Gary Redlinski and his friend Glen Fruendt

Gary Redlinski and his friend Glen Fruendt

Interview transcript

GR: You’d look for body marks, scars, tattoos. It does get to be a strain on you after a while and some guys couldn’t handle it.

GF: You know, the Graves Registration is the only part of the service that, if you don’t want to be in it, you don’t have to be…

GR: You can get out of it, yeah.

GF: They can’t keep you in it.

GR: The mortuary part, they always consider it to be demoralizing to the troops that are out in the field fighting. So, they kind of just, keep us hidden. About five years ago, I remember meeting a guy, he was an infantryman. And when I told him I worked at the mortuary down in Tan Son Nhut near Saigon, he said, “We never knew you guys existed.” They thought, whoever died, they sent them right back to the states.

You know, I have problems a lot, I can see the things that happened to me in Vietnam. They just come back, clear as…clear as it was yesterday. And, I always felt, oh I got out of Vietnam, didn’t have a scratch, didn’t get wounded at all, and then all that hit. I did go to some counseling, and I was talking to one of the psychiatrists, and he says, “Do you have nightmares?” I said, no, but I have daymares. The things guys dream about at night, I think about 24-hours a day, and it’s there while I’m awake.

GF: What would you like people to know about the work you did, Gary?

GR: Probably the fact that I was there to help their son get back home. It didn’t matter that people didn’t know we were there, we were there to do our job.

GF: And our job was to take care of the soldiers that came in from the field and to treat them as if they were family.