Hi folks ! Can you give me tips and advices on how to have an opening scene in miltary mortuaries during Vietnam war? I mean a very munitial descriptions of how the mortican handle the corpses in a miltary morgue . Thx
I've no specific experience related to Vietnam, but I'd expect treatment of bodies to depend on where they are being handled ... if its in the immediate aftermath of a fire fight, its just a case of bag em and tag em (that is stick them in a body bag and write a note of who it is on it) because the living casualties take priority. At the other end of the chain I'd expect them to be handled with a reasonable degree of deference and transferred to coffins for burial (with the weight made up with concrete blocks if the body is shall we say incomplete)... you aren't likely to see post mortems being carried out because its generally either painfully obvious or impossible to say how a soldier died. Its not likely that they have morticians trying to pretty the corpses up as is often done in civillian mortuaries because most military corpses will be buried closed casket ... not least because in Vietnam they'll have been several days in tropical heat before they made it to the freezers. This might also be helpful https://www.stripes.com/2.2035/for-those-who-prepared-vietnam-s-fallen-a-lasting-dread-1.309701 (for this kind of research google is your best tool - it took me less than a minute to find that)
I read the book by the North Vietnamese author Bao Ninh. After the war, 1976, he's the lorry driver's mate in an old Soviet lorry. They drive to battlefields, haul the rotting corpses into the back of the lorry. Then the exhausted driver sleeps in his cab, whilst the other guy/author is kicked out, slings a hammock over the corpses. He has difficulty sleeping. It's worth seeking out, a very disturbing book. He fought for ten years on the other side. By 1975, Seoul, every one of his comrades is killed, but he sees them all the time.
