There were two times that I remember, Junior Mason and did the removal of the KIA in April 68, but the one that affected me the most was in August of 1968, August 16th according to Donnie Mixon, he also remembered loading the dead who had been drug down the hill and kept as bait for 11 days. Donnie said that the pilot refused to take six at a time, I told him that he was right, because I wasn't going to make four trips to Dak To with the 22 bodies that had been dead in the Vietnam heat for eleven days. I didn't count the bodies, Donnie told me that there were 22 and I took them all in one load. There were no body bags, only poncho's and poncho liners on the bodies.

Larry, Rex Hunter and I took the aircraft to the west end of Dak To (the old base) and landed in the river, shut down and then proceeded to strip out all of the sound proofing and we flushed the aircraft for what seemed like hours. When we returned to Holloway Larry and Rex took their seats and all of their equipment out of the aircraft and we flushed and scrubbed everything to get the smell out of the aircraft. I know that I scrubbed the cracks and the tie-down points and rings in the floor with some very powerful cleansers. The smell stayed with us for weeks.

Dave