05-SEP-A-21
ALOFT IN THE DRONING OF THE C-130
“PRIDE OF BALTIMORE” AS I AM STRAPPED IN MY WEB SEATING FOR THE THREE AND A HALF HOUR RETURN FLIGHT TO MARYLAND AFTER TWO FULL EVENTFUL WEEKS IN THE WAKE OF KATRINA
September 18, 2005
I am strapped in next to the only porthole window on the starboard side of this US Air Force C-130 flown by the Maryland National Air Guard, with my only nearby seatmate Colonel Beach, a retired lawyer up in the Washington County area of Western Maryland. He had been the chief of our mission, with a lot of other folk coming by, now turned over to another lawyer, General Lucas and a third Colonel Rich. We are not having much conversation with ear plugs and the droning roar of the aircraft not made for creature comforts. Most of the passengers who have sat in these seats before have left by the back door---a ramp that drops down as they are hooked to a wire overhead and peel out in tumbling into the air before their chutes open. I will not have to get out that way, I presume, since it was estimated that it will be three and a half hours to the Martin State Air Base which I never knew existed before. The Martin is that of Martin Marietta, and there is a museum here that records events that they have turned into part of the nation’s history. There is an immense amount of materiel and manpower around me as I leave with the Air Force Tankers fling in and the C-130's of an Oklahoma and a California contingent shipping out just before us.
We were mustered out after breakfast this morning and had what they had said would be our final roll call (followed by a half dozen more) and went off to the big truck on which was off loaded the big piles of bags and baggage that would be palleted and forklifted to the load officer of this C-130 which had flown in from Gulfport LA after coming from Biloxi before that. I had just learned that, by law, 65% of the National Guard forces and resources must remain in each of the states where they are responsive to their respective governors. With the uncertainties (at least for us) as to where it was and when it would be coming, we had no schedule but the military one, which, as you all know already is simply: “Hurry up and wait!” Since the precious life stuff called my time is something I never want to turn over control of to others, I find it annoying to sacrifice several hours I might be able to do quite a bit with to someone who wants the “twenty foot rule”—wait within a radius of twenty feet for something unknown to happen. I had tried to outline the events the last two weeks after I hauled my stuff down to the lobby to be onloaded on the truck, but we were mustered out for another roll call for the security of those who are repeating “accountability and safety” which translates to there ability to count.
We took that occasion to make what must by now be the thousandth group photo and say goodbye to the realtor cook Robert and Eddy form Emeril’s and the pretty young woman who had helped serve us and all kinds of group photos with the smaller contingents who are making memories of the most memorable event in their lives, according to many who wrote this sentiment in the log book in the lobby which was Xeroxed by the flight nurse captain who passed out a file of our final statistics of the group leaving. We had started from nothing, or worse---and invaded an abandoned hospital and within twenty four hours had it cleaned up requisitioned and nine clinics set up and running---an operation the National Guard had said frankly they could never have pulled off.
Officially, Katrina is now recorded as the worst natural disaster to have ever affected the US, even though its top winds were not as strong as those of Camille, but they cut through very populated areas of the Gulf Coast, and hammered people already in the underbelly of American poverty. This is not to be compared with the people who were also poor and simply disappeared after the Tsunami, but the known destruction despite a rather extensive warning system could minimize loss of life and property, except among those too poor to take refuge on higher inland ground, and the immense response they were counting on to rescue them after the one-two punch of the Hurricane and the backflood from Lake Pontchartrain destroyed most of the homes in the area and a lot of the business, with a lot of very poor people caught up in the neglect and delay in getting help to them. I do not have the implicit faith of every trial lawyer—that anything wrong is someone’s fault, and all we need to do is affix blame, since no one is ever injured or killed by accident, since all of these are preventable if only someone with very deep pockets had done or not down something that was a critical step in the process we would otherwise cal a disaster—but it is true that these people, as I had said before in these pages, lead desperate, devastated, and tragic lives---and that was before the storm. This means that what has come to light through the storm is the fact that poverty is maldistributed in the US and in this land of milk and honey, the storm hit dead center in the soft underbelly of that poverty zone.
As I offloaded my packs at the lobby, I overheard one of the TV shows I never see like Good Morning America or another saying that this might be this single silver lining of the storm, to show that the forty year old War on Poverty of LBJ had been forgotten. There was a lot of progress for the elderly poor, but for the majority of those who have not been able to get it together, there is a rather tough life off the bottom of the American dream. One part that touched the lives of the majority of the volunteers on this aircraft through their TV sets was the immediacy of the TV coverage of people hanging on roofs or piers for days on end, without apparent attempts by anyone anywhere to send aid. Now, I know, almost by definition, that a disaster is NOT something you prepare for, since if that were possible the outcome would not be disastrous. But, it is one thing to look around to see who is at fallout, or what agencies had their budgets cut some decades back, or whether some high level official should be “chain sawed off” as the outspoken Jefferson Parish President Broussard had said about FEMA or other Federal response officials (it is he, by the way, who had been so effusive in his praise and gratitude to the Governor and people of Maryland and specifically to this—his Pride and Joy Pet Project—the volunteers of the instantly assembled Operation Lifeline) and quite another thing to do something to directly help those afflicted. Line me up with those who are ready and able to help directly rather than to decry what someone somewhere else should have done that would have prevented all this—a specious claim in any event.
It was the Parish President who had the tee shirts and caps printed up overnight somewhere in what is left of New Orleans to give each of us. It is the Maryland Defense Force that has presented each of us with the Maryland Emergency Response Ribbon. And, it is a large number of the good hearted people of all states everywhere including some international ones who have thanked us for doing what they should have liked to do if they had been able to do it as we certainly were.
The militarism of this mission had the quick command performance of a full-speed ahead mission, but it contained the inefficiencies of the military mindset as well. I cannot help but think what I could do with this much manpower and materiel to overtake the health care system of some of the areas where I work, such as the Sudan, where hundreds of operations were done out of the supplies I could pack into a few duffel bags from my basement. The conclusion about the differential resources devoted to this disaster versus the ones I have been working in abroad is no doubt that the TV coverage was better for this one and the pressure that built up from endless continual air time coverage got to the American people before they wearied of this story. I have been down here two weeks, and the President of the US has been here four times in that interval, with plans to return next week. He may come in a little less inconvenient conveyance, and may have a few more resources at his disposal and may be able to make a few more things happen by fiat orders than I have been able to do, but each of us were HERE, first and foremost, and did what we could and managed to turn around a desperate situation with what resources came “to hand” in our liberal procurement policies (now being backfilled with replacements) who will pack up the operations and shut it down in the next week.
It was good that I could be here. And, now, I have to return through the Martin State Air Base toward the disasters I have left behind on a smaller scale and with more ordered resources with which to respond to them in making up what I have neglected in my absence.