue macaws sitting on their perches had not. Those birds were the only living things left in the enclave, except for the pigs away from the main part of Jonestown.
Perhaps the masters of these dead animals killed them out of mercy, or they though they would also be united with their pets in the great hereafter Jones promised was awaiting them. Perhaps the macaws were allowed to live so they could bear witness to the insanity that struck Jonestown. If that was the purpose these they were spared, they didn’t make good witnesses. Not a word passed from these parrots’ beaks.
LT Abbott showed me what he wanted me to see, so he could satisfy himself the world would know it wasn’t just Americans that died at Jonestown. I was a witness to the carnage, I am sure so someday I could report what I saw in this place. I saw far more than I desired to see. Even worse, I saw far more than I would ever be able to forget.
When we walked back to the soccer field, two of the US Special Forces troops who had arrived in the Jolly Greens already managed to get the tractor attached to the flatbed trailer and was shuttling big bundles of brownish-black plastic body bags from the H-53s to a staging area near the pavilion. I approached another Green Beret soldier, a medic I knew from Fort Gulick, Panama. I asked him if he was going to be based in Jonestown and he said he was. He agreed to take the drug kit of anti-malarial pills and distribute them to all the soldiers who arrived at the site.
Some of the soldiers that arrived were from the Graves Registration (Mortuary Services, as it is called now) Company at Fort Lee, Virginia. There were a couple of dozen of them, clustered around a junior grade officer, apparently being briefed about the mission. These soldiers from the States coordinated with the well-trained and highly disciplined Special Forces troopers. Although the soldiers from Fort Lee appeared to be ordinary soldiers, it takes a special breed of person to carry out the indescribably difficult mission of the Graves Registration soldier. They surely are the unsung heroes of this and many missions the get involved with.
LT Abbott returned to tell me the GDF helicopter I arrived in would be back shortly, bringing fresh troops to relieve some of his tired men. He asked if I was ready to return to Matthews Ridge.
“I was ready to get back to my men as soon as I arrived, thanks for the tour,” I said as I shook Abbott’s hand.
He gave me a week smile and said, “I wish I could say it was my pleasure, but at least it was a pleasure to meet you,” he replied.
With the sound of the GDF Bell 310 in the distance, I saluted LT Abbott and waited for the helicopter to land. It did and eight young Guyanese soldiers in clean freshly pressed uniforms disembarked from it. Eight of their counterparts, uniforms sweat-stained and smelly, who preceded them and had the grim task of guarding the Jonestown dead since Sunday morning, eagerly prepared to load out. There were no noisy greetings or high fives between these two groups of soldiers as was the custom when American troopers performed similar exchanges. Instead, the signs of fear and trepidation on the faces of those just arrived and relief on those leaving told the story.
I gratefully joined the departing soldiers as did a small nervous Caucasian American in a white shirt and dress slacks. I didn’t see anyone but uniformed American service men and women disembark from the incoming helicopters, so I assumed he was in Jonestown before I arrived. He carried an unpainted wooden crate without a top. It was filled to overflowing with what appeared to be official documents.
I nodded to the shaky guy in the dress clothes. He returned the silent signal of greeting and pointed to the .45 caliber pistol on my belt. “Is that thing loaded, soldier?” asked my jittery countryman.
“Wouldn’t do me much good without ammo, would it friend?” I replied.
Sidling up to me so he could not be easily heard by other ears than mine, he motioned me to draw even closer so he could tell me something in confidence. “If anybody tries to take this box away from me, shoot them,” he ordered softly and seriously, then he quickly stepped onto the helicopter.
I jumped in and sat next to him. The chopper still was not configured with passenger seats, so the ten of us sat on the floor.
I put my mouth to the crazy guy’s right ear and said in a voice loud enough to be heard by him alone over the roar of the huge aircraft engine, “You’ve got to be kidding.”
“No, I’m not,” he replied flatly, staring at me with his most convincing ‘I am dead serious’ look.
“Look buddy,” I said to the little man in what I hoped was an equal tone of seriousness, “I don’t know who you are and I don’t know what you have in that box that is so valuable, but whatever it is, there is no way I am going to risk spending one night in a Guyanese lock-up because I shot someone who was trying to take that box away from you.”
I turned an faced the GDF soldier sitting across from me. The helicopter lifted off and I watched the jungle get smaller as we ascended higher in the waning light of my first day in Guyana. Fortunately, he and his seven comrades had just spent the most stressful 36 hours of their lives, the only living beings in a village of 900 plus dead bodies. They were exhausted and didn’t seemed to be the least bit interested in the conversation I was having with the weird American bureaucrat or the box he was now sitting on.
“I’m from the American Embassy in Georgetown,” my mysterious new associate informed, no doubt believing I would be impressed. “I’ve been here since yesterday gathering these documents. They are very sensitive, we can’t let them get into the wrong hands,” he told me in a forceful yet panicky voice.
“Let me make myself very clear to you sir,” I said to the alleged State Department man, “I don’t care if you are Rocky J. Squirrel I am Bullwinkle the Moose. I don’t care if you are President Jimmy Carter himself, I don’t care if Ivan and Natasha try to take those papers from you, unless I feel our lives are in danger, this pistol stays holstered.”
“Give it to me then,” he half ordered and half begged in a squeaky little voice. Genuine fear showed in his eyes when he removed his shades so he could see in the withering sunlight.
“Listen, I don’t know you and I don’t like you. This .45 is going to remain in its holster, and if anyone draws it out, its going to be me and if you keep fucking with me, it is you I will be shooting, I yelled at the probable CIA clerk.
About this time, the pilot began his descent. I looked down and realized we were not landing at the Matthews Ridge airstrip. With the impending landing at some other destination than the one I thought we were going to, our conversation ended.
Although it was nearly dark, it was obvious we landed at Port Kaitumba, the location where the Ryan Party was ambushed. The scene must have looked much as it did on Saturday night, when the assassinations took place.
The eight weary GDF soldiers departed the helicopter here. It was now Monday night, almost 48 hours to the minute since the carnage occurred. The planes that were to take the congressman and his aide, concerned family members, defectors and the press, were still on the tarmac, their skins pock-mocked with bullet holes.
Later I learned the plan Larry Layton and his hit squad developed called for assassins to board each aircraft.[16] When the planes were airborne, a gunman on each was to kill its pilot thereby causing a deadly crash into the jungle below.
The plan was botched when the gunmen began firing from the flatbed trailer as it approached the aircraft. No one will ever know what would have happened in Jonestown that night on November 18, 1978, had the quickly devised plan been carried out successfully. Could the Jonestown Massacre have been averted if the planes were reported missing and no one was aware of the foul play? As it was, the botched assassination plan was the catalyst for the biggest mass murder/suicide in history.
The man from the embassy and I were the only passengers on the Port Kaitumba to Matthews Ridge leg of the helicopter trip. By now, we were enveloped in total darkness and we each sat on opposite sides of the cabin. I was determined to keep as much space between myself and this odd, nervous American. I regarded him as one might a weird, off-the-wall relative with whom one does not want to be seen with in public.
Captain Skinner and Major Burgos were standing at the refueling point when the chopper finally landed at the airstrip. The helicopter would fly on to Georgetown after departing Matthews Ridge. My commander approached the helicopter as I slid the door open and jumped out.
“How’d it go?” he yelled in my ear over the din of the helicopter. “Mission accomplished,” I
replied tersely, “Are you leaving, sir?”
“Yeah, Doc. Burgos and I are going back to Georgetown. We will work out of there. You’ve got everything under control here. Call us if you need anything,” Skinner shouted over the chopper’s engine.
“Watch out for that little squirrelly guy on the helicopter,” I warned my commander. “He’s some kind of spook or something. Wanted me to shoot anyone who tried to take his damned box from him.”
Captain Skinner did not reply. Perhaps this was because I referred to the other passengers diminutive status and it made him feel more self-conscious of his own. Maybe he knew something I didn’t. At any rate, he turned towards the helicopter, staring intently at the State Department man as he watched Major Burgos hop into the passenger cabin and then turned around, sat and pulled himself in.
I watched the international orange GDF bird lift into the starless night until its running lights disappeared in the low clouds. Then I strode up the hill to our aid station, hoping at least one of the guys was thoughtful enough to set up my cot and roll out my sleeping bag. They were. I never saw the man from the US Embassy again and I never learned what his name or function was.
Monday, November 20, 1978 had been one of the most bizarre days of my life, but the weirdness was just beginning. The next eight days would test the credulity and strain the sanity of many of the Americans performing this very strange and most unmilitary mission.
[1] Medical Amateur Radio Council, April Newsletter, Retrieved April 2004 from www.smbs.buffalo.edu / med/marco/index2/html.
[2] E-mail from Joseph Dieckman, Subject: FCCPT Document Attached, dated July 10, 2004.
[3] Joseph Dieckman, The FCC Investigation of Amateur Radio Usage of the Peoples Temple, Research Paper, 2004.
[4] Ibid.
[5] Ibid.
[6] Medical Amateur Radio Council, April Newsletter, 2004.
[7] Ibid.
[8] Note: Bill Otten told Josef Dieckman in a 2004 conversation that the year should have been 1978. Dieckman related this information to the author in a telephone conversation on June 26, 2004.
[9] Medical Amateur Radio Council, April Newsletter, 2004
[10] Ibid.
[11] Ibid.
[12] Ibid.
[13] Ibid.
[14] Ibid.
[15] FOIA, Federal Bureau of Investigation RYMUR (Jonestown), 176; John Peer Nugent, White Night, 144-147.
[16] FOIA, Ibid., 157, 260.
Nothing makes a man more aware of his capabilities and of his limitations than those moments when he must push aside all the familiar defenses of ego and vanity, and accept reality by staring, with the fear that is normal to a man in combat, into the face of Death.
Major General Robert S. Johnson
I’ll admit it. I was a reluctant witness to the Jonestown Massacre and would not have set foot in the enclave that bore Jim Jones’ name if I had any say about it. Hell, on November 18, 1978, the whole country of Guyana was the last place I wanted to be.
When Captain Skinner and Major Burgos returned from their short helicopter tour of Jonestown, the brigade surgeon instructed me to gather up enough malarial prophylaxis drugs to supply the hundred or so American soldiers who were scheduled to arrive in Jonestown within the next several hours. I quickly assembled the kit and Burgos directed me to board the helicopter he and my commander had just disembarked from. It was still sitting at the end of the runway with its rotors spinning. I was to fly into Jonestown to oversee the distribution of the anti-malaria medications to the troops who would be working there.
I was relieved when I first heard our medical aid station would be set up at Matthews Ridge, some 20 miles from the gruesome death scene. I had no desire to work around all those people who had killed themselves. I tried to convince the brigade surgeon to allow me to send Bernal or Fielder to accomplish this relatively simple task.
“No,” Major Burgos said firmly, “You are the senior medic, you will go.”
A light rain began to fall from a deeply overcast sky as I gathered my personal gear and the drug kit. Although it was the rainy season in Guyana, the precipitation was not as intense here as it was on the northeastern coast where Georgetown was located.
The awaiting helicopter was an American Bell 310, or in the lingo of the United States Army, a UH-1 or “Huey.” After saluting the GDF pilot and co-pilot in the traditional palm-down American Army style, it was interesting to note they responded with the British palm-up salute, a reminder that Guyana was once a colony of Great Britain. The chopper was devoid of seats, just as the Guyanese airliner that brought us to Matthews Ridge was.
The pilot informed me he would be taking off as soon as supplies for the GDF soldiers guarding Jonestown arrived. Within minutes, a battered old civilian truck pulled up alongside the helicopter. Two large, whole, unwrapped fish along with a bag of rice and some fresh vegetables, were deposited onto its deck.
I jumped into the chopper as the pilot and co-pilot strapped themselves into their seats. Thankfully, they offered me a helmet equipped with a microphone and ear pieces so we three could communicate easily during the short flight.
The pilot cranked up the engine while his co-pilot checked gauges. After engine run-up, we quickly became airborne, heading toward a place with more dead human bodies scattered about than any other place on earth I had ever been to. The thought that I soon would be the first member of the Joint Humanitarian Task Force to set foot on this killing field was very disconcerting. I truly wondered how my constitution and psyche would react to the sights and smells that would be assaulting me in a few short minutes.
The rain continued to fall relentlessly and our altitude was not all that high when we entered the cloud bank that was producing it. Speeding through the thick blanket of dark gray clouds in that small aircraft felt a lot like riding in a car through pea soup fog at over 100 miles per hour. It was impossible to see anything beyond the helicopter windshield. It was equipped with radar and an altimeter that seemed to be operational, so there was little danger of hitting a tree, crashing into a mountain, or being hit by another aircraft – I hoped.
To keep it light and demonstrate I was confident in their skill as pilots, I engaged in small talk with the GDF officers shuttling me to Jonestown. “Why is the helicopter painted a bright international orange rather than the traditional green, brown and black of American military choppers that operate over jungles?” I naively inquired.
“Easier to find us if we crash in the jungle,” deadpanned the pilot.
That made perfect sense but was not very reassuring to this passenger taking his first ride in a GDF helicopter over one of the thickest jungle forests in the world. The co-pilot smiled and assured me that neither he nor the helicopter commander had ever crashed.
Within a few minutes, we arrived over Jonestown and the pilot began his descent from the gloomy disorienting clouds. It was comforting to be able to see the ground once again. We were about 1000 feet over the community when we broke through the clouds.
“Where are all the bodies?” I asked, trying to sound as confident and professional as I could.
“Right down there, mate,” replied the co-pilot.
I told the two GDF flyers it was difficult to make out the individual bodies from this great height and before I finished getting the words out of my mouth, the pilot maneuvered the international orange GDF helicopter in a rapid descent to a hover about 150 feet above the pavilion.
From this lower elevation, what had appeared to be piles of trash in a landfill from 850 feet higher, was easily recognized as a mass of hundreds of bodies in multicolored clothing. Arms, legs and heads extended from bodies so bloated the formerly loose fitting shirts and trousers that were so comfortable to wear in the tropics were skin tight against the gas-filled bodies. Even the severe prop wash of our helicopter rotors hovering overhead did not make the taut clothing flutter.
It looked exactly like a scene from a macabre horror film, but the bodies below were not elaborate mannequins placed on the ground by some Hollywood set designer and his artistic assistants. Nor were they movie extras in make-up waiting for the director’s signal to rise up and begin walking in yet another remake of Night of the Living Dead.
They were the quickly rotting remains of dead humans, men women and children, who until a few short days ago, had been living breathing beings with dreams and aspirations that probably were not all that different from my own.
I learned much later that for the past two years and more, most of these people had been living a miserable existence, but at least where there is life there is hope. There was no hope left in Jonestown that rainy November day, only horror, and I said out loud, to no one in particular, “I don’t want to go down there.”
“I don’t blame you, mate.” The audible reply to my rhetorical question jerked me back into the present.
Within a minute or so, we landed in a large expanse that was to become known as the soccer field. The Guyanese no doubt called it a football field. No matter what its name, I had no desire to leave the chopper that felt like a protective cocoon.
At this moment, the Bell 310 GDF chopper was the only aircraft on the ground in Jonestown, but within a day, this field would become the busiest airport in Guyana, save the Timheri International at Georgetown. Jolly Green Giants would be shuttling American soldiers and their supplies into Jonestown and taking full body bags out, in the most bizarre military airlift in the history of the United States Armed Forces.
As unpleasant as Jonestown was, it was a relief to disembark from that small helicopter. The short ride through dark rain-filled clouds had been disorienting. The unfamiliar and pungent odor of the fish, while not as unpleasant as the aroma exuded by Jonestown, was a little sickening. I had to squat on my haunches, again without a seatbelt, to keep the fish’s natural juices from soaking my uniform. Little did I know at the time, all my uniforms would be discarded and burned at the end of this mission anyway. It was impossible to wash the scent of death from them.
I would have preferred the smell of fish to the putrid odors that penetrated my nostrils once the helicopter door was slid open. The bodies had been lying in the sweltering tropical heat for three days at this point. The temperature during the day on Sunday had been nearly 100 degrees Fahrenheit. Despite the rain, the thermometer was hovering at over 90 on the third day.
If you have never experienced the awful aroma of mass death produced by hundreds of rotting bodies in close proximity to one another, there is no adequate way to describe it with words. The best mind picture I can paint, and this is admittedly insufficient, is to ask the reader to close his eyes and think of the most grossly overpoweringly sweet scent you can imagine and combine with the foulest most flatulent odor you can ever recall. Then consider that you will be required to smell this completely disgusting, maggot-gagging aroma 24 hours a day for the next nine days and your imagination will not even come close to the smell endured by the soldiers working with the dead of the Jonestown Massacre.
The sickening sweetness of death was overwhelming. The tropical heat and humidity seemed to enhance it. Although there was a light breeze blowing through the enclave almost all the time, it was not capable of removing the fetid odor of death and replacing it with fresh air.
Nothing but time seemed to rid the olfactory senses of the assault of death. Its odor literally permeated the skin no matter how many times we bathed or what soap we used. What is worse, long after the smell left my body, even when friends and family denied smelling it, I still did. Clothing and military equipment could be burned and reissued, but only time could repair the damage the smell of death did to the human senses.
Some of the GDF soldiers at the soccer field that day wore kerchiefs over their mouths and noses. I tried it and the cloth had no affect whatsoever on lessening the odor. It only added to the claustrophobic feeling of being smothered by the kerchief as well as death’s aroma.
When the rest of the American contingent began arriving, some tried wearing their Army issued protective (gas) masks. They reported the odor of the dead permeated even the fiber filters of those masks made to protect soldiers from poisonous gases and biological agents.
I looked around at the faces and uniforms of the men I saw in Jonestown as some of them removed there rations from the GDF helicopter I arrived in. I saw no one but Guyanese around me. A GDF lieutenant approached me and we exchanged salutes. His name was LT Abbott and he was in command of the 20 or so troops who were guarding Jonestown since the morning after the massacre.
LT Abbott seemed tired and drawn. His speech was a monotone most of the time. He seemed emotionless, devoid of feeling. The young officer seemed to be suffering what World War I soldiers called “shell shock.” In later wars, the condition was called “combat fatigue” or “combat stress.” In my war, Vietnam, the nomenclature became “post-traumatic-stress disorder.”
“Are you alright, lieutenant?” I asked.
“What, oh yes. …haven’t slept since I don’t know when. None of us have really… difficult to sleep here,” was Abbott’s disjointed reply.
“I was told by your commander you would be coming. You are the medic they sent, correct?” asked the lieutenant, seemingly more in control.
“Yes, yes sir, I am,” I replied.
“Your colleagues have yet to arrive, I am told they should start flying in an hour or two from now,” Abbott informed me. I acknowledged the information and we stood staring at one another for a moment or so.
“Your captain and the surgeon did not have time for a tour, but you do. Would you care to see Jonestown?”
I really did not relish the tour but was very cognizant of the fact that this was an historical event. It occurred to me that I was now part of it. I had no idea at the time what affect the Jonestown Massacre would have on the rest of my life, but I agreed to take LT Abbot’s tour.
From where we stood, at the edge of the soccer field, row upon row of neat white cottages on stilts could be seen. They were freshly painted, some with bright blue or red trim, but most of them all white.
The open-air pavilion was about 100 yards away. It had the familiar tin roof of most buildings in Guyana and even the most gentle of rains played the tin like a drum. The structure was held up by bark trimmed logs and crossbeams made of timber. The logs were painted brown and the crossbeams white. Most of the bodies were in or near the pavilion.
Wooden walkways led from the pavilion to two buildings about the same distance from where I stood. A huge metal building containing at least one tractor with a flatbed trailer attached to it was near the soccer field.
“Those two cottages are the infirmary and Reverend Jones’ home,” Abbott informed me. “The tractor and trailer were used by the assassins who killed the government man for your country on Saturday,” he added.
“I’d like to see the infirmary,” I said.
“I have someplace else I want you to see first,” Abbott said with a serious look on his face.
He beckoned me to follow him. By the intent in his step and the look on his face, it was obvious this tired but handsome black officer already had an itinerary for my tour worked out in his mind.
As we passed rows of stilted cottages with neatly manicured yards, a few bodies were strewn here and there, not in large groups, singly and in twos or threes. They looked not unlike rag dolls little girls had tossed aside after tiring of playing with them. I often wondered if that wasn’t what happened that November 18 in Jonestown. Did the maniacal cult leader, Jim Jones, tire of playing with the brainwashed members of his congregation?
As he approached the open doorway of one of the cottages on the edge of the jungle, he directed me inside with a resolute, almost angry voice.
“I brought you here first because I wanted to show you Americans weren’t the only ones to die here. These are my countrymen. They were shot – murdered.” The lieutenant flatly stated.
In the stifling one room cabin, I saw several bodies, perhaps a half dozen. Each obviously was shot at close range, with a heavy-gauged shotgun. They were all blacks.
“What were so many Guyanese doing in this American commune?” I asked the lieutenant.
“I’m not certain. Maybe some of them worked here. Perhaps some had family members who did. They may be local residents who chose a most inopportune time to visit their neighbors,” he surmised.
The next stop was the commune’s radio tower. We ascended a vertical wooden ladder and entered the platform. It was on stilts that were 20 or so feet high, not unlike the guard towers I was familiar with in military camps in Vietnam.
A lone, Caucasian former member of the People’s Temple lay on the floor, a pad and pencil in his long-dead hands. It appeared the unknown man had taken the poisonous brew and began making a written record of his physical reaction to it. After three short paragraphs of increasingly difficult-to-interpret handwriting, this man’s final thoughts became illegible as the convulsive affects of the cyanide overtook him.
Climbing down from the tower, LT Abbott proceeded to take me to Jim Jones’ cottage. Although I had never seen a picture of the man in life, in death, he had the appearance of a leader. His shirt and trousers were black. That alone separated him from the rest of the dead. The strikingly strange position of the body, lying on the steps of his home, arms outstretched and sightless eyes wide open, Jones’ seemed to be appealing to the God he denied until the end.
Jones’ body did not fall at the steps he was now resting on. Marks on the ground indicated it had been dragged from about 20 feet away. His arms appeared to be stiff in rigor mortis, however, a Time magazine photo taken later, but while the corpse was still on the steps, showed the left arm resting over Jones’ head, the right one lying at its side, obviously after rigor left the body.
A bullet hole was on one side of his forehead. There was little blood around the hole. I didn’t move the body, but I didn’t notice any sign of an exit wound. I don’t particularly remember seeing a pool of blood on the ground from where the body was removed. I specifically looked for powder burns or residue around the entrance wound. There was none. This indicated to me Jones had been murdered and did not commit suicide as initially reported by the US government and the media.
Abbott stepped into Jones’ home, carefully avoiding touching his corpse. I followed. Lying in front of an open empty safe was a dead woman, also shot, through the mouth. I believe this woman to be Ann Moore, the nurse who had allowed Odell Rhodes to avoid death when he accompanied her to the infirmary to fetch a stethoscope for Dr. Schact.
On a bed in a room to the right was another dead woman. She lay on her back and although the front of her blouse had a good deal of dried blood on it, I noticed no apparent wounds. I believe this was Maria Katsaris, Jones’ mistress.
Mysteriously, the only children I saw during the tour were two little boys lying on the floor of Jones’ cottage. We know now that Kimo Prokes and John-John Stoen, children Jones’ claimed to have fathered, lived there.
The sight of the two children combined with the stench of death and the obvious enormity of what occurred here just two days earlier was incredibly shocking. My stomach was in a sorry state, ready to expel its meager contents and definitely not ready to replace it any time soon.
My head was swimming. Although the odor was no better outside the house, I had to escape its confines and at least put my face into the light breeze that was wafting through the commune. The rain had ceased, but the dark overcast sky indicated it could begin again at any time.
Our next stop on this bizarre tour of a literal city of the dead known as Jonestown was the infirmary. As a medic, this was the facility I was most interested in. Empty pill bottles and injection vials littered an otherwise clean floor. Many of the labels on the drug containers read ‘Librium,’ ‘Valium’ and sodium Phenobarbital.
The clinic boasted a modern x-ray machine and a sophisticated training microscope with two eye pieces. Other instruments and medical equipment were equally state-of-the-art. There were no bodies in the infirmary itself, but it was the first place I requested to visit and, because I was a medic, LT Abbott knew I would be interested in seeing it.
I didn’t stay very long there, but long enough to see Larry Schact’s medical degree on the wall. I wondered out loud how a man who studied for years to become a healer could have allowed himself to become an integral element in this gross insult to humanity. LT Abbott didn’t reply.
Interestingly, an organization of medically-oriented ham radio enthusiasts called the Medical Amateur Radio Council (MARCo) made up of physicians and dentists mentioned Dr. Schact in its April 2004 newsletter.[1] It appears he joined the council in order to take advantage of the medical advice and expertise of some of its members.
Historian, Joseph Dieckman, a researcher with the Jonestown Institute, has found numerous reports of Federal Communications Commission (FCC) violations by radio operators of the People’s Temple. FCC Case Number 77-R-71 was opened on August 25, 1977, many months after the initial violations were sent out.[2]
There were four members of the People’s Temple that had amateur ham radio licenses issued by the FCC. They included Albert Touchette [WB6MID (/8R3)], who operated in Jonestown; Paula Adams [WB6MNH (/8R1)] the operator in Guyana’s capitol of Georgetown; Elton Adams [WD6DVI] and Benjamin Bowers [WA6DTJ], who each operated in San Francisco.[3]
The United States Regulations regarding amateur radio are found in Part 97 of the US Codes. All of the violations Dieckman cited are found in the FBI’s RYMUR files.
Of the four radio operators, Bowers had the most reported violations. They included: No control operator present at time of operation; Exceeding maximum input power to the final amplifier; No station log/station log unavailable for inspection; Failure to notify at 10 minute intervals, Transmitting business traffic; Transmitting false, deceptive or unauthorized call letters; Failure to identify as required; and, Operating outside authorized US amateur band limits.[4]
Touchette and Adams had far fewer violations. Most were for operating their radios outside of approved bands, a violation of international radio operation regulations.[5]
According to MARCo, Dr. Schact was a sadist. “Louie,” who was the medical technician who worked at the Jonestown clinic with Schact said, “He didn’t like to use an anesthetic for suturing. If you asked for any pain relief, he stated you were not strong. Only natural childbirth was allowed in Jonestown.[6]
“He was a terrible doctor,” charged (Dale) Parks, who was one of Schact’s assistants in Jonestown. “He had no compassion, but members of his church saw the 30-year-old Dr. Schact as a modern-day Albert Schweitzer. When he first came he was totally strung out on drugs. He could not even carry on a conversation. He even had trouble remembering his name.[7]
Because he abandoned his internship, Dr. Schact lacked clinical experience. He turned to MARCo for help. The colony began using amateur radio for all communications outside the enclave since no telephones were permitted.
Jones himself would sometimes use the radio, using fictitious names. Sometimes he called himself “Al,” the name of the station’s licensee. However, he usually relied on female radio operators and Touchette, the station’s licensee. His name appears alongside other Jonestown murder victims and could very well have been the man I saw in the radio tower.
MARCo member, Bill Otten, [now KC9CS, formerly WD9AMW] recalls his conversation with “Al” one evening on 20 meters. “Early in March of 1979,[8] I was sitting in front of my radio on a cold northern Illinois evening. I was scanning up and down the 20 meter band and a station caught my attention. It was in Guyana, a country I had not yet logged toward DXCC, so I listened for a while. It soon became apparent that the station in Guyana was talking to another station in San Francisco, and as I was listening, I was intrigued, because nothing substantial was being said. I recall mentioning to my father that the stations I was listening o were being very vague, almost as if drug transactions were taking place over the ham bands.
“I returned to the radio and WB6MID/8R3 came back to my call. I told him I was a wildlife biologist researching upland game and habitat in northern Illinois. Several days later, I tuned the radio and once again found the Guyana station, but this time it was being operated by a distinctly different voice and he did not recall our conversation of a few days earlier. This time, I asked for the operator’s name and a QSL card. His name was Albert Touchette.”[9]
The operator of Bill’s first contact identified himself as the director of a compound in the jungles of Guyana. “I run the mission,” he stated. Apparently he was Jim Jones himself, a fact later substantiated by the FBI. In November, some months later, Bill and his wife were on a trip when they heard the sad news of the deaths of more than 900 people.
Contacts with the Jonestown station by W6JZU (now Robert Smithwick, W6CS) were equally cryptic, consisting solely of passing traffic or arranging phone patches between Jonestown and the San Francisco temple, through a station identifying itself as WA6DTG, operated by a “Martha Bown,” or “Debbie Evans.”[10]
From the log of W6JZU: “Typically, the WB6MID/8R3 station operator talks to a WADTJ in San Francisco. WB6MID is licensed to Al Touchette of Redwood, CA. They often start up about 14.300 kcs (the band edge at the time), then they would move up to the high end to 14.345. They often used a coded expression such as ‘Let’s take a break for 15 minutes,’ and then they would move further up and out of the band 15-20 kcs. When out of the band they used coded call signs with the same voices and not amateur call signs. Both the ARRL (Amateur Radio Relay League) and the FCC became aware of this bizarre operation, but were limited to what action to take since the principal station was outside the United States. All letters admonishing this illegal operation were ignored.[11]
MARCo member Don Key (K0IND) confirmed this style of operation after monitoring the station over several months. “At the time of the Jonestown Massacre, Laurence Eugene Schact, MD, submitted an application himself for MARCo membership. He listed his call signs on the application as being WB6MID/8R3. When this proved to be incorrect (the holder of that call sign was Albert Touchette) he was never granted MARCo membership. His application is dated March 9, 1978 and the massacre occurred eight months later on Nov. 18, 1978.[12]
Amateur radio was used extensively to maintain communications. Every evening, about sunset, the three stations would talk with each other, sometimes for hours at a time. Every now and then, they would break in on the MARCo nets and describe some medical problem that Dr. Schact encountered.
Responding to such requests was routine for MARCo, but it was the elementary nature of the questions that first alerted MARCo members that things were not quite right in Jonestown. Members’ concerns increased when some of the questions asked seemed so simple that even people on the lower levels of the medical field normally would be able to answer. MARCo members provided radio medical consultations on broken bones, skin rashes and other tropical problems one would expect to find in a jungle and agricultural environment. In addition to Schact, there were two registered nurses and a radiological technician in residence in Jonestown.[13]
It was not only the simplistic nature of the questions that raised eyebrows. Jonestown operators would talk in such confusing and inappropriate terms that nobody listening could tell what they were talking about. They would sometimes not put sentences together, just quote a few words or say things that had no relation whatsoever to what they had just finished saying.
For example, when the figure “35,000” was worked into conversations, that number did not seem to have a reference to what they were talking about. It was later learned that they were ordering a $35,000 Caterpillar tractor to be sent from the US. The word “tractor” was never used.[14]
Schact was a drug abusing young man when Jones originally chose him to be the cult’s physician. He paid for Schact’s undergraduate and medical school educations. Schact went to Jonestown in 1977.[15]
The tour of Jonestown continued. As we left the infirmary and were walking toward the pavilion where the main mass of fallen bodies were located, the unmistakable sound of incoming H-53 helicopter could be heard in the distance.
“That must be your comrades,’ LT Abbott said, “Shall we continue?”
“Yes,” I replied flatly and without enthusiasm. I didn’t know how long I had been on this bizarre tour, but I knew it had to end soon.
I noticed many of the bodies seemed to lie in family groups and several dozen that I saw wore handmade identification bracelets fashioned of paper and transparent tape. The lieutenant surmised and I agreed, the residents had made these primitive bracelets to facilitate identification by authorities so loved ones could easily claim them when they arrived in the United States. Unfortunately, by this time, the bodies were so bloated that the bracelets were actually imbedded in the skin and most were unreadable.
A few minutes after the Jolly Green Giants landed and shut down their engines, LT Abbott and I concluded our tour. I had seen Jim Jones, seemingly pleading to the God he defied, rejected and mocked until the end. I saw his wooden throne-like chair with the sign overhead that read, “Those who forget the past are condemned to repeat it.”
I saw the pot of bubbling purple brew, made from Flav-Or-Ade, not the grape Kool-Ade erroneously reported by the media. The deadly poison contained in it, had been forced down the throats of babies and little children with needleless syringes by the very mothers who had given them life. The instruments of their death were littered all around.
I saw dogs and a large chimpanzee that had been shot and killed and I wondered why all these mammals had been executed and yet two beautiful blue macaws sitting on their perches had not. Those birds were the only living things left in the enclave, except for the pigs away from the main part of Jonestown.
Perhaps the masters of these dead animals killed them out of mercy, or they though they would also be united with their pets in the great hereafter Jones promised was awaiting them. Perhaps the macaws were allowed to live so they could bear witness to the insanity that struck Jonestown. If that was the purpose these they were spared, they didn’t make good witnesses. Not a word passed from these parrots’ beaks.
LT Abbott showed me what he wanted me to see, so he could satisfy himself the world would know it wasn’t just Americans that died at Jonestown. I was a witness to the carnage, I am sure so someday I could report what I saw in this place. I saw far more than I desired to see. Even worse, I saw far more than I would ever be able to forget.
When we walked back to the soccer field, two of the US Special Forces troops who had arrived in the Jolly Greens already managed to get the tractor attached to the flatbed trailer and was shuttling big bundles of brownish-black plastic body bags from the H-53s to a staging area near the pavilion. I approached another Green Beret soldier, a medic I knew from Fort Gulick, Panama. I asked him if he was going to be based in Jonestown and he said he was. He agreed to take the drug kit of anti-malarial pills and distribute them to all the soldiers who arrived at the site.
Some of the soldiers that arrived were from the Graves Registration (Mortuary Services, as it is called now) Company at Fort Lee, Virginia. There were a couple of dozen of them, clustered around a junior grade officer, apparently being briefed about the mission. These soldiers from the States coordinated with the well-trained and highly disciplined Special Forces troopers. Although the soldiers from Fort Lee appeared to be ordinary soldiers, it takes a special breed of person to carry out the indescribably difficult mission of the Graves Registration soldier. They surely are the unsung heroes of this and many missions the get involved with.
LT Abbott returned to tell me the GDF helicopter I arrived in would be back shortly, bringing fresh troops to relieve some of his tired men. He asked if I was ready to return to Matthews Ridge.
“I was ready to get back to my men as soon as I arrived, thanks for the tour,” I said as I shook Abbott’s hand.
He gave me a week smile and said, “I wish I could say it was my pleasure, but at least it was a pleasure to meet you,” he replied.
With the sound of the GDF Bell 310 in the distance, I saluted LT Abbott and waited for the helicopter to land. It did and eight young Guyanese soldiers in clean freshly pressed uniforms disembarked from it. Eight of their counterparts, uniforms sweat-stained and smelly, who preceded them and had the grim task of guarding the Jonestown dead since Sunday morning, eagerly prepared to load out. There were no noisy greetings or high fives between these two groups of soldiers as was the custom when American troopers performed similar exchanges. Instead, the signs of fear and trepidation on the faces of those just arrived and relief on those leaving told the story.
I gratefully joined the departing soldiers as did a small nervous Caucasian American in a white shirt and dress slacks. I didn’t see anyone but uniformed American service men and women disembark from the incoming helicopters, so I assumed he was in Jonestown before I arrived. He carried an unpainted wooden crate without a top. It was filled to overflowing with what appeared to be official documents.
I nodded to the shaky guy in the dress clothes. He returned the silent signal of greeting and pointed to the .45 caliber pistol on my belt. “Is that thing loaded, soldier?” asked my jittery countryman.
“Wouldn’t do me much good without ammo, would it friend?” I replied.
Sidling up to me so he could not be easily heard by other ears than mine, he motioned me to draw even closer so he could tell me something in confidence. “If anybody tries to take this box away from me, shoot them,” he ordered softly and seriously, then he quickly stepped onto the helicopter.
I jumped in and sat next to him. The chopper still was not configured with passenger seats, so the ten of us sat on the floor.
I put my mouth to the crazy guy’s right ear and said in a voice loud enough to be heard by him alone over the roar of the huge aircraft engine, “You’ve got to be kidding.”
“No, I’m not,” he replied flatly, staring at me with his most convincing ‘I am dead serious’ look.
“Look buddy,” I said to the little man in what I hoped was an equal tone of seriousness, “I don’t know who you are and I don’t know what you have in that box that is so valuable, but whatever it is, there is no way I am going to risk spending one night in a Guyanese lock-up because I shot someone who was trying to take that box away from you.”
I turned an faced the GDF soldier sitting across from me. The helicopter lifted off and I watched the jungle get smaller as we ascended higher in the waning light of my first day in Guyana. Fortunately, he and his seven comrades had just spent the most stressful 36 hours of their lives, the only living beings in a village of 900 plus dead bodies. They were exhausted and didn’t seemed to be the least bit interested in the conversation I was having with the weird American bureaucrat or the box he was now sitting on.
“I’m from the American Embassy in Georgetown,” my mysterious new associate informed, no doubt believing I would be impressed. “I’ve been here since yesterday gathering these documents. They are very sensitive, we can’t let them get into the wrong hands,” he told me in a forceful yet panicky voice.
“Let me make myself very clear to you sir,” I said to the alleged State Department man, “I don’t care if you are Rocky J. Squirrel I am Bullwinkle the Moose. I don’t care if you are President Jimmy Carter himself, I don’t care if Ivan and Natasha try to take those papers from you, unless I feel our lives are in danger, this pistol stays holstered.”
“Give it to me then,” he half ordered and half begged in a squeaky little voice. Genuine fear showed in his eyes when he removed his shades so he could see in the withering sunlight.
“Listen, I don’t know you and I don’t like you. This .45 is going to remain in its holster, and if anyone draws it out, its going to be me and if you keep fucking with me, it is you I will be shooting, I yelled at the probable CIA clerk.
About this time, the pilot began his descent. I looked down and realized we were not landing at the Matthews Ridge airstrip. With the impending landing at some other destination than the one I thought we were going to, our conversation ended.
Although it was nearly dark, it was obvious we landed at Port Kaitumba, the location where the Ryan Party was ambushed. The scene must have looked much as it did on Saturday night, when the assassinations took place.
The eight weary GDF soldiers departed the helicopter here. It was now Monday night, almost 48 hours to the minute since the carnage occurred. The planes that were to take the congressman and his aide, concerned family members, defectors and the press, were still on the tarmac, their skins pock-mocked with bullet holes.
Later I learned the plan Larry Layton and his hit squad developed called for assassins to board each aircraft.[16] When the planes were airborne, a gunman on each was to kill its pilot thereby causing a deadly crash into the jungle below.
The plan was botched when the gunmen began firing from the flatbed trailer as it approached the aircraft. No one will ever know what would have happened in Jonestown that night on November 18, 1978, had the quickly devised plan been carried out successfully. Could the Jonestown Massacre have been averted if the planes were reported missing and no one was aware of the foul play? As it was, the botched assassination plan was the catalyst for the biggest mass murder/suicide in history.
The man from the embassy and I were the only passengers on the Port Kaitumba to Matthews Ridge leg of the helicopter trip. By now, we were enveloped in total darkness and we each sat on opposite sides of the cabin. I was determined to keep as much space between myself and this odd, nervous American. I regarded him as one might a weird, off-the-wall relative with whom one does not want to be seen with in public.
Captain Skinner and Major Burgos were standing at the refueling point when the chopper finally landed at the airstrip. The helicopter would fly on to Georgetown after departing Matthews Ridge. My commander approached the helicopter as I slid the door open and jumped out.
“How’d it go?” he yelled in my ear over the din of the helicopter. “Mission accomplished,” I
replied tersely, “Are you leaving, sir?”
“Yeah, Doc. Burgos and I are going back to Georgetown. We will work out of there. You’ve got everything under control here. Call us if you need anything,” Skinner shouted over the chopper’s engine.
“Watch out for that little squirrelly guy on the helicopter,” I warned my commander. “He’s some kind of spook or something. Wanted me to shoot anyone who tried to take his damned box from him.”
Captain Skinner did not reply. Perhaps this was because I referred to the other passengers diminutive status and it made him feel more self-conscious of his own. Maybe he knew something I didn’t. At any rate, he turned towards the helicopter, staring intently at the State Department man as he watched Major Burgos hop into the passenger cabin and then turned around, sat and pulled himself in.
I watched the international orange GDF bird lift into the starless night until its running lights disappeared in the low clouds. Then I strode up the hill to our aid station, hoping at least one of the guys was thoughtful enough to set up my cot and roll out my sleeping bag. They were. I never saw the man from the US Embassy again and I never learned what his name or function was.
Monday, November 20, 1978 had been one of the most bizarre days of my life, but the weirdness was just beginning. The next eight days would test the credulity and strain the sanity of many of the Americans performing this very strange and most unmilitary mission.
[1] Medical Amateur Radio Council, April Newsletter, Retrieved April 2004 from www.smbs.buffalo.edu / med/marco/index2/html.
[2] E-mail from Joseph Dieckman, Subject: FCCPT Document Attached, dated July 10, 2004.
[3] Joseph Dieckman, The FCC Investigation of Amateur Radio Usage of the Peoples Temple, Research Paper, 2004.
[4] Ibid.
[5] Ibid.
[6] Medical Amateur Radio Council, April Newsletter, 2004.
[7] Ibid.
[8] Note: Bill Otten told Josef Dieckman in a 2004 conversation that the year should have been 1978. Dieckman related this information to the author in a telephone conversation on June 26, 2004.
[9] Medical Amateur Radio Council, April Newsletter, 2004
[10] Ibid.
[11] Ibid.
[12] Ibid.
[13] Ibid.
[14] Ibid.
[15] FOIA, Federal Bureau of Investigation RYMUR (Jonestown), 176; John Peer Nugent, White Night, 144-147.
[16] FOIA, Ibid., 157, 260.
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