Sometime shortly before my last mission, we were working somewhere north of the Wagon Wheel in a large partially defoliated area. We had been scouting the area all day and were well into the late afternoon and rather tired when my crew chief called for me to break left to allow him to re-scout something he had seen. He pointed out to me a strange looking device sticking out of the ground right in the edge of the tree line and as I got in better position I could see that it rather resembled the skeleton of an open umbrella with no fabric and with a thick handle which was sticking into the ground. During the process of continuing to circle and discuss this curiosity, something a little further away into the trees caught my eye and I eased up and over the trees to check it out. What I had seen was a man lying face down on the ground just outside the door opening of what appeared to be a mud bunker built on top of the ground. He was lying in a prone crawling position and had nothing on but black pajama bottom shorts. After making a few circles above the high trees with no foliage on them, I reversed paths and put him out my crew chiefs window with instructions to the chief to stitch a few circles around him with his M-60 to see if he could get a reaction. This, my chief expertly did and reported he did not see any response. Something that I could not put my finger on was bothering me so I again reversed pattern and again scouted down through the trees for some answer to my nagging feeling but apparently was to tired to pick up on it so we finally broke off and headed home to Dong Tam. Later that evening as I lay on my cot, I replayed time and time again what I had seen trying to determine what it was that was haunting me but could not riddle it out. It was not until the next afternoon that out of the blue it hit me. The individual we had seen was to tall and to big to have been a VC! Had either one of us seen any flies on the corpse? Could we have seen any flies from where we were above the trees? Could the person have been dark complexioned rather than dark from bloating? Could the person have been alive and simply not moved because he was unconscious or to scared of moving for fear we would have shot him if he had. Could this individual have been an ESCAPED POW, God Forbid? With that bearing on my mind, I somehow finagled our return to the general area the next morning and though we looked and looked for some reason we never could recall exactly where the precise location had been the two days before and never found the site.  This haunted me for several years and I even get chills now as I write about it.