The eyeless, the limbless, the decapitated, the disembowelled. On and on they came, higher and higher we piled them. Women and children.

During the summer of 1985 I was the medical orderly on the Irish naval vessel LE Aisling. In the early hours of June 23rd, having just boarded and arrested a Spanish fishing vessel, a rumour began to circulate the ship.

We subsequently learned that high above us, Air India flight 182 from Toronto to Bombay, via Montreal and London, was blown out of the sky.

At 8.13 a.m. the pilot made initial contact with Shannon airtraffic control and was beginning his descent into Heathrow. Moments later, the plane disappeared off radar screens. It fell 31,000 feet.

There were 329 people on board. None survived.

Medical training in the Naval Service checked was primitive to say the least: a 14-week first-aid course. There were no doctors in the Naval Service and the sense of isolation was frightening. I couldn't tell the difference between a knock on the head and a fractured skull. I once asked if our ship carried morphine. I was bluntly told not only was there none on board, but if there was I'd be the last to see it. It was probably just as well as I wasn't trained to administer it, though I was once shown how to take a blood sample.

Approaching the crash site I was angry, frightened, powerless. If someone were brought aboard alive I knew they would die under my supervision.

Heading past the galley one of the cooks asked what he should do in the event of survivors being brought aboard. I was only sure that they'd be in severe shock. Hot, strong sweet tea is recommended as part of the cure so I suggested he have large amounts on standby. Even then, the words sounded futile and ridiculous.

We arrived at the crash site at 12.17 p.m. By 12.30 p.m., the first bodies had been taken aboard. Standing on the starboard bridge wing I looked below to see a large woman floating by, naked, face down, her long black hair trailed behind her. The sea was littered with wreckage - mechanical and human - as far as the eye could see, great hunks of smashed and twisted metal bobbed on the water.

On deck a system for retrieval of the bodies was in place. A small, inflatable craft, the Gemini, was put on the water. When its crew had collected all the corpses it could carry, it returned to the ship. With the Gemini's crew and cargo hoisted aboard, the remaining crew would line up to remove the bodies. The first task was to disentangle the jumble of broken limbs. One man at the head, the other at the feet, a nod or glance between them and the covering sheet was lifted to see if head and feet were connected. Sometimes they were - increasingly they were not.

Sitting on deck, waiting for the return of the Gemini, the seaman seated next to me said, "What are you looking at?"

"You have blood in your hair," I told him.

He laughed and replied, "You know what? No matter how long we live, we will never be able to describe this to anyone."

He was right. First, we filled the engineer's office with bodies, then we filled the carpenter's store, end-to-end, throughout the day and into the night. I lifted a young woman into the carpenter's store when her head rolled from the sheet. I remember the dull dead thud of bone on metal as it whacked against the hatch.

We had no body bags, so we wrapped them in sheets. Nor did we have gloves. I still recall the feeling of dead, wet flesh against mine, the stink of aviation fuel, a heavy, sickly-sweet smell that clings to flesh and metal.

When the Gemini had been emptied of its cargo what remained was hosed away. Then it was lowered into the sea and it would start all over again. Fourteen times that day the Gemini was launched, 14 times it returned, a stained and bloody white sheet covering the mound of corpses. By 10.30 p.m., there was no light left in the sky, and full of bodies, 38 in all, we turned for home.

Later, we went below to eat; cold ham and chips, the day's uneaten dinner. Somebody had put on a video of Rory Gallagher at the Montreux Jazz festival, though nobody had bothered to turn up the sound. In stunned weary silence people stared at the screen. The room was dark except for the grey flickering light of the TV screen. It made the faces of those present look haunted, aged beyond their years. I was in a room full of ghosts.

I showered, but couldn't wash the smell of aviation fuel off my hands. Unable to sleep, I went up on deck to get some fresh air. Heading past the galley, the cook was pouring cold tea down the sink. High above us, Royal Navy helicopters carried corpses to the Regional Hospital in Cork. Outside, the remains of the day's work were hosed from the decks while seagulls screamed and swooped overhead.

The next morning we returned to the Naval base. There were journalists, news crews, photographers and doctors from the Regional Hospital in Cork. It made a strange sight. The doctors - in their white coats, hard hats, boots, face masks and protective gloves - looked like they were dressed for chemical warfare, lifting bodies with people who didn't have a face mask between them: young men whose clothes were still stained from the day before, whose eyes were ringed from lack of sleep.

We spent the rest of the week gathering the remaining pieces of wreckage. When we were finished the captain thanked us all, gave us each a mouthful of whiskey and sent us home for the weekend. The then-Taoiseach, Garret FitzGerald, went to the Regional Hospital in Cork to thank the soldiers who had guarded the Royal Naval helicopters. He never set foot on the Aisling.

For overseeing the salvage operation, the captain of LE Aisling, Lt. Cdr. Jim Robinson, received the Distinguished Service Medal. So did the crew of the Gemini: Mossy Mahon, John McGrath and Terry Brown. Throughout the day they had repeatedly manhandled the bodies from the sea into the Gemini, in deteriorating weather conditions and increasingly shark-infested waters.

IN December 1987 I left the Naval Service. When I returned my uniform, it still bore the stains picked up on the day of the crash. Almost a year and a half had elapsed. During that time nobody was ever sent for counselling or given any form of support for what they had experienced on the day of the Air India disaster.

A few days later I received a call from my mother who told me that one of my oldest friends, Seamus Reddy, had been killed in a motorbike accident. Travelling on the train to Dublin for the funeral I shared a carriage with some of the relatives of the crash victims. Their wailing cries echoed through the carriage. I moved further along the train but the sound persisted. Unable to escape, I felt as though death itself were following me.

Standing at my friend's grave in the brilliant sunshine, I looked around at the mourners: family, and school friends of 19 and 20 years of age. They were inconsolable in their grief. Like the bodies fished from the sea, like the relatives on the train, we were, each in our own way, broken, gutted, empty.