Washed Away: My Katrina Memoir

    NowPublic contributor phrolen is a veteran of Operation Iraqi
Freedom and Joint Taskforce Katrina. His commentary is based on actual
experience.  

 

    Would it be a cliché to start out saying it was like something out of a dream? Probably, but I will say it anyways because that’s exactly what it was like. I remember sitting in my living room that night watching the loop of the most perfect hurricane I had ever saw, saying to myself, that thing is going to hit New Orleans. I had only been back to work for just over two months after my Iraq tour and the month long sabbatical that followed. So, I was, to say the least, a bit surprised when I got the call asking me if I wanted to deploy with the disaster response team to New Orleans. I had been working non stop for the preceding 24 hours preparing the medical rapid response materials packages for possible deployment so for me the answer was simple. I wanted to go with my supplies.
  

    The events played out as they were foretold and the worst predictions were soon reality. New Orleans was coming apart at the seams while the world stood by and watched it all on Fox News. 3 days after Katrina made landfall we were on the ground at Louis Armstrong International Airport standing up the largest humanitarian relief operation that lower 48 had ever seen. The first memory I have of New Orleans is the smell. We had just finished being briefed by Colonel Owen, our unit commander, on the volatility of the events on the ground "They are shooting at rescue helicopters, you guys be ready for anything" he had said and then sat down strapping in for landing. I settled back in my seat, still weighing his words in my mind when the smell hit me. We were still thousands of feet in the air over the tattered city but the aromatics of the chemical and sewer filled stew below us called out to us. "Welcome to the Big Easy", a voice in my mind said, as I marinated in the pungent air. I can tell you now, with certainty, The Big Easy was anything but easy.
  

    All and all I spent almost a month at Louis Armstrong; my home was a cot I had set up in the back corner of an empty Delta Airlines office which also doubled as my controlled supply office. My first night at the airport I met face to face with the horror which existentially was post-Katrina New Orleans. The airport was filled with people, upper and lower levels, many of them sick, frightened, and suffering over lost love ones. Several elderly care facilities had evacuated patients to the airport assuming that help would be there; a faulty assumption. Geriatric patients were strewn on the floor, some of them dead, most of them laying in the same place they had been two days prior, covered in their own waste. Some of them had soiled their clothes and rather than let them lay in those clothes other evacuees had stripped them and covered them with paper towels and news papers. I spent the first 6 hours I was there locating airline blankets and pillows and distributing them to those in need. There were no flights coming or going, so everyone sat waiting for something to happen, waiting for someone to help them. But, for at least 24 hours that absolution never came. People became irate. Tempers flared. Junkies went into withdraw without their fixes and for hours pandemonium reigned. It was the wild west again. A LA National guardsmen told us that it was the same on the streets recounting a tale of his unit stumbling onto a man raping a little girl. "She was screaming and we told him to stop, but he didn't." The guardsmen had said. "So we just shot him and left him where he was, bringing the girl with us here."  

    One FEMA contracted, Disaster Medical Assistance Team (DMAT) nurse was stabbed while trying to render aid, prompting a forced clearing of one wing of the airport and the establishing of a fully armed security checkpoint that the evacuees had to pass through. Beyond that checkpoint lawlessness was the order of the day and we were forbidden from traveling out into the general populace. Below our terminal the baggage claim area came to be known as "The pit." The Pit was so revolting that many simply refused to wade into the heaped masses that were simmering down there and lend a hand. The smell was indescribable; people were literally crammed into that small area like sardines in a can. I can still hear their requests in my mind as I think of them. "Sir could you get us some ice? Sir, can you get us some food? Do you have a blanket? We need medicine? I had no answers for them. I felt desperate. I worked as hard as my body would let me to try and fill every request.
  

    U.S. marshals were posted at the top of the stairs leading down in order to maintain security. I remember one old woman caused a huge dust up by throwing her shoe and hitting another woman in the face. The marshals intervened and thwarted  the chaos that surely would have followed. My time as part of Joint Taskforce Katrina is a bit of a blur in my memory; I worked 48-72 hour shifts in the beginning trying to bring in the medical supplies that were needed to savethose in critical condition. I took material orders from DMAT supply teams who had exhausted their caches. Those orders were delivered across the airport grounds to a building containing a giant seafood freezer which we augmented as a supply warehouse. We tore our supply packages apart scouring their contents for the needed items. Loaded filled orders onto airport baggage tugs. Drove the tugs back to the terminal weaving through a constant wave of helicopters delivering more evacuees. Lifted the huge triwall crates (4ftx4ft cardboard crate) off of the tugs onto a baggage conveyer belt (the ones they use to send bags up into the belly of the planes). Ran the triwalls up the belt and onto an awaiting hand truck and then made the delivery to the makeshift DMAT supply area. This process, though a bit inventive, worked very well and repeated itself over and over for days. There is absolutely no doubt that these supplies actually saved lives.
  

    After the first week the pace of things slowed way down. More and more troops were pouring in, setting up a tent city that created at least some degree of military structure. But with that structure came the ridiculous protocol that always comes with military structure. To us, we had fought the war and won, evacuating most of the patients. But, with New Orleans Mayor Ray (School Bus) Nagin's cursing plea for federal assistance being repeated on television a hundred times an hour the federal government was in panic mode. Unit after unit poured in setting up operations for a scenario that had already passed. The 82nd Army Airborne arrived and overnight our tugs disappeared and airline trucks were broken into and hot wired. Old military parochialisms kicked in and with every new unit that hit the ground came the same old "We are in charge here" attitude. Everyone under the sun came. Air Force units came in and erected a troop clinic. Environmental units came in and brought tanks of potable water that sat unused, eventually growing moss on the top. An Army field surgery team came in and set up a full, field capable, surgery unit down in the pit, which had long since been emptied. Al Gore showed up with an entire American Airlines jet full of Ensure and MRE (meal ready to eat) packs. John Travolta stopped by in his private jet, and every Senator under the sun from Bill Frist to Ted Kennedy came in to "Ascertain the facts for themselves." President Bush came twice though stayed only a short time both times. Vice President Cheney stopped by but left quickly and Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld, along with the Joint Chiefs of Staff, came  and toured the entire site, shaking all of our hands and congratulating us on a job well done. Waving the flag is what Col. Owen called it. It was a circus to me. All of these assets had been moved into the affected area well after most of the patients had been evacuated to other cities.
  

    Eventually, I withdrew from the process almost all together. The pointless redundancy became maddening to me. Waving the flag or not, most of it was unnecessary. One day, one of the Army Blackhawk pilots asked me if I wanted to go up with them for a tour, and after a nod and a wink from the major (we were not supposed to go up in the helicopters) I accepted the invitation. The city, when viewed from above, was like a lonely, flooded graveyard; a wild west, waterworld, ghost town. Gas leaks were met with sparks from surging electrical grids sending huge fireballs through the roofs of houses. The flood waters contained rainbow colored chemical slicks from nearby petroleum plants, Houses stood lonely and abandoned, some with SOS messages chalked on the roof, others with the chilling red X penned by rescue crews, indicating that there were bodies inside. We spent the whole day surveying the damage and on the way back to the airport in the evening we flew over the New Orleans Independent School District bus yard. The sight we saw there there made me want to vomit. The whole yard was filled with empty school buses! The buses had sat unmoved through Katrina, and stayed unmoved as the levees broke and water filled their undisturbed yard. There were easily over 100 buses there that could have been used to load people into, taking them far away from the LA shoreline; away from Katrinas wrath. Later, I would hear New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin say in an interview, that the city didn’t have enough qualified drivers at the time to use the buses for evacuations. Thousands lost their lives and the best excuse Ray Nagin could come up with was there weren’t enough qualified bus drivers. Residents of New Orleans went on to re-elect Mayor Nagin by a wide margin. I remember just shaking my head.
  
    I wish I could tell you that during my time as a part of of Joint Taskforce Katrina I saw the best side of humanity in New Orleans. I wish I could say that I saw altruism and the kindness of the human spirit all come together to help people in need. I wish I could say that I saw the best in New Orleans shine through. Don't get me wrong, good things did indeed happen. But looking back on my experience, the negatives overshadow the positives. From the stabbings, to the rapes, to the perfectly capable looking man who sat down on the evacuation plane and with a straight face soiled his pants, to the fights, and to the woman who looked at me when I offered her one of my MRE's (meals ready to eat..military field rations) and said "Is that all you got, old MRE's, people can't even live on those." all of those things cultivate a very negative image of New Orleans in my mind. Except for a select few, I saw the people of the cajun center of the universe as generally ungrateful and hostile; the Delta Airlines employees from Louis Armstrong are one huge exception to this generalization. I found that the city that is known for its jazz music and Wild parties had a scary, unattractive, darker side; a side much more cynical that I was prepared for. Since the experience I have often told people that I will never return to the Big Easy. I don't know if this is a true statement, no one really knows where the wind will blow them. As for the New Orleans that I hold in my mind, it will forever be the place where whatever was left of my childhood fantasies of human decency and innocence were finally washed away.