Hello?…is this thing on?….OK…. well I guess you want to know what I did in the war? They told me you was recording stuff about the war and wanted to know what I did. You ain’t gonna get a story about the shooters from me…I wasn’t one of those fancy-assed trigger pullers… I did my time in G,R&D. Graves, Registration, and Disposal.

You always hear the stories about the shooters, how they won the war by stacking zack up til he stopped coming. I think they even have a movie coming out about it.  I give um credit, they did do that but that ain’t the whole story, that’s for damn sure. About the time those pansy assed shooters was high fivin’ each other and heading to the rear for cold beer and hot showers our job was just starting. Them piles of corpses just wasn’t gonna disappear on their own. It wasn’t pretty but shifting them corpses is what we did.

I was a raker for my whole time in. Some of the older hands use to tell stories about how early on everyone did a little of everything but by the time I joined up they pretty much had a system in place. Rakers, Scoops, Dumpers, and those poor bastards working the fire pits.

Man, those fire pits were their own little slice of hell. Dig a trench twenty or so feet deep, line it with thermite and coal, and when the dumper trucks come along and dump the bodies you wet um down with JP8 or diesel or whatever you got to keep um cooking until they are nothing but ashes. You just keep digging the trench until the dumper trucks stop coming. I remember one guy told me that one trench outside of Topeka was over two and a half miles long. They say that most of the guys on the fire pit turn vegetarian…Ha… they can’t stand the smell of cooked meat … Ha, Ha! Well that’s just something I heard anyway.

When you’re a raker they give you a ten foot steel pole with a little pitchfork looking thing and a hook on the end. You use that to pull the piles apart. One corpse at a time. Then the guys from the scoops come and put them in the front end loaders. Scoops to the dumper trucks and dumpers to the fire pits …as simple as that. You just keep on going till there ain’t none left.

You gotta rake um out because the shooters don’t get um all. Sometimes zack will fall down and get buried. Then you come along, rake out the corpses, and up pops zack hungry as ever. That’s why you gotta work in two man teams. It’s all close in work and we used .22 carbines instead of the long rifles that the shooters got. When zack pops up you pin him with the rake if you can and let your buddy put um down. My last buddy was so quick I hardly ever had time to get um with the rake before he had a couple of rounds into zack’s head.

You only see a full up zack once in a while, sometimes you get the crawlers, you know, the ones that don’t have legs or the legs don’t work. One time we got four midgets right in a row, boing, boing, boing, boing. We laughed about that for a week. Zack midgets…Ha, Ha! Usually though it’s the kids we get. Not the older ones…the younger ones, six, seven year-olds. Sometimes we get them allot younger. They just get buried in the corpses until we rake them out. They pop up and let out that moan, but it ain’t the same as grown up zack. It’s …you know… higher pitched…like kids playing at being a monster…but these are the real deal. Kid or not they are still zack and you gotta put um down. And we did. We put down allot of kids. Zack kids, I mean. Allot of them.

I knew this one guy, he had been with us for a while, his buddy raked up three kids. His buddy said he just stood there with his carbine and let them come at him. They crawled all over him before his buddy could put um down. Course we had to put him down too but I remember he said that he just could not pull the trigger. He said he just couldn’t shoot any more kids. Funny thing was this guy never had any kids of his own … from before, you know. Maybe I could understand if he had kids of his own that …well…that didn’t make it, but this guy didn’t have any at all. He just stood there and let them get at him. I, uh … I don’t, uh … Well, that’s all I want to say about that.

We had some great parties in the G,R,&D. When we finally got finished the decon trucks would come and spray the area down with that sweet smelling stuff they said killed everything. That was the best smell in the world … that smell meant we could clean up our gear and head to the rear. They would lay on one hell of a feed for us. All the beer and whiskey you could drink and we would get hammered for a couple of days before we had to report back and get ready for another job.

We had a hell of a party when they cut us loose for good too. I don’t remember most of it so it must have been good. They sent us through all the shrinks when they demobed us but I only wanted to get out and get hammered. I remember the shrinks sayin’ that I might have some nightmares but that they will go away after a while. Ha … I never had nightmares even when I was in like some of the guys did. I guess I am just lucky.

I don’t much like to be around little ones though. I went to see my sister right after I got out … her and her kids. I couldn’t stand to be around them, the kids, I mean. I just had to get away from them. Pissed my sister off something fierce but I just could not stand to be around them. I don’t like being around any kids … you know, they just bother me. But I got a clean bill of health from the docs… so I’m OK. Not like the stories you hear about some of the guys. I’m doing OK…just fine That is all I got to say. You can turn that thing off…I’m done here.