August 6th, part six...
I wish I could say the rest of the trip was a blur.
It wasn’t.
It is a pristine stained glass of images.
The Tech Sergeant assigned to recover body parts who did so through tears because he’d changed his daughter’s flight from Seoul to the following day.
The near-riot that broke out when a group of mostly Buddhist family members showed up and wanted to walk through the wreckage to stand as close as possible to where the spirits of their beloved had left their bodies and were denied because NTSB investigators wouldn’t allow it.
The first commercial passenger plane that flew overhead.
The chaplains who accompanied the recovery crews trying to provide some sort of spiritual help for whoever needed it.
The EMT from the Southside of Chicago whose eyes glazed over when he told me about being part of the first team on-scene and admitted to crying that morning, just before he broke into tears again.
The emergency room doctor who’d treated ALL of the first wave of rescuees.
The smell.
The Air show that continued at Andersen that weekend, because it was scheduled ... and how shell-shocked a lot of the people who came to visit seemed. It was a weird juxtaposition of happy and sad.
Standing on a guardrail as recovery teams pushed wheelbarrows full of body parts up the hill for "marking" and "identification."
The phone calls back to home base that confused me, because the home team was "excited" about "what kind of footage we were getting."
Finally shutting down the operation because word on the street was that the NTSB was looking for all of the video footage of the incident scene, and not wanting to have to go through the war between government agencies over our footage.
Sitting in my hotel room at the Hatsuo Greens, which has since become some other named golf resort, and trying to keep my thoughts and the room from spinning.
Going to the strip club with Dan (he was against it, for the record) in hopes we’d put it all behind us.
Fighting to find a flight home, hoping to leave from Andersen ... having that hope dashed when a flight to Narita showed up empty at Won G. Pat International.
Literally sprinting the length of the airport to make the flight, while trying to compute how many uniform pieces I had to take off to not be considered technically "flying in an unauthorized uniform."
Having airline attendants call our names over the intercom to tell us that our plane was finished boarding, and was about to head out to the runway.
Barely making it, and being stunned to be confronted with the walk to our seats in the very back row ... and having to pass the roughly 300 people, sitting in seats just like the wrecked plane I’d been seeing in my waking hours and in my dreams over the past three days.
Seeing a pregnant woman in the middle section. I couldn’t tell how far along she was, but she stared by at me with a look of concern in her eyes. I’m not sure if it was how filthy I was, or the terrified stare I must have been giving her. Or maybe, she just didn’t like to fly.
Flashing between the present, and the disturbing videotape as I searched for my row.
Flying DIRECTLY over the fucking wreck as we flew to altitude.
Not being able to fight the urge to look at it.
Almost screaming when we hit the first patch of turbulence.
Wanting to kiss the ground when we landed.
Trying to start processing my thoughts on the three-hour ride back to base.
Getting there, and starting to immediately write the short piece to send to Network.
Calling my wife, and telling her I’d made it safely home.
Realizing I’d changed, somehow.
Not being able to figure it out.
Going home, not being able to sleep and getting out of bed to return to work.
Three days straight of producing the piece. Arguing about what would make the cut, and which soundbites were appropriate, which were not.
Being far too close to the story to be objective, for some reason.
Having to watch the video again ... frame by frame.
Finishing it, and realizing I was as tired as I’d ever been in my life–AND simultaneously becoming aware that I wasn’t sleepy at all.
Drinking Nyquil to make me drowsy, and spending three hours in the most terrifying nightmares I’d ever witnessed.
Getting a lot of positive feedback on the finished product.
Winning a couple of awards for it.
Not caring.
Fast forwarding ten years, and starting a blog.
Reaching the end of this story. And being strangely satisfied that the only thing left ... is to make its point.
20 February 2006
August 6, 1997 -- Part Five
There really is a point to this story.
I admit to a political point-of-view, and a specific reason for sharing how this event impacted me–aside from a cathartic chance to cleanse myself by putting the thoughts of my darkest days in writing, allowing anybody with an internet connection to see them and develop an opinion about who and what kind of person I am.
I’ll ask you to trust me just enough to believe that I’ll get to the point eventually, and in return I promise to make it there before I stop typing for good.
Early afternoon of August 7th found me in a production suite at Andersen Air Force Base. The objective was viewing on-scene footage of the first few minutes after the last of the rescues. It’s time I’d like to have back.
There’s this ... "moment" that most of us have in common. I ask you to visit it with me. It’s the moment after you board an airplane and you’re looking for your seat. I’m not a wealthy man, so I’ve very rarely been in the first few rows of a commercial flight; for that reason, I’ve had the opportunity to repeat this ritual repeatedly..
Shortly after my rows are called, and I cross the threshold of the machine and make the right turn that sends me down the middle aisle, I find myself scanning two things. You’ve probably done the same thing. First, I carefully try to unobtrusively find my row number. This requires a constant leaning in and squinting at the tiny numbers above the seats, but below the luggage racks bolted to the walls.
Secondly, I scan the faces.
I used to wonder what I’m looking for when I look at the people. I used to believe I was looking for the pretty women. That was probably true at one time. Now, I admit to looking for potential terrorists, and people who look like they might have a death-wish for some reason. Basically, I’m trying to get a feel for people I’m hoping I don’t have to sit beside.
The end result of that scan is almost a kaleidoscope of faces and images. There are usually men and women. Old and young. A wide variety of skin tones. A variety of colors. An interesting mix of clothing styles. A variation of sleepy, well-rested, and anxious expressions.
Videographers pay close attention to how vision works. Not in the way opticians and optometrists do; Doctors pay attention to the biology and physiology of the process. Video-shooters and editors pay attention to what you see first, and second, and third when you’re confronted with a new scene. It is the foundation for how film and video scenes are put together. The current hypothesis is that when you walk into a new environment, your eye takes a wide shot. You then zoom in to a region of the room, then a specific object. After this, you tend to scan from one item of interest to another. This pattern repeats until you either find an object that will hold your complete attention (like a person talking to you), or you start all over again in a different part of the environment.
(Where is this heading? This is disjointed and hard to follow.)
Have a bit of trust, would’ya?
After being introduced to the theory of videography, I started subconsciously testing it in my own responses and reactions to new environments. That’s when I first noticed the airplane thing...
...which brings me to a metal folding chair, sitting in front of an edit suite with the Senior Airman ... who was NOT my type of guy. He’d been up for about 35 hours too, except that when the crash was first reported, he’d immediately headed up to the scene. He arrived a few minutes after the first fire engine, and hitched a ride in an ambulance. He immediately started shooting...
...he popped in his tape #2, and said ... "check this out. It’s REALLY cool."
It was a videographer’s imitation of that scan I do every time I board a plane.
After climbing through a hole in the skeleton of the aircraft, in the dark ... he’d walked to the front right side of the plane. After the color bars, the first few seconds of the tape were pitch black. He switched the mounted light on. What followed was about 30 minutes of "the walk." From the front of the plane to the end of the first section. From the gaping hole between the first section to it’s conclusion.
I felt weird watching it.
The round light cast a peculiar glow on everything, sort of like an interrogator’s lamp. In the middle of the wide shots, there was a round circle of light where everything was the right color, outside the light ... everything was bluish-gray.
Most of the people were still belted in their seats ... even though some of the bolts attaching them to the floor had snapped, tilting some of them at odd angles.
They were all dead.
I’m no expert on these things, but it seemed like many of them never woke up. A few had their eyes closed, and I might’ve thought you could wake them up if a snapped your fingers loud enough right in their ears ... except for the charred clothes, and skin, and seatbacks.
One or two had apparently been WIDE AWAKE and realized PRECISELY what was happening. Faces frozen in terror, my impression is that their last moments had been exactly how I DON’T want to die.
First class got the worst of it. Most of it was just a mangled mass of metal. The fire had consumed virtually all of the cloth. My eye zoomed in on severed limbs and shoes full of feet and legs up to the knee jangled up in-between some of the charred metal rods and busted suitcases.
In a different environment, it might’ve been a horror movie. But there was no plot, and no music. Just blood, and gore.
I was sure the SrA wasn’t my kind of guy because he was stoked about it. I asked him why he was so excited, and his logic made a sick kind of sense.
"I didn’t cause their death, and its the most interesting thing I’ve ever shot."
Fair enough, but not my cup of tea.
There was a pregnant woman in the second section. I’ve no idea how far along she was ... but I couldn’t help wondering if her fetus had survived the initial impact.
The further you went back in the wreckage, the less actual "damage" had been done -- unless you count the fact that so many of the people were dead as part of your damage assessment.
Some of those images are still seared into my brain.
There were men and women. Old and young. A wide variety of skin tones. A variety of colors. An interesting mix of clothing styles. A variation of sleepy, well-rested, and anxious expressions.
I suffered through about six tapes worth of footage. Close ups and zooms, pans and rack focuses. A continuous stream of sights and sounds I wish I could simply erase.
But they’re all still here.
I’ve tried to drown them in scotch, soak them in beer, smoke them out with nicotine, eat them away, even work them out in the gym until I nearly passed out.
But they’re just as strong as ever.
Usually, my job as a journalist requires me to get as close to whatever is happening as possible. I’d thought in this situation that to board the wreckage was a good idea. I decided at that moment, in that room, where the line was for me. I wasn’t going to board the wreckage. I wasn’t going to even try.
It wasn’t a very professional decision, but in some ways it has probably saved my mind.
I met back up with Dan, and we headed back out to the scene.
There really is a point to this story.
I admit to a political point-of-view, and a specific reason for sharing how this event impacted me–aside from a cathartic chance to cleanse myself by putting the thoughts of my darkest days in writing, allowing anybody with an internet connection to see them and develop an opinion about who and what kind of person I am.
I believe there are three more parts to this story. The third is where I’ll make my point, and probably never mention this event again.
Thank you for your patience.
(Originally Posted 20 Feb 2006)
I admit to a political point-of-view, and a specific reason for sharing how this event impacted me–aside from a cathartic chance to cleanse myself by putting the thoughts of my darkest days in writing, allowing anybody with an internet connection to see them and develop an opinion about who and what kind of person I am.
I’ll ask you to trust me just enough to believe that I’ll get to the point eventually, and in return I promise to make it there before I stop typing for good.
Early afternoon of August 7th found me in a production suite at Andersen Air Force Base. The objective was viewing on-scene footage of the first few minutes after the last of the rescues. It’s time I’d like to have back.
There’s this ... "moment" that most of us have in common. I ask you to visit it with me. It’s the moment after you board an airplane and you’re looking for your seat. I’m not a wealthy man, so I’ve very rarely been in the first few rows of a commercial flight; for that reason, I’ve had the opportunity to repeat this ritual repeatedly..
Shortly after my rows are called, and I cross the threshold of the machine and make the right turn that sends me down the middle aisle, I find myself scanning two things. You’ve probably done the same thing. First, I carefully try to unobtrusively find my row number. This requires a constant leaning in and squinting at the tiny numbers above the seats, but below the luggage racks bolted to the walls.
Secondly, I scan the faces.
I used to wonder what I’m looking for when I look at the people. I used to believe I was looking for the pretty women. That was probably true at one time. Now, I admit to looking for potential terrorists, and people who look like they might have a death-wish for some reason. Basically, I’m trying to get a feel for people I’m hoping I don’t have to sit beside.
The end result of that scan is almost a kaleidoscope of faces and images. There are usually men and women. Old and young. A wide variety of skin tones. A variety of colors. An interesting mix of clothing styles. A variation of sleepy, well-rested, and anxious expressions.
Videographers pay close attention to how vision works. Not in the way opticians and optometrists do; Doctors pay attention to the biology and physiology of the process. Video-shooters and editors pay attention to what you see first, and second, and third when you’re confronted with a new scene. It is the foundation for how film and video scenes are put together. The current hypothesis is that when you walk into a new environment, your eye takes a wide shot. You then zoom in to a region of the room, then a specific object. After this, you tend to scan from one item of interest to another. This pattern repeats until you either find an object that will hold your complete attention (like a person talking to you), or you start all over again in a different part of the environment.
(Where is this heading? This is disjointed and hard to follow.)
Have a bit of trust, would’ya?
After being introduced to the theory of videography, I started subconsciously testing it in my own responses and reactions to new environments. That’s when I first noticed the airplane thing...
...which brings me to a metal folding chair, sitting in front of an edit suite with the Senior Airman ... who was NOT my type of guy. He’d been up for about 35 hours too, except that when the crash was first reported, he’d immediately headed up to the scene. He arrived a few minutes after the first fire engine, and hitched a ride in an ambulance. He immediately started shooting...
...he popped in his tape #2, and said ... "check this out. It’s REALLY cool."
It was a videographer’s imitation of that scan I do every time I board a plane.
After climbing through a hole in the skeleton of the aircraft, in the dark ... he’d walked to the front right side of the plane. After the color bars, the first few seconds of the tape were pitch black. He switched the mounted light on. What followed was about 30 minutes of "the walk." From the front of the plane to the end of the first section. From the gaping hole between the first section to it’s conclusion.
I felt weird watching it.
The round light cast a peculiar glow on everything, sort of like an interrogator’s lamp. In the middle of the wide shots, there was a round circle of light where everything was the right color, outside the light ... everything was bluish-gray.
Most of the people were still belted in their seats ... even though some of the bolts attaching them to the floor had snapped, tilting some of them at odd angles.
They were all dead.
I’m no expert on these things, but it seemed like many of them never woke up. A few had their eyes closed, and I might’ve thought you could wake them up if a snapped your fingers loud enough right in their ears ... except for the charred clothes, and skin, and seatbacks.
One or two had apparently been WIDE AWAKE and realized PRECISELY what was happening. Faces frozen in terror, my impression is that their last moments had been exactly how I DON’T want to die.
First class got the worst of it. Most of it was just a mangled mass of metal. The fire had consumed virtually all of the cloth. My eye zoomed in on severed limbs and shoes full of feet and legs up to the knee jangled up in-between some of the charred metal rods and busted suitcases.
In a different environment, it might’ve been a horror movie. But there was no plot, and no music. Just blood, and gore.
I was sure the SrA wasn’t my kind of guy because he was stoked about it. I asked him why he was so excited, and his logic made a sick kind of sense.
"I didn’t cause their death, and its the most interesting thing I’ve ever shot."
Fair enough, but not my cup of tea.
There was a pregnant woman in the second section. I’ve no idea how far along she was ... but I couldn’t help wondering if her fetus had survived the initial impact.
The further you went back in the wreckage, the less actual "damage" had been done -- unless you count the fact that so many of the people were dead as part of your damage assessment.
Some of those images are still seared into my brain.
There were men and women. Old and young. A wide variety of skin tones. A variety of colors. An interesting mix of clothing styles. A variation of sleepy, well-rested, and anxious expressions.
I suffered through about six tapes worth of footage. Close ups and zooms, pans and rack focuses. A continuous stream of sights and sounds I wish I could simply erase.
But they’re all still here.
I’ve tried to drown them in scotch, soak them in beer, smoke them out with nicotine, eat them away, even work them out in the gym until I nearly passed out.
But they’re just as strong as ever.
Usually, my job as a journalist requires me to get as close to whatever is happening as possible. I’d thought in this situation that to board the wreckage was a good idea. I decided at that moment, in that room, where the line was for me. I wasn’t going to board the wreckage. I wasn’t going to even try.
It wasn’t a very professional decision, but in some ways it has probably saved my mind.
I met back up with Dan, and we headed back out to the scene.
There really is a point to this story.
I admit to a political point-of-view, and a specific reason for sharing how this event impacted me–aside from a cathartic chance to cleanse myself by putting the thoughts of my darkest days in writing, allowing anybody with an internet connection to see them and develop an opinion about who and what kind of person I am.
I believe there are three more parts to this story. The third is where I’ll make my point, and probably never mention this event again.
Thank you for your patience.
(Originally Posted 20 Feb 2006)
17 February 2006
My Kind of Hip Hop
I miss it. And it's not even that old.
Story tellers...
and of course ... my first philosopher.
Peace,
--Stew.
01 February 2006
8/6/97 - Part IV
Death has a certain smell.
Not certain like a specific one of many.
Certain like deliberate, inevitable, assured in mind or action.
It is haunting the way particular songs are haunting. It is visceral and organic. You immediately know what the smell is, even the first time you smell it.
And it uncannily grips you on a level far more intense than any other odor.
The smell of death makes you understand what instinct is. When it passes your nostrils, your psyche screams. Some part of you tries to run from it, but your mind ... constantly processing ... blocks any actual movement. It understands; instinctively, ethereally, that the forces in play are bigger than everything that lives inside you. Bigger than your imagination, bigger than your emotion, and definitely bigger than your thought and knowledge combined.
There used to be a show about a Medical Examiner. It was called Quincy, M.D. Jack Klugman played the lead.
I bring it up because there’s a scene in the opening sequence where Quincy whips the cover off of a cadaver, and the other people in the room immediately faint. As a kid, I always thought the people passed out because of the level of decomposition of the body. I now know that it was actually the smell.
There is nothing like it. Anywhere.
Until that morning on Nimitz Hill, I’d never smelled death.
I’d seen it. I’ve watched a number of people die.
Even felt it, by kissing my grandmother in her casket.
But I’d never smelled it.
In our sanitary, disinfected culture ... we embalm the bodies of our fallen before they start to smell.
Our dead become mannequins. Human forms, devoid of humanity.
But ask a doctor, or a medical examiner, perhaps even an embalmer about that smell ... and I’ll bet you get more than you bargained for.
I was holding the camera on sticks, at the top of the Hill when the smell first hit me.
I’d been working on adrenalin and naivete for more than a day. On some level, I realized this was potentially a story that could make a name for me. That had been my angle, until the odor. My eyes closed.
It was still faint, but Guam is a hot, tropical place where heat and humidity are constant, even in the morning. And the whiff brought a promise of increasing strength.
I carried the gear over to the edge of the hill closest to the largest piece of the wreckage.
Dan had wandered behind me, and was kind enough to snap the photo that accompanies part two of this memoir. It was a surreal moment that I’ve never left, even now ... almost ten years later. The spirituality of the instant wasn’t clear to me at that point. Events later in the day brought that to bear. But the finality was hitting me at about the point Dan snapped the photo.
Before me, was a smoldering hull. It was completely recognizable, and markedly out of place.
It looked as foreign as a car in a tree.
Planes NEVER rest on grassy knolls.
Sometimes they sit on assembly lines. Other times they park in hangars, or idle on runways. They soar on drafts, and bounce onto carriers.
They fly overhead, flip at the air show, and sit at the end of the walkway you travel to board at the airport.
They don’t rest on grassy knolls. Ever.
Few people have ever even seen the right front side of an airplane up close. You board on the left, through the door. You watch the bottom as it flies overhead.
You’re familiar with the tail end. Typically, its where the airline paints its logo. But the "passenger side," as it were ... is, and should always be ... a mystery.
This plane was breaking all the rules.
It was smoking. It was in three or four pieces. There were no stairs. The landing gears weren’t positioned right. And it was full of passengers.
I tried to retreat to my armored position behind the lens ... but that slight scent swallowed my space. It entered my clothes, and I felt it in my skin.
I’m a professional.
I centered the sticks, focused the lens, and pushed the button with my right thumb. I shot.
I zoomed, and panned.
Rack-focused, and moved.
Repeated.
Repeated.
Repeated.
Repeated.
There were workers crawling around the wreckage.
I captured them on videotape.
I centered the sticks, focused the lens, and pushed the button with my right thumb. I shot.
I zoomed, and panned.
Racked focused, and moved.
I repeated.
Repeated.
Dan eventually tapped me on my shoulder.
He was probably stronger than me at the moment.
The flip side of the camera’s protective powers is that when they fail ... LIFE exists in the lens.
You've framed the subject, and focused it perfectly. It is trapped.
You can’t tear yourself away from it.
It is narrow, and sharp. You can see it with a crystal clarity that your vision typically never stops to pronounce.
It stamps a still photo on your mental rolodex that is crisper and brighter than what you see when you simply scan a scene with the naked eye.
Dan taps me again.
"Stew, I’ve set up some interviews."
We start to talk to the men who built the road, and lit the night. It is a turning point in their lives too, but they are afraid to admit it to us, because we’re "press" and they don’t want to be the subject of a "story."
They’re speaking "military-ease" to us. It’s a defense mechanism.
I speak it fluently, but never understood its true purpose.
I’ve seen cops do the same thing at the scene of a tragedy. It allows a language unfettered by emotion, and untouched by reality. It lets them describe what has happened, without telling you what’s going on.
It detaches them, and allows what they’re experiencing to be separate and distinct from what they’re feeling.
It comes out like "At approximately 0630, the driver of the red dodge lost control of his vehicle, leaving his lane and coming into contact with the blue toyota. All five passengers were medivac’d to St. Joe’s hospital where they are in critical, but stable condition" ... instead of "Jesus, man ... what sort of fucked up pain is this that I’m feeling? Could this have been me?"
It was about nine o-clock in the morning.
On the way back to the truck, we stopped to tape the wreckage from every possible angle. B-roll makes a news story. But already, my heart wasn’t in it.
We were walking across the hill, and I saw it.
The suitcase.
The single element that made everything snap back into reality.
It was lying on the ground. Smashed open.
It looked like the suitcase I’d packed the previous day.
Whoever owned it, was a real person.
The straps held the deodorant in place, along with a small can of shaving cream, and a photograph. The socks, boxer shorts, and jeans were still neatly folded, although a bit wrinkled and slightly askew underneath the elastic bands.
There was a photograph.
A Korean woman, probably a few years older than me, standing next to a man who obviously loved her–his arms were wrapped around her shoulders. Standing behind them, a younger man, probably about my age, with two fingers held up behind her head ... in the universal symbol of "she’s going to be soooo surprised when she sees this picture."
I have no idea if she ever saw it, but I was surprised when I saw the picture.
There were some trees, and a rock in the photo. But I was stunned. THIS man, in THIS photograph ... was now, probably dead.
I couldn’t bring myself to push the record button.
I wasn’t a professional at that moment.
I cried.
I have very, very rarely used a suitcase from that day, to this. They still kinda ... spook me. I'm bothered by the way the clothes look, folded underneath the elastic bands. It's a silly little Stew thing that maybe one day I'll grow out of. But not today.
I travel with a duffel bag. Its no safer, but it reminds me of going to the gym, or deploying for a training exercise.
I half walked, half stumbled away.
The hill was virtually empty. Except for the innards of the plane.
I never expected them.
The coffee cans, and Bibles.
The shoes, pillows, and blue blankets.
The current magazines.
The laundered and pressed shirts.
The twisted pieces of metal.
There was a paper cup, with a lipstick mark. How the hell did IT survive?
The baby bottle, the hairbrush.
Dan has also noticed. I don’t know what caught his eye, but we both wandered up the other side of the hill to the waiting vehicle.
We didn’t talk about what we were seeing, only about our next step.
Our assignment was a news story. Enough video for three minutes of produced airtime.
"Let’s head back. We have enough."
The tech sergeant was waiting for us.
The car was quiet for the entire ride.
The sun was still coming up behind us.
I called the home office.
"Scott? Stew. We’ve got enough for a story."
"Yes, its as bad as the commercial stations are showing, and worse."
"They want what?"
"30 minutes worth?"
"Yeah, we have interviews."
"I guess we can get more footage."
"Umm....ok."
"Scott. There’s a terrible smell."
"No, this is my first."
"Are you sure?"
"Yes. We can do it."
"OK. Will do. I’ll call back later this afternoon."
"Yes, we’ll be ok."
I turned to Dan.
"They want a 30 minute special."
When you watch the news, you see 1:30 - 3:00 edited video clips. In those pre-digital days, it took about an hour to put a one minute piece together. It also took about 15 minutes of raw tape.
The average :15 second soundbite comes from a three minute interview. Longer soundbites require longer interviews. A 30 minute special takes about ten 30-minute tapes. We had exactly 3/4's of one tape worth of footage.
I would have been perfectly ok with me to end this adventure right there. I could take my 25 minutes of footage, head back to Tokyo, and never come back to Guam. But that wasn’t in the cards for me. I was hungry, tired, emotionally overwhelmed.
I suddenly needed to kiss my wife and tell my mother I loved her.
I wanted a beer, and a shot of whiskey.
I’d had enough for one day.
The Tech Sergeant came in the room with a slip of paper in his hands.
"Stew, you have a telephone message from our video shop. They have some video of the actual rescue they want to know if you can use it. Give them a call, you can go over and take a look this morning."
I’m too young for this...
( 1 Feb 06)
Not certain like a specific one of many.
Certain like deliberate, inevitable, assured in mind or action.
It is haunting the way particular songs are haunting. It is visceral and organic. You immediately know what the smell is, even the first time you smell it.
And it uncannily grips you on a level far more intense than any other odor.
The smell of death makes you understand what instinct is. When it passes your nostrils, your psyche screams. Some part of you tries to run from it, but your mind ... constantly processing ... blocks any actual movement. It understands; instinctively, ethereally, that the forces in play are bigger than everything that lives inside you. Bigger than your imagination, bigger than your emotion, and definitely bigger than your thought and knowledge combined.
There used to be a show about a Medical Examiner. It was called Quincy, M.D. Jack Klugman played the lead.
I bring it up because there’s a scene in the opening sequence where Quincy whips the cover off of a cadaver, and the other people in the room immediately faint. As a kid, I always thought the people passed out because of the level of decomposition of the body. I now know that it was actually the smell.
There is nothing like it. Anywhere.
Until that morning on Nimitz Hill, I’d never smelled death.
I’d seen it. I’ve watched a number of people die.
Even felt it, by kissing my grandmother in her casket.
But I’d never smelled it.
In our sanitary, disinfected culture ... we embalm the bodies of our fallen before they start to smell.
Our dead become mannequins. Human forms, devoid of humanity.
But ask a doctor, or a medical examiner, perhaps even an embalmer about that smell ... and I’ll bet you get more than you bargained for.
I was holding the camera on sticks, at the top of the Hill when the smell first hit me.
I’d been working on adrenalin and naivete for more than a day. On some level, I realized this was potentially a story that could make a name for me. That had been my angle, until the odor. My eyes closed.
It was still faint, but Guam is a hot, tropical place where heat and humidity are constant, even in the morning. And the whiff brought a promise of increasing strength.
I carried the gear over to the edge of the hill closest to the largest piece of the wreckage.
Dan had wandered behind me, and was kind enough to snap the photo that accompanies part two of this memoir. It was a surreal moment that I’ve never left, even now ... almost ten years later. The spirituality of the instant wasn’t clear to me at that point. Events later in the day brought that to bear. But the finality was hitting me at about the point Dan snapped the photo.
Before me, was a smoldering hull. It was completely recognizable, and markedly out of place.
It looked as foreign as a car in a tree.
Planes NEVER rest on grassy knolls.
Sometimes they sit on assembly lines. Other times they park in hangars, or idle on runways. They soar on drafts, and bounce onto carriers.
They fly overhead, flip at the air show, and sit at the end of the walkway you travel to board at the airport.
They don’t rest on grassy knolls. Ever.
Few people have ever even seen the right front side of an airplane up close. You board on the left, through the door. You watch the bottom as it flies overhead.
You’re familiar with the tail end. Typically, its where the airline paints its logo. But the "passenger side," as it were ... is, and should always be ... a mystery.
This plane was breaking all the rules.
It was smoking. It was in three or four pieces. There were no stairs. The landing gears weren’t positioned right. And it was full of passengers.
I tried to retreat to my armored position behind the lens ... but that slight scent swallowed my space. It entered my clothes, and I felt it in my skin.
I’m a professional.
I centered the sticks, focused the lens, and pushed the button with my right thumb. I shot.
I zoomed, and panned.
Rack-focused, and moved.
Repeated.
Repeated.
Repeated.
Repeated.
There were workers crawling around the wreckage.
I captured them on videotape.
I centered the sticks, focused the lens, and pushed the button with my right thumb. I shot.
I zoomed, and panned.
Racked focused, and moved.
I repeated.
Repeated.
Dan eventually tapped me on my shoulder.
He was probably stronger than me at the moment.
The flip side of the camera’s protective powers is that when they fail ... LIFE exists in the lens.
You've framed the subject, and focused it perfectly. It is trapped.
You can’t tear yourself away from it.
It is narrow, and sharp. You can see it with a crystal clarity that your vision typically never stops to pronounce.
It stamps a still photo on your mental rolodex that is crisper and brighter than what you see when you simply scan a scene with the naked eye.
Dan taps me again.
"Stew, I’ve set up some interviews."
We start to talk to the men who built the road, and lit the night. It is a turning point in their lives too, but they are afraid to admit it to us, because we’re "press" and they don’t want to be the subject of a "story."
They’re speaking "military-ease" to us. It’s a defense mechanism.
I speak it fluently, but never understood its true purpose.
I’ve seen cops do the same thing at the scene of a tragedy. It allows a language unfettered by emotion, and untouched by reality. It lets them describe what has happened, without telling you what’s going on.
It detaches them, and allows what they’re experiencing to be separate and distinct from what they’re feeling.
It comes out like "At approximately 0630, the driver of the red dodge lost control of his vehicle, leaving his lane and coming into contact with the blue toyota. All five passengers were medivac’d to St. Joe’s hospital where they are in critical, but stable condition" ... instead of "Jesus, man ... what sort of fucked up pain is this that I’m feeling? Could this have been me?"
It was about nine o-clock in the morning.
On the way back to the truck, we stopped to tape the wreckage from every possible angle. B-roll makes a news story. But already, my heart wasn’t in it.
We were walking across the hill, and I saw it.
The suitcase.
The single element that made everything snap back into reality.
It was lying on the ground. Smashed open.
It looked like the suitcase I’d packed the previous day.
Whoever owned it, was a real person.
The straps held the deodorant in place, along with a small can of shaving cream, and a photograph. The socks, boxer shorts, and jeans were still neatly folded, although a bit wrinkled and slightly askew underneath the elastic bands.
There was a photograph.
A Korean woman, probably a few years older than me, standing next to a man who obviously loved her–his arms were wrapped around her shoulders. Standing behind them, a younger man, probably about my age, with two fingers held up behind her head ... in the universal symbol of "she’s going to be soooo surprised when she sees this picture."
I have no idea if she ever saw it, but I was surprised when I saw the picture.
There were some trees, and a rock in the photo. But I was stunned. THIS man, in THIS photograph ... was now, probably dead.
I couldn’t bring myself to push the record button.
I wasn’t a professional at that moment.
I cried.
I have very, very rarely used a suitcase from that day, to this. They still kinda ... spook me. I'm bothered by the way the clothes look, folded underneath the elastic bands. It's a silly little Stew thing that maybe one day I'll grow out of. But not today.
I travel with a duffel bag. Its no safer, but it reminds me of going to the gym, or deploying for a training exercise.
I half walked, half stumbled away.
The hill was virtually empty. Except for the innards of the plane.
I never expected them.
The coffee cans, and Bibles.
The shoes, pillows, and blue blankets.
The current magazines.
The laundered and pressed shirts.
The twisted pieces of metal.
There was a paper cup, with a lipstick mark. How the hell did IT survive?
The baby bottle, the hairbrush.
Dan has also noticed. I don’t know what caught his eye, but we both wandered up the other side of the hill to the waiting vehicle.
We didn’t talk about what we were seeing, only about our next step.
Our assignment was a news story. Enough video for three minutes of produced airtime.
"Let’s head back. We have enough."
The tech sergeant was waiting for us.
The car was quiet for the entire ride.
The sun was still coming up behind us.
I called the home office.
"Scott? Stew. We’ve got enough for a story."
"Yes, its as bad as the commercial stations are showing, and worse."
"They want what?"
"30 minutes worth?"
"Yeah, we have interviews."
"I guess we can get more footage."
"Umm....ok."
"Scott. There’s a terrible smell."
"No, this is my first."
"Are you sure?"
"Yes. We can do it."
"OK. Will do. I’ll call back later this afternoon."
"Yes, we’ll be ok."
I turned to Dan.
"They want a 30 minute special."
When you watch the news, you see 1:30 - 3:00 edited video clips. In those pre-digital days, it took about an hour to put a one minute piece together. It also took about 15 minutes of raw tape.
The average :15 second soundbite comes from a three minute interview. Longer soundbites require longer interviews. A 30 minute special takes about ten 30-minute tapes. We had exactly 3/4's of one tape worth of footage.
I would have been perfectly ok with me to end this adventure right there. I could take my 25 minutes of footage, head back to Tokyo, and never come back to Guam. But that wasn’t in the cards for me. I was hungry, tired, emotionally overwhelmed.
I suddenly needed to kiss my wife and tell my mother I loved her.
I wanted a beer, and a shot of whiskey.
I’d had enough for one day.
The Tech Sergeant came in the room with a slip of paper in his hands.
"Stew, you have a telephone message from our video shop. They have some video of the actual rescue they want to know if you can use it. Give them a call, you can go over and take a look this morning."
I’m too young for this...
( 1 Feb 06)
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