No Ordinary Soldier

David E. Kelly, Jr. was 14 years old when he saw his first dead body.

He was an assistant at Clarke's Funeral Home in Seward, Pa., and not as scared as he thought he'd be.

Five years later, he was in Vietnam, ushering into a body bag a young Vietnamese girl with hair like black silk.

A childhood ambition to become a funeral director led Kelly to the Army's Graves Registration (GR) and the battlefields of Vietnam.

As a Memorial Activities Specialist, Kelly played a pivotal, though routinely overlooked, role in the Vietnam War.

He risked his own life to retrieve the bodies of fallen soldiers, and earned a Purple Heart.

Only 19 years old at the time of his service, Kelly bore a tremendous burden. As other soldiers left the GR for other assignments, he remained committed to his mission.

He catalogued his comrades' personal effects, processed their paperwork and helped them on their journeys home.

A Calling

Kelly was 12 years old, and on his way to the playground, when destiny called.

Funeral director and family friend Cliff Clarke spotted Kelly strolling by the funeral home and asked if he would cut the grass for a few dollars.

Kelly agreed, and began checking in daily with Clarke, who always had some odd job for him to perform.

He washed cars, vacuumed the funeral home carpet and kept the small yard trimmed with a push-mower.

At 14, he accompanied Clarke into the embalming chamber to wash the remains of one of Seward's elderly residents.

He regarded the remains with a professional detachment, and soon began pondering his future.

Like most Seward men, Kelly's options were limited. When he graduated, he could go to work at the nearby Bethlehem Steel factory, or he could enter the coalmines.

The men in Kelly's family were typical Seward sons - ironworkers, electricians, boilermakers.

But Kelly opted for a different path, favoring the sterile embalming room to the dank coalmine and soulless factory.

Shortly after his high school graduation, Kelly met a U.S. Army recruiter who told him that a Memorial Activities Specialist was the military's version of a funeral director.

As the Vietnam War raged overseas, Kelly signed up for a three-year hitch.

In the Army Now

In April 1967, Kelly arrived at Fort Lee, Va., where he underwent eight weeks of Memorial Activities Specialist training.

He learned all the tools of the trade - skeletal remains; dental charting; fingerprinting; anatomical charts; cemetery, search and recovery, collection point and mortuary operations; map reading and personal effects.

After his training, Kelly was wrongly assigned as a battalion field service NCO, a job for which he was unqualified.

He knew nothing about bakery, laundry and bath operations, and so wiled away his time at the barracks.

"I didn't do anything," recalled Kelly. "At first, I just cleaned the barracks every morning, which took me about an hour, and then I read books."

After four or five months of idleness, Kelly was on a boat to Vietnam. In departing, he passed his older brother, Michael, who was returning home from Vietnam after one year in the infantry.

Upon arrival, Kelly stayed with his unit for three days before being reassigned, soon after his 19^th birthday, to a GR unit in Qui-Nhon, South Vietnam.

Initiation

Qui-Nhon was one of several central collection points scattered throughout Vietnam.

Dead soldiers arrived in human remains pouches, commonly called body bags, from two field collection points and a nearby Army hospital.

Around 30 soldiers from varied backgrounds staffed the Qui-Nhon collection point.

Some were funeral directors with college degrees, three or four were teachers, and many had wives and children.

Most were draftees, who just wanted to serve their two years sand return home.

Sgt. Sam Wines oversaw the operation, and Kelly liked him instantly.

In the mornings, he awakened his troops not by yelling and shaking their bunks, but with a calm greeting.

Kelly regarded him as a kind leader who possessed a way with words. He addressed his troops by the pet name "Shit Maggot."

Behind his back, the soldiers called Wines "Papa Maggot."

Shortly after his arrival, Kelly was joined on his way to the mess hall by Sgt. Eddie Mitchell, who had one question:

"Are you scared of remains?"

Kelly answered no, and Mitchell elaborated.

"Tomorrow morning, they're going to lock you in the cooler with whatever remains are in there. Most people will start banging on the door. The longer you do that, the longer they're going to keep you in there."

As Mitchell predicted, Kelly was asked the next morning to enter one of four walk-in refrigerators, known by the slang term "refers."

One of the refers was used to store food, and the remaining three, with temperatures set between 38-42 degrees Fahrenheit, accommodated 20-24 human remains pouches.

 Kelly did as ordered, took a seat inside the refer and kept his eyes on a dozen filled body bags.

It was not a pleasant wait, but he knew not to make a fuss.

After 10 minutes, a soldier opened the door and set free an initiated Kelly.

A Young Girl

In his first recovery mission inside Vietnam, Kelly accompanied a Puerto Rican named Vargas to the Army hospital to retrieve the body of a seven or eight-year-old Vietnamese girl.

They found the girl lying on the morgue floor, with tubes still attached. The doctors had tried to save her life, but were unsuccessful.

Vargas, a draftee who didn't believe the U.S. should draft Puerto Ricans, told Kelly to throw her in a body bag.

Moved by the sight of the girl, Kelly began removing her tubes and asked a nurse for a sheet.

When he lifted her from the floor, he noted her slight weight and soft hair.

"She didn't weigh nothing but 20 or 30 pounds at the most. I could pick her up with one hand," remembered Kelly.

"She had beautiful black hair, it was just like silk. I'd pick her up and it would get across my arm."

Back at the collection point, Kelly reviewed her death certificate, which listed her as an "unknown Vietnamese female."

The certificate noted the province where she lived, but contained no information about her parents.

The next day, Kelly and Vargas carried her to a structure that housed the bodies of Vietnamese civilians.

On the cement floor were piled a sea of bodies, covered in black and green flies.

Vargas issued an order: "Take her out of the body bag, we're taking the body bag back."

Though Vargas outranked him, Kelly lodged a protest - "I told him, ‘We can't do that. Let her have the body bag.'"

After some back-and-forth, Vargas relented, and Kelly placed the girl's bag beside the other bodies.

He never knew what happened to her - whether she was disposed of, or returned to her parents.

In his hometown funeral home, Kelly had seen hundreds of bodies. Most were elderly, with the occasional car accident victim or still-born baby.

But the experience with the young Vietnamese girl had left him shaken.

"The first body you see is a little girl, you're not expecting a little girl," said Kelly. "You think you're going to war and see dead people, you think of GIs. You don't think about civilians getting killed."

The Dead Beat

At Qui-Nhon, Kelly and his fellow soldiers rechecked paperwork drafted in battlefield collection points.

Bodies arrived in human remains pouches, accompanied by a convoy list of remains, which detailed the soldiers' names and the items - or personal effects - they carried with them.

At the earlier field collection points, Memorial Activities Specialists identified soldiers by several methods.

They reviewed their identification - or "dog"- tags, Armed Forces identification cards, and asked someone from their units to make a physical identification.

Sometimes they made tentative identifications based on fellow soldiers' word and a process of elimination.

These remains were labeled "BTB," or Believe to Be.

Those they could not identify, they assigned a number.

At central collection points such as Qui-Nhon, Memorial Activities Specialists requested medical records from BTB soldiers' units.

They reprocessed remains, re-inventoried personal effects and did additional paperwork before shipping remains to one of two mortuaries in Saigon and Da Nang, where final identifications were made and bodies, embalmed.

From the mortuaries, remains were shipped by air to U.S. port of entry mortuaries in Oakland, Calif. or Dover, Del., depending on where the soldier resided.

Those who lived east of the Mississippi River were taken to Dover; those who lived to the west, to Oakland.

Following reprocessing, which included the application of cosmetics, dressing and casketing, remains were forwarded to the place designated by a family representative.

The whole system took a matter of days-a much quicker turn-around rate than in previous wars, when family members waited months or years before being reunited with their loved ones.

In Vietnam, Kelly would work in every phase of the GR operation - in the field, at a central collection point and in the Da Nang mortuary.

At Qui-Nhon

Kelly entered the Army's Grave Registration because he wanted a nice, clean place to work, and he found Qui-Nhon to be more or less what he envisioned.

He slept in a long barracks, framed outside in wood, and stayed cool with the help of Army-issued fans.

The barracks were divided into two parts, with the U.S. soldiers sharing quarters with their Korean GR counterparts.

The Republic of Korea sent three divisions of troops to Vietnam over a 12-year period to aid the U.S. in its fight against communist North Vietnam.

The fighting forces of the "White Horse," "Blue Dragon," and "Tiger" divisions totaled over 300,000.

The Korean and U.S. GR men helped one another at Qui-Nhon, communicating via one Korean sergeant who spoke English.

The Korean soldiers cremated all of their remains in a crematory located in a nearby valley. The cremains were placed in urns and shipped back to Korea through Cam Rahn Bay.

The U.S. soldiers processed anywhere from one to 18 bodies a day at Qui-Nhon, with an average of six to eight bodies daily.

Kelly was struck by his similarity to his fallen comrades, most of whom were not much older than 20.

"I thought I'd seen it all at the local funeral home, but remains in a war are so much different. All the people getting killed were young," he recalled.

When re-inventorying personal effects, Kelly handled the soldiers' most personal mementoes - religious crosses and medals, photos of wives and babies, letters from family members.

He removed their wedding rings, their marijuana stashes and the weapons they brought from home - the 25 caliber pistols and 2-shot derringers.

Some of the objects, he has never forgotten, like a soldier's letter from his wife with a haunting photograph attached.

"It was the first picture of the baby, and here he was dead, 18 or 19 years old-my age-and he's got a baby and never going to see it," said Kelly.

He removed anything that would embarrass families, like photographs of soldiers in compromising positions, and boxed the personal effects for transport to a personal effects depot at Camp Redball, from which they were mailed back to the soldiers' families.

Occasionally, Kelly received a vacation from the war zone.

In escorting remains to the Saigon mortuary, he got to stay in a nice hotel, watch Bob Hope and Michael Landon at United Service Organizations (USO) shows, and call his family from a regular telephone line.

It was not until later, when he became a parent, that Kelly realized what impact his, and brother, Michael's, Vietnam service had on their family.

"I didn't realize how hard it was on my mother, every day wondering whether one of her sons was killed or not. When you're 19, you don't think about that."

Sgt. "Junior"

In June of 1967, Kelly was summoned to a meeting by Sgt. Wines and a lieutenant who dangled sergeant stripes in front of his face.

The lieutenant asked Kelly to take control of the collection point at Landing Zone English in Bong Song.

The assignment meant a promotion - Kelly would be the Non-Commissioned Officer in Charge (NCOIC) of the collection point, or in Army slang, a "John Wayne sergeant."

"They called them John Wayne sergeants because you didn't get paid for it," explained Kelly. "The only thing you had was the privilege of being a non-commissioned officer."

Kelly weighed the offer. He had recently been promoted to E-4, and knew it would be a while before he became an E-5.

He also knew that the Bong Song soldiers who currently outranked him would resent having to take orders from a 19-year-old.

But then there was that matter of burning human waste in 55-gallon drums - Kelly's most dreaded task.

Because there were no toilets in the barracks, each day the low-ranking soldiers burned the waste with lit diesel fuel - a terrible job, no matter which way the wind blew.

He could not picture John Wayne doing that.

Kelly recalled his 19-year-old reasoning: "I know those guys who are out there are a lot older than I am, but then I thought, well if I'm a sergeant, I won't have to burn shit anymore."

The next morning, Kelly arrived by helicopter to Bong Song, and entered the barracks. His orders were to replace the acting Sgt. Jet, a soldier he knew and liked.

Sgt. Jet had not received the same word, and was startled to find his old friend Kelly shaking him awake.

"You need to go to Qui-Nhon to find out what's going on," Kelly told him.

The officer in charge of the Bong Song task force, the sharp-dressed Major Bruono, had more direct instructions.

He told Kelly he wanted Jet out of there on the first aircraft.

With Jet reassigned, the tension in the barracks was palpable.

As Kelly expected, the four remaining soldiers did not welcome him with open arms.

"Last week they outranked me, now this week, I'm in charge of them. It was not a very good situation to go into," remembered Kelly.

The most insubordinate was an Oregon hippie named Steve Grow, who was 25, married and the father of two.

He wore his hair and mustache long and called Kelly "Junior."

That night, when remains arrived at the collection point, one soldier refused to get out of bed.

Kelly processed the remains and completed all the paperwork. The next morning, he told the militant soldier that he would be escorting the remains to the Qui-Nhon collection point.

"Pack all your stuff," said Kelly. "You're not coming back."

Kelly recalled that morning as a turning point.

"The other guys knew that I wasn't going to fool around, that I was out there to do a job, and I was going to do it."

Kelly ordered Grow and the others to shave their mustaches and get haircuts.

In time, he became good friends with Grow, who amused him with his sarcastic sense of humor.

He also struck up a friendship with a Boston draftee who had recently inked a professional contract with the Detroit Pistons.

Kelly successfully won over Maj. Bruono as well. He briefed him every day and joined him at staff meetings every night.

Kelly's father, David Kelly, Sr., was a World War II veteran, and he'd been around the military enough to know what men like Bruono wanted.

Kelly showed appropriate reverence, appeased Bruono when necessary, and the two got along just fine.

Search and Recovery

Since his arrival in Vietnam, Kelly had worked in a relatively clean environment. Now he was recovering remains straight from the battlefield.

The field collection point was set up near the medics, with separate morgue and sleeping tents.

Kelly and his comrades boarded a helicopter and flew into designated areas where they were informed bodies would be.

They recovered soldiers killed on land, those in helicopter crashes and those who drowned and washed ashore.

Kelly occasionally found himself in a firefight and was forced to defend himself before he could attend to his fallen comrades.

Most of the fingerprinting work was done at the mortuary, but Kelly lifted prints when he thought they wouldn't be there long.

Skin from drowning victims often slipped off, and it was better to get the prints while he still could.

When he recovered an enemy's remains, he would try to get rid of them in Bong Song. One place run by nuns accepted Vietnamese bodies, but shut down after being overloaded.

Kelly and his men opened the morgue tent to soldiers' comrades, who made physical identifications.

Many of the soldiers knew the departed for a long time, in the service or back home, and they mourned openly.

"They'd be very upset, especially if they knew the person. It would be hard for them," remembered Kelly. "Even though they might have seen [the body] on the battlefield-at that time, so much adrenaline was going-but then when they'd come back and things have calmed down, and they had to identify them, it was very hard for them."

Many soldiers avoided the morgue tent, which was enclosed with canvas. They were afraid to look at the dead, and would call Kelly and his men outside to talk.

Even though he was in the field, Kelly remembers the Bong Song collection point as a fairly decent working environment.

Grow provided comic relief, showers and a mess hall were a short walk away, and he was able to wash his clothes.

He was unprepared for what happened next, when the Division Commander 1^st Calvary told the men they'd be going north to set up new field collection points.

Kelly knew danger lay ahead, but thought he and his men would be able to handle their workload, just as they had at Bong Song.

When the Tet offensive commenced, Kelly realized just how wrong he had been.

Fireworks in the New Year

At the dawn of 1968, Kelly received orders to travel north to the Phu Bai staging area, located on the site of an old cemetery in Hue.

The U.S. military named the Phu Bai staging area LZ El Paso, but the troops called it LZ Tombstone.

Kelly and seven others gathered there before divvying up supplies and departing to create new Graves Registration field collection points farther north.

Before they went their separate ways, the Memorial Activities Specialists pitched a tent and began processing remains.

As night fell, Kelly constructed a bunker inside the tent for protection in case of an ambush.

Though a fellow sergeant named Douglas scorned Kelly's initiative, his efforts proved fortuitous.

The North Vietnamese timed an ambitious new battle plan to coincide with Tet, the Vietnamese New Year celebration.

On Jan. 30, 1968 they attacked South Vietnam's major cities, with intense fighting in Saigon and Hue.

At Phu Bai, Kelly felt the Tet offensive's shockwaves.

When night fell, enemy troops penetrated the wire and began firing on the nearby hospital.

Kelly ran for safety to a designated rendezvous point and waited out the fighting. Douglas and others took shelter in Kelly's bunker.

Throughout the night, Kelly heard voices all around him crying, "Graves Registration, Graves Registration," but heeded his orders to remain at the point.

At daylight, Kelly surveyed the damage. The hospital had been badly hit, and his tent, though still standing, resembled Swiss cheese.

In spite of all the bickering during its construction, the bunker saved Douglas' life.  When he saw Kelly the next morning, Douglas had one question:

"Did you know this was coming?"

Kelly said no, and went to work processing remains.

Stepchildren

The troops broke down into groups a few days later.

Kelly teamed with Grow, and the two headed north to Camp Evans.

Because there was not enough equipment to divide equally among the teams, Kelly and Grow arrived at Camp Evans without a generator.

They found the medic tent standing in the middle of a dirt road, set up behind it and began scouting for help.

The soldiers at Camp Evans united in their hostility to the newcomers.

"We were like stepchildren," remembered Kelly. "Nobody wanted anything to do with us."

Kelly approached a company of engineers and asked the commander if he could run a line into his tent for electricity.

The commander told Kelly, "Hell no," and sent him packing.

 With his supporting task force miles away, Kelly turned to a first lieutenant, who let him plug into his generator.

The first lieutenant later proved a valuable ally.

He lent Kelly a truck to haul remains to the airfield and dispatched one of his soldiers to escort bodies from Camp Evans to the Da Nang mortuary.

Though superstition prevented him from entering the field collection point tent, the lieutenant shouted his greetings from outside. Kelly and Grow welcomed his arrival, and customary gift of refreshing beer.

A Valentine's Day Gift

Within hours of his arrival at Camp Evans, Kelly knew that operations would not run as smoothly as they had at Bong Song.

The fighting during the Tet offensive was intense and many soldiers lost their lives. In his first two days at Camp Evans, Kelly went through 100 human remains pouches.

Fighting occurred all around the field collection point, and battlefield search and recovery missions proved perilous.

During a Feb. 14, 1968 mission supported by three infantry squads, Kelly's left leg was injured when a Vietnamese soldier tossed a grenade in his direction.

He calls the wound his "Valentine's Day present."

The injury sidelined Kelly for several days in the Army hospital and earned him a Purple Heart.

Though Kelly did not lose any mobility, the stinging white phosphorous burns left him in excruciating pain, eased only by a dose of morphine.

He rested only five yards from the collection point, where Grow and two other soldiers struggled to complete their workload.

The Worst Day

Because their sleeping tent had been destroyed in the LZ El Paso firefight, Kelly and his fellow soldiers slept, ate and processed remains in the same tent.

At night, they tuned a transistor radio to the Armed Forces radio network and received a daily debriefing on U.S. casualties, a subject they knew all too well.

Kelly recalled a typical broadcast during the Tet offensive: "They'd say, ‘Today in the republic of Vietnam, 75 U.S. soldiers got killed,' and I used to say to Grow, ‘We're the only two guys working'-cause we'd have that (many to process)."

One day remains vivid in his mind-Feb. 21, 1968-when the field collection point received a record 129 remains.

With the third Memorial Activities Specialist on an escort mission, Kelly and Grow were left alone to process the remains, which arrived from the medic tent and battlefields.

A fourth soldier, whom they called "Pretty Boy" for his habit of combing his hair, had left to escort remains to the Da Nang mortuary and never returned.

He told the Da Nang staff he could not bear being around so much death, and left Kelly hanging on two bottles of Old Grand Dad bourbon that he'd promised to take back to Camp Evans.

Kelly sympathized, but only to a point-"In a way, I don't blame him. He was scared, but then he let us down."

Kelly and Grow went on numerous search and recovery missions. Upon their return to the collection point, they found 20 or 30 bodies waiting for them, some from the nearby medic tent, and others fresh from the battlefield, wrapped hastily in poncho liners.

Kelly rounded up soldiers to make physical identifications of the remains, and struggled to keep his head above water.

Bodies arrived faster than he or Grow could process them, and the tent quickly reached its capacity.

Kelly and Grow placed the bodies on stretchers and lined them up outside the tent, their muscles straining to support the weight.

The thick, rubberized human remains pouches weighed nearly 10 pounds apiece, and the fallen soldiers weighed upwards of 160.

Bodies left too long in the sun swelled, but transportation out of Camp Evans was difficult to come by.

During the Tet offensive, U.S. aircraft often could not land, and instead dropped supplies to the troops.  When helicopters did arrive, they could only support 35 remains, piled one on another.

Kelly had been trained to treat soldiers' bodies with reverence, but the sheer volume of remains forced his hand.

He stacked incoming remains in front of the tent, and dug a huge hole behind the tent to place remains that had been processed.

Staff Sgt. Sims

As more and more U.S. soldiers lost their lives during the Tet offensive, emotions ran high.

When a brigade commander from the 101^st Airborne Division saw a sea of bodies resting outside the field collection point, he threatened Kelly with a court-martial.

He told Kelly he would be back in an hour and a half, and he asked for another officer to be present when he returned.

If Kelly did not do something about the bodies laying roadside, the commander said he'd make good on his threat.

Grow, who was a few years older than Kelly, remained tight-lipped during the shouting match.

When the colonel stormed out of the tent, Grow paused in his work to address his friend.

"Junior, it's your lucky day. I'd take a court-martial and get out of here anytime."

The colonel from the 101^st was understandably shaken by the situation at the field collection point.

He had lost many of his own that Feb. 21, including a 25-year old staff sergeant from Port St. Joe whose heroic sacrifice earned him the Medal of Honor.

Orphaned as a very young boy, Clifford Chester Sims was adopted at age 13 by James and Irene Sims of Port St. Joe.

On Feb. 21, he had led a 12-man squad in a densely wooded area near Hue to aid the besieged 101^st Airborne Division.

As he approached a bunker with his squad, Sims heard the sound of a concealed booby trap being triggered immediately to their front.

He yelled, "Get back, get back!" and hurled his body on top of the grenade, saving a half dozen soldiers.

Kelly never met Sims, who grew up a thousand miles from his hometown of Seward, Pa.

He learned of him later, after he'd retired in Gulf County and heard his name mentioned at a Veteran's Day ceremony at the courthouse.

Learning that he died near Hue, Kelly researched Sims' date of death, which fell on his most active day at the Camp Evans collection point.

Kelly placed Sims among the 129 bodies processed that day by his overburdened crew.

Near the Breaking Point

Still reeling from the 101^st colonel's threat, Kelly walked a mile up the road to an officer's mess tent and bent the ear of a one-star general.

The mess tent was a strange site in a war zone-clean, with freshly laundered tablecloths on the tables.

Kelly entered covered in blood and informed the general of the colonel's threat.

The general said he'd take care of it, and arrived, an hour later, at the field collection point.

When the 101^st colonel arrived as promised, he demanded to speak to the "officer in charge."

Kelly pointed at his cot, on top of which sat the one-star general.

He has never forgotten the colonel's expression-"That colonel saw that general and he about died."

The officers stepped outside the tent to talk, and Kelly was never bothered again.

Though he'd avoided a court-martial, Kelly felt no better about the increasingly untenable situation at the collection point.

Overwhelmed by paperwork, he stopped pecking on a typewriter and began filling out all the forms, including death certificates, by hand.

The soldiers' names became etched in his mind through the repetition of paperwork, and remained with him weeks later.

A Catholic chaplain administered last rites to all the fallen soldiers, regardless of their faith, and Kelly struggled to retain his sanity.

At night, the moonlight entering the tent cast shadows over the body bags located inches from where Kelly slept, making the dead soldiers seem to come alive.

Shouldering so much responsibility at such a young age took a toll on the 19-year-old Kelly.

"I remember one afternoon, I started shaking because I wondered, ‘How the hell am I going to do this?'" remembered Kelly. "I was shaking and then I said, ‘Well, I've got to do this, for the families.'"

Goodbye, Vietnam

Thankfully, Kelly would soon get a reprieve.

In April of 1968, he returned to Bong Song to gather his things before leaving Vietnam for the first time.

Grow stayed behind for another 20 days to finish off his duty before returning home to Oregon.

Though he made it out of Vietnam safely, Grow was killed a few years later in a logging accident.

Kelly departed through Cam Rahn Bay, where he reunited with two soldiers from his original unit in Vietnam.

The soldiers were college graduates and friends in Idaho before being drafted.

They served as clerks in Vietnam, and regarded their military experience as one big joke.

In their airplane ride to Washington, D.C., they entertained Kelly with tales of their adventures.

 "They were just glad to be out of the Army," said Kelly.

Soldier's Home

Kelly returned to Seward on military leave, and found the adjustment to civilian life difficult.

His father, a World War II veteran, had retired after 20 years in the Army and his uncle had been a WWII prisoner of war.

Like so many men of the Greatest Generation, neither spoke of their military service, and asked Kelly few questions.

Kelly shared some of his experiences with his older brother, Michael.

"We could understand each other, where my dad's war, my uncle's war, was a little different than ours," said Kelly.

Though he was happy to spend time with his parents and younger sisters Margaret and Abby, Kelly found everyday life strange and unnerving.

"The whole year I was in Vietnam, most of it was full go-the adrenaline was always there. I had so much responsibility. Then you come back and now you're just walking around and there's no hurry," recalled Kelly.

"Things that seem important to people are not important at all. It's like you went from being 19 years old to being 50 years old overnight."

His wartime service alienated him from his former friends.

"The things the guys you grew up with had in common; you didn't have that in common any more. It was different," said Kelly.

Unlike his father and uncle, he did not receive a hero's welcome. The war was unpopular at home, with protests becoming more frequent.

Anti-war activists disrespected Kelly, calling him derogatory names and belittling his sacrifice.

Though he received a brief and unwelcoming vacation from the war zone, Kelly's mission in Vietnam was not yet complete.

In 1970, the same year the National Guard killed four students during a Kent State University peace protest, Kelly reported to the Da Nang mortuary.

At Da Nang

The prolonged nature of the war had taken its toll on the Memorial Activities Specialists assigned to Da Nang.

Some 60 soldiers staffed the mortuary, most of whom were draftees who wanted to serve their time and go home.

Kelly observed a number of cliques and made friends with only four or five guys.

The morale was different at Da Nang, and so were the casualties.

Most of the deaths were not combat related, but the result of drug overdoses in a country where drugs were readily available.

As operations sergeant, Kelly worked from 6 p.m. to 6 a.m., completing paperwork at night, and embalming bodies in the wee hours of the morning.

During his year at the Da Nang mortuary, Kelly made search and recovery missions inside Laos, accompanied by fellow soldier Joseph Jones, a former funeral director from Indianapolis.

They worked out of Khe Sahn, and flew to Cobra and Huey helicopter crash sites to retrieve remains.

The bodies that they uncovered had been stripped of their watches, rings and money by the Republic of Vietnam army.

The Da Nang mortuary closed near the end of the war, and operations in Saigon were transferred to a Central Identification Laboratory in Thailand.

After a two-year stint as an Army recruiter, a job Kelly found unchallenging and without reward, he spent a year at the Thailand laboratory.

By then, the war was over, and Kelly went on recovery missions inside Vietnam to retrieve the remains of fallen U.S. soldiers.

The Thailand Central Identification Laboratory was later relocated to Hawaii, where Kelly worked from 1980-7, and met his wife of nearly 25 years.

"You Take Care of Dead People?"

Kelly's work at the Hawaii Central Identification Laboratory required him to travel extensively.

During one of his trips to the airport, he was smitten by a Hawaiian native named Myong, who worked the desk at Duty Free.

When the couple started dating in 1981, Myong knew Kelly was in the Army, but did not know the unusual nature of his work.

During one night out with Kelly's Army buddies and their significant others, Myong listened to the men discuss a naval aircraft crash in Hawaii that resulted in 21 casualties.

When talk turned to their work at the mortuary, Myong removed Kelly's hand from her leg.

After five minutes of uncomfortable silence, Kelly turned to Myong and said, "What's wrong with you?"

Kelly now laughs at her reply: "You take care of dead people? I thought you were in the Army."

In time, Myong accepted Kelly's profession, and the couple married in March 1982.

In their wills, they have asked to be buried together in Arlington Cemetery, where Kelly's father, David Kelly, Sr., now rests.

Both father and son earned the privilege after spending 20 years or more in the military.

Two Thousand Names

At the Hawaii Central Identification Laboratory, Kelly worked in the POW-MIA program, recovering remains from all U.S. conflicts.

The majority of his work was in Papua New Guinea, where he and his colleagues unearthed remains from World War II.

One of Kelly's Papua New Guinea missions resulted in the recovery of a B-24 bomber that crashed on March 22, 1944.

Pulitzer Prize winning author Susan Sheehan chronicled the search and recovery mission and painstaking identification of the B-24 passengers in her 1986 book, A Missing Plane.

During his tenure at the laboratory, Kelly also traveled to South Korea, where he recovered remains from the Korean War.

Kelly enjoyed his work and the opportunity to wear civilian clothes, stay in nice hotels and travel in civilian aircrafts.

Recovering decades-old remains brought Kelly a sense of accomplishment and a greater understanding of U.S. history.

Because negotiations with the Vietnamese government were tense after the war, Kelly only occasionally returned to Vietnam for search and recovery missions.

He said things are different now, with U.S. offices in Hanoi, and a warmer reception from Vietnamese officials.

At the Central Identification Laboratory, Kelly became familiar with the approximately 2,400 names of U.S. soldiers unaccounted for after the war in Southeast Asia.

Each name was assigned a reference number, and Kelly could recall both on command.

"If you write their names down 15 or 20 times, it stays with you," said Kelly. "I have a very good memory, or at least I should say, I used to have a very good memory."

During his time in Hawaii, Kelly frequently returned to headquarters in Alexandria, Va., and made side trips to Washington, DC, where the Vietnam Veterans Memorial was being constructed.

He remembered the names of the POW-MIAs, just as he had years earlier remembered the names of the fallen soldiers he processed at the collection points.

With each visit to "The Wall," he said a prayer for the soldiers and their families.

A Witness to the Wall

Kelly left Hawaii in 1987, and retired in 1993 as a sergeant major. He and Myong moved to Gulf County in 1992, and settled into a home in the Gulf Aire subdivision.

Kelly has returned to "The Wall" several times, most recently last March, with Myong and their grandchildren.

He calls "The Wall" a "wonderful tribute, a very beautiful memorial," and believes it has helped generations heal from the scars of war.

"You go there and you see these families with a piece of paper and they're rubbing a name out, or you talk to children whose fathers died that they never knew, and they have that wall that they can go to," said Kelly.

Though he can no longer recall the names of the missing and fallen, he has never forgotten their sacrifices.

When Kelly speaks of Vietnam, it is without tears. He has come to terms with his experience there, though he acknowledges that many of his fellow soldiers have not.

"When ‘The Wall' first opened up, I went back there, and there were a lot of Vietnam vets that were there. That sort of bothered me-that their whole lives, everything in their life, came to that wall. I would go back three months later, and would see the same guys there, and I understand that," said Kelly.

"What do they say-‘Everything I learned about life, I learned in Kindergarten.' Well, everything I learned about life, I learned in Vietnam."