Katrina

Howdy all,

Just wanted to let my friends at smc know that I returned Friday from serving the past two weeks with my National Guard Unit in New Orleans. I'm safe and still healthy but will forever remember what I saw there. This post is a bit long but tells the story of what I saw. If you have the time, read on.

On the first day of our mission we arrived in Belle Chasse, a suburb south of New Orleans. Our landing point was a Naval Reserve air field that despite suffering heavy damage and having no running water or power had been set up as a makeshift arrival point for most of the National Guard units from out of state who came to help out thier neighbor state of Louisiana. The airfield was probably the busiest it had ever been as scores of rescue helicopters, C130 cargo planes, air refuelers and nearly every other variety of military transportatoin arrived on the scene to help. I have never seen such a massive number of military vehicles. Every inch of available land on the base had troops setting up makeshift camps for the night before embarking on thier missions. Vast quantities of supplies were arriving with the thousands of troops. To put it mildly, the infrastucture of the base was unable to cope with the demands put upon it. Only a handfull of forklifts were still serviceable after the storm and were running 24 hours a day hustling endless pallets of MRE's (meals ready to eat) and bottled drinking water to feed the thousands of troops moving throughout the region. My unit, the 147th fighter wing from Houston, Texas, was forced to sleep under the stars on the flight line for two days as we awaited transportation into the city. There were simply no vehicles to move us to a position to
begin helping.

Finally, at around noon on day three, two charter busses arrived and carried us to our destination. We were to set up camp in the devistated New Orleans Convention center. When we arrived, the building still had not been cleared of the thousands of "displaced citizens" (I call them that because our command believed the term "refugee" to be too degrading and not PC). As the military police emptied the building we waited in a riverside warehouse for several hours. Finally, as the last of the "displaced citizens" were cleared out, we began moving in to our new home.

The scene at the convention center was utter devistation. This destruction was not caused by the hurricane, but by the thousands of people who where camped there waiting for help. Words cannot describe what I saw. Forgive me if this is offensive to anyone, but I believe that if most anyone who believes in creationism were to take a tour of the convention center as we found it, they would give more credence to the theory of evolution and reevaluate whether or not we are descended from animals. Had I not known otherwise, I would have been sure that the devistation of the lobby had been caused by non-human creatures. There were piles of human waste (poop to anyone not knowing what I am talking about) occupying nearly every square yard of carpet on all three floors of the mile long building. It was smeared and thrown on the walls in a fashion reminiscant of what I have seen at zoos in primate cages.

There were a total of four people found dead in the convention center, some murdered by thier fellow man. One of these I stepped over in the dark not knowing what it was. I couldn't even detect the smell of a days-old rotting body because the smell in the air from the waste was overpowering even that. I really don't know how I kept my lunch.

My unit quickly set up our living area at the back of Hall G and began cleaning the acres of concrete floor we would be living on. We shoveled up the piles of debris in our new home and bleached the floors to nullify the biohazardous waste. We also sealed all the doors around us to help prevent the incredibly strong odor of urine and feces from infiltrating our living area. A small crew of mechanics, including myself, set out to commandeer fork lifts to move our supplies. We successfully hot wired about a dozen and began husting supplies into the convention center for the thousands of troops that were about to call it home.

The next week and half were spent on actual missions to secure the city. Occasionally, I would play "bus driver" and haul crews in a Viet Nam era "deuce and a half" truck to thier posts around the city. As we drove through the flood waters, I was dumbstruck by the devistation. The city that I had loved and visited often was a vacant and submerged ruin. My unit
was tasked basically as a securty guard service with M-16 rifiles. I spent some days guarding the crews that were busily rebuilding the levees. I spent others keeping the media away from Memorial Hospital where the staff, in a hurry to save themselves, left 45 people to die.

Spending 12 hours a night guarding that hospital left me a lot of time to contemplate human nature. I couldn't help but tear up as the thought came to me that our society might be in real trouble. 45 souls perished alone in thier hospital rooms when the people, who were supposed to be care givers, saved thier own skins and forgot thier duty to protect and save life. Nobody even took the time on thier way out to let rescue workers know that these people needed help. A helicopeter could easily have reached the landing pad on top of the building and saved many lives - it never arrived. I can only imagine the last days of the now-dead patients.

I'm not an expert on anything relating to what makes people act the way they do. I can only observe and form my own opinions. In driving busses for A&M, I have all been cut off countless times by people who risk the safety of everyone on my bus so that they can get home five seconds sooner. It's the same "me first" attitude that was seen at the hospital and it is becoming pervasive in socitey today. Fortunately, in seeing the efforts of
the rescue workers and countless volunteers manning the shelters, I am relieved to know that "me first" isn't the only attitude left in society and I know that kindness and compassion can still exist in the darkest hour.

Friday I was flown back to Houston so that I may try to salvage what's left of this semester. After spending two weeks without running water I was overjoyed at the simple sight of my own bathroom and enormously glad to have a meal that didn't come from a sealed plastic pouch. Funny how only two weeks in #### can make you appreciate the simple things in life. I look forward to returning to New Orleans but I think I'll wait a year or so. I'm
certain the city will recover and be even better than before.

Thanks to all of you who kept us in your thoughts and prayers while we were down there.

	Author	Topic: Katrina (Read 19181 times)
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