Dr. Preston Jones: Where were you based in November 1978?
David Pompili: Fort Bragg, North Carolina. I was with the 330th Movement Control Center in support of the XVIII Airborne Corps.1
Jones: And what was your job at that time?
Pompili: Movement control. We monitored exercises, the transportation, the logistics, and all the rest for the exercise.
And when they kicked the exercise in, we would shop various packages, because at times you don’t always send whole units into a particular area. You send units that are tailored to operate in a specific theater or field or whatever.
Jones: How did the news first get to you that you were going to go to Guyana?
Pompili: Oh, fun. We had just completed an exercise at Eglin Air Force Base, also at an auxiliary field, Dillon Field in Florida. And, I arrived back at Fort Bragg and got a telephone call from the Emergency Operation Center to go to the orange room, draw a .45, and report to the Green Ramp, which also came under our control. Green Ramp is a rapid deployment ramp for C-141s, C-5s, C-130s, and so forth.
We got on a StarLifter, the C-140, C-141, at 12:30 in the evening and hit Timehri Airfield at 4:30 in the morning. They are fast. They’re cold, but they’re fast.
Jones: What day was that?
Pompili: Well, it was on the 23rd. The evening of the 23rd. But we hit there technically on the 24th of November, around Thanksgiving time.
Jones: When you got the word that you were going somewhere in a hurry, did you immediately know where you were going?
Pompili: No, we didn’t know that until we were in the air and they had us check in our weapons, lock up our weapons, and all the rest of it. They seemed sort of quirky, but it is what it is. When the aircraft landed, it was surrounded by these little short fellows with submachine guns and dark blue uniforms and black berets; I guess it was the police force.
Jones: Were they Guyanese?
Pompili: Yeah.
Jones: Now the tragedy in Jonestown took place on November 18th. Were you following the news, or were you at least aware of what had happened?
Pompili: No. Like I say, we were out in the boonies. The news was the last thing that we were concerned with.
Jones: So when you get in the air, that’s when you’re told that you’re going to Guyana?
Pompili: Yeah.
Jones: And did they explain to you then what had happened?
Pompili: They gave us a brief explanation and they said, “approximately 417 people committed suicide down there.”
Jones: The numbers were off for a while. How long did it take before the actual number came in? I imagine it came in while you were there.
Pompili: Yeah. Well, we landed, and at the same time that we landed, units from the 193rd Light Infantry out of Panama landed. And the 5th Special Course had already been there and was doing and completing the body count. When we got the body count, it ended up being 917.
Jones: What is your first memory of being on the ground in Georgetown?
Pompili: It was a hot, warm 110 degrees in the shade.
Jones: Do you go right to work as soon as you land?
Pompili: Indeed. That’s how we take care of business. They had structures and all the rest of that, and we set those up along with the arrangement of transfer cases, because they had the metal transfer cases that are slightly pre pressurized and you put the body bags into the transfer case.
We only had 450 transfer cases and 450 body bags. Naturally there was a shortage, as the bodies started coming down and we were transferring them from the helicopters to the transfer cases, using two-and-a-half-ton trucks to move the bodies from the helicopters to the preparation area to package them up and then put them on the C-141s and send them up to Dover.
Jones: Some veterans who were there talk about the shortage of body bags and they say that some body bags had multiple children.
Pompili: Yes, there were a total of 180 babies who had died due to the cyanide. We had two female soldiers there. One, understandably—it just blew her away. We had to send her back because it was too much for her. The other young lady managed to hang in there. She was a nice, bright, smiley face amongst all of that stuff that was going on down there.
Jones: What happened to this one female soldier? Did she work for a while and then did she come up to you and just say, “I can’t do this anymore.” How did that go?
Pompili: Sort of. You sort of pay attention to it. It’s something with us old guys, especially the combat vets; it takes you but about one or two minutes to notice a change in behavior or demeanor or whatever. It is an acquired art. I guess you can sort of read somebody in about one to two minutes.
Jones: Did you read her and could you tell that she wasn’t going to be able to keep doing this?
Pompili: It didn’t look good. So, when I noticed what the heck was going on with her, I said, “well, I’ll watch her for just a little while longer.” And that was maybe about half an hour. And I said, “no, it is time to pull the trigger and get her out of here before real damage comes upstairs.” We sent her on back with just a thank you for support and all the rest of it, and to make sure that somebody on the medical side of the house sat her down and hit her with that immediate counseling instead of waiting for it to boil over and cause her more damage.
Jones: You experienced combat in Southeast Asia in the late 1960s. Obviously, what you’re looking at in Georgetown is not combat; it’s a very different thing. But you see the sites of combat, and you see the results of combat. You see what you see at Georgetown. They are very different. But how would you compare the two in terms of just the kinds of things you see and the kind of impact it has on the soldier?
Pompili: You see the aftereffect of death in combat. And then you see what the end results are. It’s a weird way of saying it. The bodies are fresh. The temperature is a little bit different. At the altitude I was at, the ground target elevation is about 3,600 feet. Like I say, as it’s going on and you are watching these people getting killed with DK 82 mortars and all the rest of it. And we’ve got a couple of little fellas and the not-really-little fellas, little ladies and the wire. It’s complex, but it’s fresh. Jonestown is different. Jonestown had been out there in 110 degrees. Rigor mortis came. Rigor mortis left.
Jones: You said it’s extremely hot and extremely humid.
Pompili: 110 degrees in the shade. And they’d been out there since the 18th. They waited a doggone week and those bodies are lying out there and just starting to fall apart.
And that’s where the wintergreen comes in. We used an average of about 5 gallons of wintergreen a day in that place.
Jones: Is that a kind of cologne or an air freshener?
Pompili: It’s a wintergreen oil. It sort of neutralizes the impact and overpowers the smell that you encounter.
Jones: The soldiers put on scarves then and put that around their faces.
Pompili: Put a little bit of it on your face. You spray the areas, and then it’s wintergreen all over the place.
Jones: You described the one soldier who, in your assessment, was not going to be able to keep doing this. And so she’s removed from the situation. How would you describe it? Because at this time you are, I imagine, primarily in a supervisory role.
Pompili: [Unintelligible.]
Jones: So the non-commissioned officer in charge. So, how would you assess the soldiers generally? That one soldier can’t do this mission so that soldier is removed. How did the other soldiers deal with what they were experiencing there at the airport in Georgetown?
Pompili: Well, they knew what they had to do. The majority of them, unfortunately, had to supplement the Graves Registration people because they performed a mission that I was not on, and that was the 239 people that got killed in the Canary Islands.
Jones: So some of the folks who were in Georgetown had been part of this previous mission.
Pompili: They had a little bit more experience in graves registration and body recovery, transfers, and all the rest of it.
Jones: How long were you there altogether in Georgetown?
Pompili: From the 24th till about the 30th.
Jones: Are you there at some point—the last of the more than 900 bodies are flown from Georgetown to Dover. Were you there through that whole process? Where did you leave after the last bodies went out?
Pompili: The last bodies, because I had to fill out the AF-906s, the freight waybills, for each one of the bodies. I had to sign off on all of those waybills. The one individual that made the count was Guyanese, and the Guyanese at the end of the airstrip 3 days into the exercise that we were involved in, which is called Operation Keys, shut off our water.
Jones: And why did that happen?
Pompili: I guess just [unintelligible].
Jones: So was there tension then between the US forces and the Guyanese on the ground?
Pompili: We did not deal with them directly. They weren’t in the area. It was solely an American exercise. They didn’t participate in the evacuation or security or anything else.
Jones: But something happened and the Guyanese cut off the water that had been available to you?
Pompili: Yes, indeed. They cut it off after three days. They just cut it off. Period.
Jones: So did the US then have to—I imagine then water started being shipped in?
What sorts of things did you see? I mean, obviously when the bodies are taken from Jonestown, and from my understanding, they’re in body bags. They’re flown from Jonestown to the airport in Georgetown in the body bags. Then in Georgetown, they’re put in these meta cases.
Pompili: Yeah, transfer cases.
Jones: So is that the process?
Pompili: Yeah.
Jones: So as far as sort of seeing what had happened in Jonestown, are you only seeing the body bags?
Pompili: We’re seeing the body bags. Sometimes we had to make adjustments for the little babies and all the rest of that to transfer body parts from one bag to another and then into the transfer cases.
Jones: When Jim Jones’s body arrived at Georgetown, was that the kind of news that went through? “Here’s the body of Jim Jones?”
Pompili: Well, the first body—the Special Forces have a sort of weird sense of humor. The first bag was labeled Jim Jones, and “hey, this looks sort of weird and it’s sort of hard to maneuver.” We opened up the body bag and it was his chimpanzee, Mr. Muggs. So, we finally got the right body bag and that was Jim Jones. We certified that it was him and then we loaded him up and shipped him out.
Jones: So the Special Forces guys had a dark joke in a dark time. They labeled Mr. Muggs, the chimpanzee, as Jim Jones?
Pompili: Yes.
Jones: And then how were you able to verify that it was Jim Jones?
Pompili: We managed to obtain some pictures from some of the journalists down there.
One and one made two. It looked like him, so it must have been him.
Jones: This is my last question along this line. I don’t want to get into gory details, but did you see evidence that the overwhelming majority died from consuming the Flavor-Aid with cyanide in it and that Jim Jones was shot? Did you see evidence of that?
Pompili: Yes.
Jones: You had a long career in the United States Army and you saw service in Southeast Asia. I believe after your Army career, you spent some time in Kuwait around the time of the Gulf War, and then you had this incident in Jonestown. In terms of intensity and in terms of things that rattle around in your own head—memories that rattle around in your own head—where would you place this experience in Georgetown dealing with the immediate aftermath of Jonestown?
Where would you place that in the list of, these kinds of intense experiences that you had in this very long Army career?
Pompili: Jonestown and Laos are in competition for first place. They bounce back and forth. The comparison between combat and what happened in Jonestown—yes, they are different experiences, but the feelings, to a degree, are still the same. Death is death. There’s no getting around it. The reason I’m saying Jonestown and Laos were at a tie is because you’ve got these people that are victims of this monster. And then on the other side of the fence you’ve got these guys that I used to. I was with them. I lived with these folks, these 400 guys that got killed. They gave me my nickname and all the rest of it.
Jones: You mean in Laos?
Pompili: Yeah. We laughed and joked. We had some good times even in that area.
Jones: In your memory, then, the experience of combat and war and everything that comes with it, and the experience of Georgetown, seeing the immediate aftermath of Jonestown—these things kind of compete in your mind in terms of just the difficulty of it?
Pompili: Yeah.
Jones: When you’re flying to Georgetown, you’re told what happened, but you don’t know what’s coming. You get on the ground, you find out what’s coming, and then you go through these days. Now I’m interested in hearing what you remember about the flight home. The job is done. You’re on the plane on the way home. What’s going on? What’s going on with you on that flight?
Pompili: Well, thank God it’s over with. As much as we love the Army, there are some things that they have you doing—you do it because the discipline takes over. It’s as you get a little bit older; it’s not uncaring, but it’s pragmatic. It is what it is. There’s nothing you can do about it. And when you get put in that position, you’ve got to deal with it. If you don’t deal with it, then you’re not doing your job. And that’s what you took the oath to do.
Jones: When you got back to the States, did you have a little time to, like, take a breath or was it Right back to work?
Pompili: Back to work. I got off of the aircraft and got my transport to my home, and my wife was standing in the doorway and she saw me. I said, “don’t you even—you go back in the house.” I stripped at the front door because of the smell and the clothing. When I went into the house, I took a good hot, steaming shower. Like I say, you get noseblind to the smell.
The vehicles, the extraction equipment and all the rest of that is what we tried to deodorize. But that was an exercise of futility because once those human fluids get into metal and wood and all the rest of it, it’s a done deal.
Jones: Did you tell your wife at all about what you’d seen? Or did you just kind of let it go and move on?
Pompili: No, I just told her it was ugly. It was nasty. You’re going to read about it. I’m not going to extrapolate on it. She had been with me through Laos and all of Vietnam and all the rest of it. There was no sense in subjecting her to that; she’d had enough.
I had three daughters and that was another thing to take into consideration. I tried to shield them as much as I could. When you’re in places like Fort Bragg, the media is going to blow it up and blow it sideways, and no matter how much you avoid it, it’s going to come out and it’s going to hit them in between the eyes.
If they have any questions, then I clear up those questions. But I don’t want to be put in a position to try to sugarcoat things and lessen the impact.
Jones: There’s that phrase that you often hear, “don’t drink the Kool-Aid.” And a lot of people don’t even know where that came from.
Pompili: I have an issue with that. It was Flavor Aid. I started to thank you for saying that. It was Flavor Aid; it wasn’t Kool-Aid. But once people start repeating the same phrase over and over again, it sticks. “Don’t drink the Kool-Aid.” I keep on thinking every time I hear that statement—Jesus, you people are brain dead. You are listening with the wrong stuff and attaching the wrong labels to it.
Jones: When you hear people say that, though, to most people it’s just almost a throwaway line, and I think now a lot of people don’t even know where that phrase comes from. Not only do you know where it comes from, but you also have firsthand experience of what led to that phrase in the first place. Have you ever had an experience where somebody says that and you’ve sort of stopped and said, “hey, let me tell you about that phrase”?
Pompili: Yeah. Wrong answer, dude. It’s the wrong answer. It’s tantamount to committing suicide for a goofy reason: cultism. You’re saying it, and I can’t impress on them the impact of seeing that and the aftereffects of it. But now people, they say it and it’s sort of taken like a compliment. They don’t tie the mess up with the Kool-Aid. That’s what the disconnect is. They really don’t tie the death up with the Kool-Aid suicide-murder. They don’t do that.
Jones: Whenever you hear that phrase, do you always kind of react to it even if you don’t say anything?
Pompili: Little bit. Yeah. It’s with you.
Contextual Notes
- Mr. Pompili passed away in May 2025, at the age of 82. ↩︎