BANGKOK, Thailand -- Grim-faced rescuers were tying ropes to the stiff, jutting legs and arms of bloated corpses floating in the Andaman Sea, and bringing them to shore after an earthquake under the Indian Ocean triggered the giant pulverizing waves of the Dec. 26, 2004 tsunami.

Tourists were thronging Thailand's gorgeous southwest coast where Phuket island and the granite-studded, sandy beaches of Khao Lak became the hardest hit zones amid estuaries, mangroves, and sea cliffs.

The doomed coast's exquisite Buddhist temples crumbled. Five-star resorts, tropical villages, and virtually everything else became smithereens when the tsunami hit.

Rare surviving Buddhist temples became storage grounds for bodies smelling of formaldehyde and packed in dry ice, shrouded, and left outdoors next to stacks of plywood coffins awaiting cremations or burials.

"The horrible thing about this is, we could tell that they were male or female, but beyond that it was very hard to differentiate whether they were Asian or foreign," Canadian volunteer Scott Murray said in an interview at the time after collecting the dead.

"They took a DNA sample from every single person, whether it be hair, teeth, or they would cut into the thigh and take something from there," Mr. Murray said.

Amid the priority of identifying the dead, Interpol and other crime agencies were concerned that career criminals could fake their deaths among the unidentified and unretrieved victims, and emerge with new identities.

The tsunami killed more than 5,400 people, about half of them foreigners, on the morning after Christmas in Thailand.

More than 225,000 people perished worldwide from the waves, which slammed more than a dozen countries. Indonesia, Sri Lanka, India, Maldives, and Thailand suffered the most.

In jungles tangled by the tsunami, Thailand's trained elephants used their long, curved, ivory tusks to retrieve any bodies discovered while clearing debris.

Elephant crews wrapped the dead in plastic sheets and tied them to the tusks with ropes and bamboo supports, using the tusks like a forklift.

The post-apocalyptic devastation was soon dotted with military-built camps for local people displaced by the Andaman's deathly liquid.

Among the survivors was a 72-year-old American who had been swept into the Andaman Sea, clinging to a broken tree for four hours, before finally drifting to shore.

"It was probably next to atomic energy as one of the greatest physical forces possible," Gerald Bodden said in an interview at his hospital bed where he lay bandaged, with skin peeling from his face, legs, and torso shortly after being brought ashore.

"What I saw on the horizon looked like a whole line of cumulous clouds. Instead, they were huge walls of water.

"I saw every drop of water being pulled out to sea, which of course was feeding the tsunami. And I should have had the sense of mind to climb to higher ground.

"But I just did not. I'm a great believer in self preservation, but I just missed it this time," Mr. Bodden said.

Phuket City Hall's emergency relief center was plastered with hundreds of photos of missing people -- mostly foreigners -- captioned with their biographical details, similar to street scenes in Manhattan immediately after Sept. 11, 2001.

Another terrible echo of 9/11 was that most of the missing tsunami victims would not be found alive.

One family offered a $25,000 reward to anyone who could find Louise Hallin, 11, from Sweden, who had green eyes, long blond hair, "a long scar on her under leg, and a birthmark on her stomach."

She "disappeared from her family in Khao Lak."

Khao Lak's beaches, about 40 miles north of Phuket island, were among Thailand's worst hit by the tsunami.

"Today there’s a monument to the victims, but on the beachfront it's business as usual, with new resorts opening. The beaches around Khao Lak are packed," Bangkok-based travel writer and author Tom Vater said in an interview after visiting Khao Lak during the first week of December.

"The new JW Marriot –- the property was a Sofitel prior to the tsunami -- boasts almost 500 rooms and is almost fully booked in early December. Guests come from all over the world, though particularly from Israel and India, half of them families," Mr. Vater said.

"If one doesn’t talk to locals, it feels as if the 'wave that eats people' -- as the Chao Ley sea nomads who live along the Andaman coast call the tsunami -- never happened."

Twenty years ago, Thailand's Buddhist-majority, conservative, group-oriented society rapidly pulled together to deal with the tsunami's aftermath.

Cremating thousands of tsunami victims at Buddhist temples near the sites was challenging work, but Thailand's monks were lucid, calm, and prepared.

Many of the monks had trained in "corpse meditation" by gazing at gruesome forensic and autopsy photographs of purple-and-black decomposing cadavers, to mentally detach themselves from life's transitory nature -- realizing all life decays.

"Corpse contemplation, or corpse meditation, would be just literally [meditating on] a picture of a dead body, or a body at one of the actual stages of decomposition," said maroon-robed monk Siripanyo Bhikkhu in an interview in 2004 at Phuket's emergency relief center.

"It is very common with us to have [corpse meditation] pictures with us, to use them, or just to have in your hut, or have with you when you are eating, or just to look at and to contemplate."

Bhikku Siripanyo, 34, had two specific photographs that he used when he practiced corpse meditation.

"I have a picture of a cremation with a body very visibly burning on a pyre. I have another picture of a skeleton, a human skeleton.

"I have quite a few [corpse photos] actually. Say, about half a dozen. Some monks like to have a lot, to have a variety. Some monks don't have any because they have them in the monastery.

"It sounds incredibly gruesome and almost bizarre, but it is totally, totally normal and understood in Thailand," said the monk who sat cross-legged on the grass, available to anyone seeking Buddhist wisdom or blessings after being traumatized by the morbid chaos.

Buddhist monks also entered the tsunami's shattered killing zones and other sites where they chanted and performed rituals, hoping to restore harmony.

In this deeply superstitious Southeast Asian nation, people who felt spooked by what they perceived as ghosts from the tsunami, invited Buddhist monks to exorcise their homes or area.

Fish sellers and seafood restaurants meanwhile suffered a loss of customers along the southwest coast amid unfounded fears that the fish may have eaten the tsunami's human victims.

To lift the gloomy mood and relieve financial burdens, tourism was pushed immediately after major devastation was cleared.

Within two weeks after the tsunami, government-run TV repeatedly broadcast bikini-clad foreigners strolling along the shore, topless women lying face down on their towels, foreign adults and children sitting and playing on the beach, and other tourists splashing and swimming in the sea -- all with an invitation to visit Thailand's paradisical surf.

Soon after, speculators began snatching up wreckage-strewn beachfront property, damaged buildings, and other devastated sites at cheap prices -- sometimes by threatening impoverished villagers to quickly sell.

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Richard S. Ehrlich is a Bangkok-based American foreign correspondent reporting from Asia since 1978, and winner of Columbia University's Foreign Correspondents' Award. Excerpts from his two new nonfiction books, "Rituals. Killers. Wars. & Sex. -- Tibet, India, Nepal, Laos, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Sri Lanka & New York" and "Apocalyptic Tribes, Smugglers & Freaks" are available at
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