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[Back to index of October articles] Looking Katrina in the eye By David Wood [New Orleans] As a journalist, I’ve covered conflicts around the world for 28 years. But never a hurricane, until Katrina. Coming into New Orleans after the storm, though, I thought: Okay, I’ve been here before. The deafening thwack of helicopter blades and men bellowing on radios. Acrid smoke drifting across a tropical sun. Superheated stink of rotting garbage and flesh. The hopeless crush of exhausted refugees. The pop-pop-pop of sniper fire and men in flak vests racing in response. Elegant shops looted and dark. In an oily puddle, a headless doll and a man’s shoe. It was a war zone, all right. But it wasn’t Mogadishu or Baghdad or Kinshasa or Srebenica. This was America. This was home. Home always has been a place of comfort and safety, a retreat from the unpleasant realities that stalk the rest of the world. And they are realities. I know the vast majority of mankind lives constantly on the edge of peril, looking over their shoulders at the relentless advance of disease, violence, malnutrition, poisoned water and that most insidious enemy, hopelessness. I have watched people in desperation scratching for a little advantage—some education, the chance at a job—that somehow will transport them and their families to safety. I have watched most of them fail, and try again, and fail. Coming home was the best part of a long reporting trip. I’d feel the skinny arms of my kids around my waist, bathe in the glow of their uncomplicated laughter, gaze on their unlined faces as they slept. How miraculous is the freedom from fear. How fiercely I tried to preserve it. And how quickly it can shatter, and with it the fiction that we in Washington labor to sustain: Government protects us. Wading into the eerie, miasmal gloom of the Hyatt hotel in downtown New Orleans a few days after the storm, I came across Mayor C. Ray Nagin. At his fingertips, theoretically, thousands of police officers, sanitation and health workers, fleets of buses and trucks, clean-up crews, bulldozers and road scrapers, housing specialists, food preparation specialists—all the resources of city government. But there he sat, in a sodden gilt chair in the dark, wearing shorts and a smudged T-shirt and sandals, a towel around his neck, attended by two aides and a non-working cell phone. That, post-Katrina, was city government. And the Feds? Not there. Less than a 10-minute slog away through waist-deep water, past drowned and looted cars, smashed windowfronts and stinking debris, the writhing mob at the convention center was all you wanted to know about America even temporarily without government. And yet one sensed, as people flailed through the spreading disaster, something of a solid footing underneath. The volunteers, for one thing. Thousands of them, it seemed, who streamed into the disaster zone assigned or unasked, bringing only their skills and commitment to serve. A fireman from Rhode Island named Nelson Pedro, a member of a disaster medical assistance team, drove from Providence the day before Katrina struck. Why? “This is what I do,” he explained. Others just holding up somehow, with even a bit to give. A middle-aged woman waited in line to be evacuated after four days of living on the floor of the Superdome. She was finishing up a can of tuna fish when the line started to move. Wearily she picked up her tattered shopping bag. As she passed, she looked me in the eye and smiled. “Take care,” she said, meaning it. I had more time with Nicholas Kontodiakos, a young (21) Navy petty officer. He was sprawled in the open door of a Seahawk helicopter wearing his wet suit, unzipped in the heat, and the thousand-yard stare of exhaustion and disbelief. His job as a “swimmer” involved being lowered on a cable to retrieve survivors. In three days he had pulled dozens of people to safety, from rooftops and car tops and boats. Children first, then the elderly and women, while above him the fretting pilots caressed their controls to hold altitude and keep the cable away from trees and power lines and the hoist man peered over the edge, waiting to wrestle the survivors up into the shuddering aircraft. This is rescue at the retail level, one human being at a time. Nick pulled two elderly folks to safety. Shouting, they indicated there was a couple in the house across the street. Back down he went. Swam through neck-deep filth to the house, whose windows and doors were boarded up. He hammered on the door, on the windows. No response. He ripped boards off the window, climbed through. Silence. Water up to his chest. He pushed on through the house, finally found attic stairs with three elderly people huddled on the top step. He punched a hole in the roof, got them out into the downblast of the hovering chopper. Up rose one woman, then another. Now it’s just Nick and a thin, frail old man. Nick puts his arms around the man and signals the hoist man. “I’m scared, I’m scared,” cries the old man, his knees sagging, his head against Nick’s chest. David Wood, Christ Church, Kensington, is national security correspondent for the Newhouse Newspapers. [Back to index of October articles]
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