My friend Alex went to Vietnam a year before I did. I didn't see him again until we were both back in the States. Alex had changed. Alex used to be a fun guy before the army. He was an athlete in high school and had no trouble meeting girls. He always had the prettiest and most popular girls in school on his arm for the football games and dances.

Now he was strange. The only place I would ever run into Alex after the war was in a crummy beer joint downtown. Alex sat there smoking cigarettes and drinking beer. I felt bad for Alex and I tried to help him. Eventually he told me his job in Vietnam. He never made it to the infantry. Never saw a day of combat. But Alex got re-assigned almost from the moment he landed. He went to the Quartermaster detachment at Tan Son Nhut A.F.B. near Saigon. He was assigned to the unit called "Graves Registration."

He worked with the embalmers. Alex told me it was his job to sign in the fatal casualties in body bags that came down from up country. Wearing a filtered mask, he would unzip the bags on a stainless steel table. He used a high-pressure water hose to initially clean off the remains before tagging them, filling out the paperwork and moving them into the freezer. Many times, the thing inside the bag was already in a state of decomposition. He saw things that even a big city coroner probably wouldn't see in his whole career.

Alex told me about the things that bothered him most. Like unzipping a bag to find a young man he thought he knew. It was almost impossible of course. He didn't really know all that many other soldiers. But the way he described it, he began to dread opening the bags, not so much because of the putrefied, ghastly remains he was likely to find (I'll spare you the details) but he said he was afraid that he would see someone he knew, someone from back home. He said that sometimes he had the feeling that it was either his mother or father in the bag.

He would finish his shift at the morgue and go back to his billet, we called them a hootch in those days. He'd go back to his hootch and light up a spliff. After a while, he found a source for heroin. Alex became a junkie.

When Alex came home, he was fucked up. He went to the Veterans Administration hospital and asked for help. When they found out he was a smackhead, they threw him out of the psych program. He eventually got clean and came back.

Then the P-docs put him through a battery of tests and asked him a bunch of questions about his childhood. He trusted them. He told them all kinds of stuff about a bad childhood. He didn't think it mattered. It did.

He put in for a PTSD disability. Six months later the paper came back, "Non-Service Connected" due to pre-existing psychological trauma from childhood. Alex didn't trust the VA anymore after that.

Alex finally got his life back together for a while. Oddly enough, he became a small-town cop. He got married. I lost track of Alex for a few years after that.

But one day I picked up the paper and there was a story inside about Alex. He came home from work one afternoon while his wife was away and he blew his brains all over their bedroom wall with his Smith & Wesson .38 revolver.

So you see, Alex didn't have a claim, according to the VA because 1) he was a drug addict and 2) he was fucked up before he went in and 3) he never saw combat in Vietnam.

Their hands are clean, and they didn't have to pay him a dime.