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)
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