ANDERSON — There are days, many of them, when Jeff Brailey wishes he had not been called to the gruesome campground known as Jonestown, Guyana.

On Nov. 18, 1978, more than 900 men, women and children died in modern history’s worst mass murder- suicide.

Thirty years ago this week, Brailey was an Army medic stationed in Panama assisting a Special Forces battalion and a jungle operation training center.

“On a Sunday morning the day after the massacre, we were notified that several hundred Americans had tried to take their lives in Guyana,” says Brailey, 60, now living in Chesterfield.

“We thought, until we landed there, that we were going down there for a humanitarian effort, to help people who had tried to kill themselves.”

Brailey and the eight medics loaded up with universal antidotes intended for use by survivors. They wouldn’t need those supplies. Instead, Brailey watched bodies being bagged for shipment to the U.S.

Most cult members had moved to Guyana on the north end of South America with leader Jim Jones, raised in Lynn, Ind. Jones, often first associated with pro-Communist leanings, was later criticized for promoting integration and he began to fear a nuclear holocaust. In 1977, Jonestown would become his refuge.

Within a year, reports circulated that Americans were held against their will. A team led by California Congressman Leo J. Ryan went to investigate; he and four others were killed with 13 cult members who wished to leave.

The murders triggered Jones’ paranoia. Jonestown residents were ordered to drink cyanide-laced ade. Those who didn’t were shot. Jones would be shot, likely by a camp nurse.

“Every time I think about it, I wish I hadn’t gone there,” says Brailey who served two years in the Vietnam War. “I would rather do two more years in Vietnam than to go back to Jonestown one more day. It was the worst experience of my life.”

Jonestown changed many of those in the U.S. military. Brailey keeps in touch with Eric Vega, who was to man an aid station. Vega now lives in San Diego and wrote The Herald Bulletin through e-mail.

“I have more respect for the dead. I don’t like seeing anything dead on the road like animals. I wish people could live forever but it is something we have to do whether we want to or not. It saddens me when people I know die.

“But my mother helped me through it with her strong love of God and my beautiful wife who shares my mother’s love of God and they believe that we all go home to heaven,” wrote Vega.

Brailey, who later married and divorced twice and was homeless for six years, currently earns a pension through the Army.

He put all of his thoughts into a yet-unpublished manuscript. The following excerpts are from “The Ghosts of November: Memoirs of an Outsider Who Witnessed the Carnage at Jonestown, Guyana” by Jeff Brailey.