Skulls: Eerie Souvenirs From the Vietnam War
Certain things are immediately apparent about the six human skulls lined up on the metal cabinet in a back room of Walter Reed Army Medical Center.
First, there is the graffiti scrawled across them, abrasive as wartime expressions can be: "Today's pigs are tomorrow's bacon" on one, "Stay high stay alive" on another, trippy thick stripes of bright blue, red and yellow on a third. Two eye sockets are filled with red candle wax, as though the skull had been used to light up a soldier's lonely night decades ago.
Second is their story. Unlike the thousands of other human specimens kept at the Defense Department's National Museum of Health and Medicine, staff anthropologists said, the skulls had been confiscated from U.S. soldiers who were trying to bring them home as macabre souvenirs from Vietnam in the 1970s.
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First, there is the graffiti scrawled across them, abrasive as wartime expressions can be: "Today's pigs are tomorrow's bacon" on one, "Stay high stay alive" on another, trippy thick stripes of bright blue, red and yellow on a third. Two eye sockets are filled with red candle wax, as though the skull had been used to light up a soldier's lonely night decades ago.
Second is their story. Unlike the thousands of other human specimens kept at the Defense Department's National Museum of Health and Medicine, staff anthropologists said, the skulls had been confiscated from U.S. soldiers who were trying to bring them home as macabre souvenirs from Vietnam in the 1970s.