When I served as the commander of the 305th Supply and Services Company in the 227th Maintenance Battalion At Yongsan, Seoul, Korea, there was never a dull moment. How could there be? I commanded 425 soldiers and civilians spread out across nine installations that covered a lot of territory in the combat zone in Korea. I spent a lot of time on the road visiting my soldiers and civilians at remote installations. However, I also spent a lot of time at my company headquarters where I had a large contingent of soldiers and civilians to deal with, as well as some important company operations such as my mess hall and my mortuary. My mortuary received a lot of visibility from the command because it served the entire Pacific Rim. The mortuary served the entire Pacific Rim because the next nearest facility was located in Honolulu, Hawaii. Occasionally, we received missions that came down through Eighth Army channels from the United States Embassy in Seoul, Korea. One particular morning, well actually it was closer to noon, I was headed toward my mess facility. I decided to swing by my mortuary to see what was going on. As soon as I walked through the front door, I knew that walking into the mortuary had been a very bad idea. Did I say bad idea? Oh no. It was more like a very rotten lousy stinking idea. I about gagged from the stench that permeated the air. My NCOIC, Staff Sergeant Jones, came out from the embalming room wearing a gas mask and immediately motioned for me to walk outside. When we got outside, he took off the gas mask and asked if I could get some portable tanks of oxygen and oxygen masks for them to use to breathe. I asked him why he needed the masks, as if I didn’t already know. The nasty odor in the air kind of gave it away. But I wanted him to answer the question. Staff Sergeant Jones started to tell me a little story, “Well, you see, Sir.” “Actually, I really don’t see,” I replied. “Please describe to me in vivid detail so that I may envision what you want to portray to me.” “Like I was saying sir, we received a phone call from Eighth Army Civil Affairs telling us that they had orders come down from the US Embassy. The orders from the US Embassy directed us to go to the diplomatic mission for the government of Morocco. One of their diplomats was found dead in his office. Except when we got there, the diplomat wasn’t in his office. He was in his residential suite. And it appeared that he had been dead for several days.” “What do you mean, it appeared that he had been dead for several days?” “Do I have to, Sir? Explain it, I mean.” “Well, you can either do that or you can show me. But one way or the other, I have to know because the Battalion Commander has to know. How in the hell do you expect me to explain this to him?” “But Sir, you smelled the smell. If I open the chiller box that the body is in so you can see it, the mortuary will stink to high heaven. Not even skunk smell will get rid of that shit. That right there is some real bad shit.” “Well then, I suggest you put on your talking boots and start describing in vivid detail just exactly how in the hell we got stuck with that stinking stack of shit that’s sitting in my mortuary.” “Well, Sir, that body had to ‘av been dead for at least a week or so. And it had been rotting in the hot ass weather. The story we got from the people over there was that the guy had probably hired a business woman to stay with him one evening, and he probably died sometime during the night of a heart attack. The business woman probably got scared and ran off without telling anybody. Nobody else knew about the body, so they didn’t check up on him until they started noticing the really bad smell.” “You mean to tell me that a diplomat doesn’t show up for work for a few days and nobody questions it? That seems rather stupid. And it’s not until they notice a really bad smell and say, gee, I wonder what the hell that really bad smell is from. Maybe they thought the cat died, or there was a dead rat under the floor. That could be possible, right? Come on.” “Sir, it gets better.” “There is no goddamn way that this story can get better. But please tell me, how in the hell does it get better?” “Our meat wagon smells exactly the same as the inside of the mortuary, only worse. We’ll have to condemn the meat wagon, one transfer case, and one chiller unit.” “That means we will have to do a report of survey, so that we can write the property off of our property books. Oh shit, the Battalion Commander is going to love this. The only way to sell this story is to bring him down here and let him smell for himself.” “Sir, you wouldn’t.” “Oh, but I would, and I will.” That afternoon, I went down to Battalion headquarters and asked my Battalion Commander to take a walk with me to my mortuary. When we arrived at my mortuary, I allowed him to enter first. He gagged so hard that I thought that he was going to lose his lunch. His face turned ashen as I led him out the door by the arm. Then I explained what had happened and what our course of action needed to be. I explained what actions we needed to take for remediation. I just needed his approval. Within a minute, I had it. Eighth Army Civil Affairs talked with the US Embassy and notified them that the only course of action for disposal of the body was cremation. We would need approval from the Moroccan government to proceed. The Moroccan ambassador asked why, and we responded that the body had decomposed beyond any other means of burial preparation such as embalming. In other words, the body had decayed to such an advanced state that we couldn’t do anything other than cremate. That putrid diplomat had caused my mortuary to go through one helluva exercise in futility when we condemned one chiller unit, one transfer case, and our meat wagon.
by 
by 