From Reporting for Duty
Six days after Hurricane Katrina pummeled the Gulf Coast, the American Red Cross had still not reached many who needed them most -- 10,000 residents who stayed behind in New Orleans. Following the storm's landfall on Monday, August 29, authorities had barred all traffic into the city; there were reports of looting, arson, even rapes and murders. In the flood zone, rotting bodies, sewage, and an appalling blend of chemicals commingled to create a revolting and dangerous toxic stew.Like hundreds of others, I went to the stricken area to bring supplies and comfort to people who had been trapped in this hell since the day of the storm. The closest I could get was Abita Springs, about 35 miles away. "Don't expect to get into New Orleans anytime soon," a Red Cross worker cautioned. "It's too dangerous, and we never ask our people to put themselves in harm's way."
Really? The Red Cross? Didn't they dodge bullets on battlefields and perform daring rescues? "You're going to Spirit of America," the woman told me. "It's at the St. Tammany Parish government complex. They'll put you to work in the yard."
Louisiana is divided into parishes, a vestige of its French colonial past. St. Tammany, one of the largest, is 854 square miles of pine and oak forests, and small, relatively well-to-do neighborhoods. Many of its residents commute to New Orleans via the 24-mile toll causeway that cuts across Lake Pontchartrain.
Most of the communities of St. Tammany had escaped flooding. But Katrina's 150-mph winds had knocked over so many trees that the heavily wooded area looked like a giant game of pickup sticks. It was stifling hot, and there was no electricity, running water or phones.
On the sprawling parking lots of the government complex stood a semi trailer converted into a mobile kitchen. This was Spirit of America. My job was to off-load rigs filled with cases of bottled water and food -- everything from military Meals Ready to Eat (MREs) to cookies and noodles -- sort it all and load it onto ambulance-style Emergency Response Vehicles (ERVs), which would transport it to feeding points and shelters in the parish.
When an ERV came wheeling into the yard, the driver would throw open the doors, and we would push food items like salesmen. "Want some bananas? How many boxes? How about MREs? Take four cases."
The ERVs always returned empty.
The Sacrifice
Barbara Ham, a Red Cross volunteer from Arkansas, called her family from the hurricane zone and got gut-wrenching news. Her grown son had just backed over his own four-year-old with his truck. "Is he okay?" Barbara asked, but before her son could answer, the call was lost. Ham got in her car and started heading home. She repeatedly dialed her cell phone as she drove. Finally, she got through."He's going to be okay, Mom," her son said.
"Do you need me there?"
"Yes, I do. But those people need you more."
So Barbara turned back around.
We were 150 strong and growing every day, working shoulder to shoulder, sharing small talk about our real jobs and families. Pastor Mike Mau from Benicia, California, a husky former jazz drummer in his early 50s, often sang to himself as he moved heavy boxes around inside a freezer truck or sorted supplies on pallets. The work seemed to give him deep satisfaction. Mau had jumped on a plane hoping to join search-and-rescue efforts or comfort victims. Instead, he ended up here, in this closed-off compound lifting boxes of food.
Gypsy La'More, a stunning 25-year-old event planner from Sacramento, rose every day before 5 a.m., and was usually still flitting cheerfully from task to task at 10 or 11 o'clock at night. She didn't believe in breaks. Yet she really wanted to work in the evacuee shelters, doing the mental health counseling she was trained for.
"Then why don't you try to do it?"
"Because this is what I've been asked to do."
It was Pastor Mike who said: "These days everybody wants to be a big deal. But sometimes it's a big deal to be a little deal."
I thought I knew what Mike meant, but I, too, was craving direct contact, so I arranged to go on an ERV run to the community of Folsom to give hot meals to some 400 people.
Feeding Station
Located in the northern part of St. Tammany, Folsom is a working-class community. Here, thousands of downed trees blocked roadways and cut power, leaving the 600 residents desperate for food, water, gas and medicine.Most people around Folsom rode out the storm in their homes. Now they were queued up before me. They were hungry, hot, thirsty and worried. Those whose homes had been crushed were left to wonder at the random nature of a disaster that spared a neighbor's house just ten yards away. Gathered around our ERV at a derelict Mobil station, they complained angrily that the Red Cross hadn't shown up until now.
Debbie Jackson, a drawn, tearful woman, told how her husband had suffered a blood clot during the hurricane; so many trees were in the roadway that her neighbors had to form a chain-saw brigade to cut their way clear to the hospital, where he underwent emergency surgery. Ervin Guichard, whose diabetic mother was wheelchair bound, kept trying to call his daughter in New Orleans, but, he explained, "the 504 area code is nonexistent."
Then there were the Carpenters, Elaine and Dell. On Elaine's forearm was a medical contraption I'd never seen before -- two sharp metal pins about nine inches apart boring down through her flesh and into the bone.
"We've lost everything," Dell said. "Everything. Our home is destroyed."
"Did you injure your arm before or after the hurricane?" I asked Elaine.
"Before," she replied through tears.
She told me her doctor had prescribed a pain drug, but when she brought it home, it turned out to be for cholesterol. Katrina arrived before she could iron out the mistake, and now here she was, five days later, in agony, standing in line to receive a Styrofoam tray with a serving of beans and rice and two bottles of water.
The Hot Zone
A group nearby called Veterans for Peace was planning a blitz into New Orleans. They had supplies they intended to distribute, come hell or high water. I wanted in. Their leader was a hyperkinetic chain smoker who told me to call him James Anonymous.That morning he and a couple of young colleagues had loaded up his Honda Element with food and water, and had simply not stopped at the first police roadblock into New Orleans, despite much heated shouting and swearing on the part of the cops. Like that, they were in the forbidden city.
They spent the day doing reconnaissance, identifying areas of great need and making contacts to help avoid riots caused by desperate crowds too large for their food shipment.
I arranged to go with them the next day, and even scored supplies from Spirit of America to distribute with the vets.
With my rental car riding low, I followed James up to the first roadblock. To my relief, he did not blow through it and instead sweet-talked the Army guard into letting us in.
The city was abandoned. We could drive the wrong way up one-way streets, or even on the interstate. There was debris everywhere, and the smell of death. Nearly every storefront had been emptied. Interstate 10 and Veterans Boulevard had become boat ramps instead of highways, plunging steeply into the filthy water.
On Veterans Boulevard we met two cousins, Reggie and José Ford, young men who'd fled the hurricane and were returning to check on Reggie's apartment in the 9th Ward. Reggie is a painter of some local renown; José had been managing a brew pub until the storm hit. Reggie faced Katrina's aftermath stoically; José kept up his own spirits through humor. They agreed to act as our guides.
José jumped in my car, Reggie climbed into the Element, and we made our way to Tchoupitoulas Street, where the day before James Anonymous had found a small apartment complex ideal for our relief effort. It was a squalid brick building with a crumbling concrete court. Beneath the stairwell, a thin-haired heroin addict writhed in the throes of withdrawal. A man in combat fatigues introduced himself as Mr. Thomas Brown, preacher man. I carried a load of MREs and water into his apartment, which was crammed with odds and ends of the mad: a grotesque rubber clown mask plopped on some pressure-canned tomatoes, a tall stack of cheap spiral-bound calendars, piles and piles of magazines and cardboard boxes.
We moved on to Reggie's 9th Ward neighborhood, a depressing cluster of small boarded-up homes. The empty streets were littered with broken glass, shingles, and rotting garbage. There must have been dead bodies and animals in some of the homes, judging by the smell. A city bus sat at an odd angle in an intersection, commandeered and hastily abandoned.
Our passage to Reggie's stoop was blocked by a shallow canal of filthy water. Despite a makeshift bridge we threw together, we all fell in. Reggie, relieved that his house was intact, scooped up some of his valuables. Then we waded back across the moat to look for more people to help.
There was flooding on parts of a main road called Elysian Fields, so we drove along the median until trees blocked our way. A green minivan stood with its side door open; beside it, a man sat on two paint cans. He wore only a pair of shorts, and held in his hand a bloodied walking stick. Fresh blood covered his chest and forearms, and there were flecks of it on his forehead.
"Somebody just tried to kill me," he wheezed. He could barely speak. "I had to hit him with this stick."
He was sitting on the cans when a man tried to enter his car. He cracked the guy over the head with his stick, then punched him in the mouth. "These are his teeth marks on my hand," he said.
"How did you know he was trying to kill you?" I asked.
"He was trying to get into the van."
"Did he have a weapon?"
"No."
"Did he come at you?"
"No."
Ghost Town
We gave the rest of our food and water to holdouts and squatters on Bourbon Street. I then parted company with Reggie and José, and boarded a skiff with a local volunteer on a search mission. It got dark, and we turned around before we could locate a group of people reportedly stranded on a rooftop. We navigated by street signs inches above the putrid water, passing homes submerged to the eaves, and dogs stranded on car roofs, barking hoarsely to be spared. The first body we saw was hideously bloated and hooked to debris.
In darkness and silence, we returned to St. Tammany Parish.
The Smell of Death
The Red Cross had finally worked out a serious supply-chain problem, and business was now booming at Spirit of America.A pre-law student named Tim had come down from Memphis to offer his energies wherever they were needed and ended up with the Veterans for Peace. He now joined me at the Red Cross hub, working in the yard. Tim leaped into the job as if possessed. Like the rest of us, he had come hoping to work on the front lines with victims; now he was reveling in the thankless behind-the-scenes tasks I had taken for granted.
That afternoon, we drove back to New Orleans. Reggie and José guided us to a neighborhood called Algiers Point, where we met a community leader named Malik, who was housing a handful of activists hoping to come up with a plan to feed locals. When I mentioned the Red Cross, one of them snorted and cursed the organization. "Where have they been? What good have they done?"
I felt my hackles go up, thinking of my friends, good people toiling in a sweltering parking lot. "In St. Tammany Parish," I said, "they put out 17,000 meals yesterday."
"What's 17,000 meals?"
"It's 17,000 more than zero," I said, fuming. I wanted to leap off the porch and break the guy's nose.
But I calmed down and continued to talk with Malik, who was outraged that 18 bodies were baking on the dry streets of Algiers. "Why can't the soldiers pick them up? I'll show you one right around the corner."
He took us to the health clinic where a man had been lying facedown in the parking lot for six days. Someone had put a white cotton throw over him, and a windblown piece of tin roofing over that. Nearby was a leafless sapling with several pairs of latex gloves hanging from its branches like surreal fruit. Malik pulled on two of the gloves and peeled back the body's crude covering. Above us a helicopter thwupped as we stood numbly with our hands over our noses and mouths. "If this had been a white man," Malik asked, "would he still be lying here six days later?"
It was almost 6 p.m., curfew time, and we could feel the city starting to change. In the fading light, more troops began patrolling, from the National Guard to the elite 82nd Airborne. And helicopters flew lower, washing us with wind.
Curfew
We needed to leave, and now. José, Tim and I headed for our cars, and I reached for my keys. They were gone. I dug into my pockets, ran my hands across the seats, then sent Tim to ask Reggie if he had them. He'd just rounded the corner when I found them. I shouted, "Tim! I have the keys!"When I turned back, everything had changed. The street was now crawling with soldiers and police. A mustached man in a flak jacket aimed a shotgun at José's chest. At least 12 others pointed M16s at us.
The mustached man was screaming, "Do you understand that looters will be shot?"
We had our hands raised. "Get your hands in the air! Higher! Who are you? One of you come forward!"
"I'm a journalist," I said. "I'm going to walk toward you."
When I got to him, he pointed the shotgun at my chest. I did not like the look in his eye; he looked afraid.
"Get your hands up higher!"
I didn't think they could go any higher without getting on my tiptoes.
"Now very slowly lift your shirt up."
In slow motion, I did as I was told.
"Tell me who you are and what the hell you're doing here."
I explained the situation, showed him my press pass, and the fear left his eyes. He told us to get out of Dodge, fast.
This is what New Orleans has become. A storm hits, the city floods, and humanity is tested. Black turns against white, white against black. Latex gloves dangle from a sapling beside a human body decomposing at the door of the health clinic. There are orders to shoot to kill unarmed people caught stealing. Men beat other men with sticks for looking into their cars.
The story of New Orleans is unfinished, but this I believe, because I have seen it: For every looter who would shoot at a rescue boat, there are a thousand stranded victims who would share their last bottle of water. For every ideologue who denigrates the efforts of hard-working volunteers, there are a hundred people who will sacrifice to help others -- even foregoing a visit to an injured grandchild to deliver food to those in need. For every person despairing in their loss, there are dozens returning with humor and the hope to rebuild. Yes, there is confusion, corruption, incompetence and fear. But there is also human goodness, and that is what will endure.