The first one he rescued from the roaring water was a Thai man, at the end of his strength and probably seconds away from disappearing.
The second was a European woman, Dutch or German, he thinks. She was a strong swimmer, but how long could that last when the water was so strong it ripped buildings apart and lifted cars as if they were rubber ducks drowning in draining bath water?
The third was lifeless. An "adult male", Roman Quaedvlieg says, the police-speak coming through down the end of the phone from Canberra.
He also remembers the long boat. He'd noticed it before the tsunami hit, tied to the wharf and being loaded with tourists heading out on day trip. It swept past him with two people screaming for help, clinging to the upturned hull.
"One was a Caucasian – a European guy – and the other was a woman, I'm not sure what nationality she was, and the boat, that was probably 150 metres, 200 metres from shore," he says.
"I was trying to work out how I was going to help these people out, but the pace, they had floated off down to the south."
To remember the detail around him when all hell breaks loose is Mr Quaedvlieg's line of work. Boxing Day 2004 is all still there; the distances between himself and the wave, or safe ground, or those needing help to the descriptions of people he saved and lost.
Mr Quaedvlieg, now chief executive of Customs and Border Protection Services, was working in the Australian Crime Commission covert unit at the time.
The trip to Thailand was his honeymoon with wife Christine and a break from the grubbiness of the Melbourne gangsters he had been investigating.
Boxing Day was the last day of their holiday and they were eating breakfast at their elevated, hillside resort in Phuket that overlooked the ocean when the wave came in. It was about a kilometre away and Mr Quaedvlieg kept waiting for it to break.
"It kept coming like a train. There was a lot of noise, a lot of screaming because by that stage other people had twigged and you could hear it hitting infrastructure in and around the resort," he says.
"There was like a flow-back of water and when the flow-back started occurring, it brought back with it cars and houses ... we were watching this unfold and I said to Christine, 'Wait here, I'm going to bolt down to the lower tier to make sure everything is OK."
The rescues probably took minutes and Mr Quaedvlieg continued running along the shoreline, scanning for people close enough to pull in. In the distance, beyond the violent flow-back of water, the ocean was pacific, like glass.
"But then there was a panic ensuing because someone had said there was a tidal wave. The big one was still coming and that caused pandemonium," he says.
Mr Quaedvlieg ran back to his wife and they scrambled up the resort to their room on higher ground. They switched on the television and the scale of the chaos smacked them in the face.
"We thought it was local tidal aberration," he says.
The couple were able to fly out the same afternoon and were among the first Australians to make it back from south-east Asia.
A media crush awaited them at Melbourne Airport and cameras captured the couple pushing luggage out of customs, which inadvertently blew Mr Quaedvlieg's cover just before gangland violence escalated in the city.
Violence and death is part of Mr Quaedvlieg's job and a decade on, for the most part, he recalls Phuket with professionalism, as if he's remembering one of his investigations.
But for a man for whom answers are part of the end game, he never found out who those people were that he pulled from the water.
"The European woman would have got out, the Thai guy, he wasn't a strong swimmer and he was just hanging on. I have no idea who they were and I don't know to this day whether that male I pulled out of the water is dead or alive."
