“It changed me forever.”

Jerald Collman, who served in Vietnam, remembers receiving the bodies of fallen soldiers as an Army Graves Registration collection point officer.

Listen to

Recorded in St. Louis, MO

Credits

Transcript

Click here to read the transcript for this story.

Interview transcript

JC: My first day on the job was seven bodies that we got in that were messed up bad. The next day, more bodies. We had some eleven, twelve hundred Americans that went through in my time frame, and so many of them I knew. When you would see a name, and then you would see who was there, it was very tough.

I’d go into the refrigeration unit, I'd go in there, nobody could hear me. I'd scream as loud as I could, and nobody knew.

I'm proud that I didn't commit suicide. That's, that’s all I can say, I would have liked to have never had the experience.

It changed me forever.