Dispatches from the Edge: A Memoir of War, Disasters, and Survival (15 page)

Writing in my hotel room in Maradi. We end up working around the clock. Shooting all day, writing and editing stories well into the night.
RADHIKA CHALASANI/GETTY IMAGES FOR CNN

Broadcasting from a flooded highway on-ramp in New Orleans, September 2005.
RADHIKA CHALASANI/GETTY IMAGES FOR CNN

Beaumont, Texas, September 2005.
Hurricane Rita arrives on shore.
JENSEN WALKER/GETTY IMAGES FOR CNN

THE NEXT DAY,
Saturday, I leave for New Orleans. It’s only about fifty miles from Waveland, but the drive takes several hours because of roadblocks and traffic. Our team has grown over the last few days, and when we line up to convoy to Louisiana we have at least fifteen vehicles. CNN has sent trucks from Atlanta with food and gas so we can operate independently for weeks. They’ve also sent two RVs so we’ll have a place to sleep.

New Orleans is largely underwater. The evacuation of the Superdome has just been completed. After days of waiting and inexplicable delays, buses arrived to take the stranded to Houston’s Astrodome. The Convention Center has just started being evacuated. Medical tents have been set up across the street, and helicopters land nearby to shuttle the most vulnerable evacuees to the airport and shelters in Baton Rouge. Coast Guard helicopters continue to fly over the city, occasionally hovering over flooded neighborhoods to pick up people still stranded in their homes.

CNN has set up a base at the New Orleans airport, and we briefly stop there to pick up some gear—waders and handheld satellite phones. When we enter the city, it feels like we’re crossing a frontier. The farther we go the more we find stripped away. Maps are useless. We double-back from dead ends and slowly find our way along the water’s edge. We head toward the Lower Ninth Ward.

A FEW BLOCKS
from Bourbon Street, we stop at a police station to borrow a boat. A cowboy crew of cops has been holed up there for days. A hand-drawn sign on a sheet of cardboard hangs over the entrance.
FORT APACHE
, it says. That’s what they’ve renamed the station.

“We call it Fort Apache ’cause we’re surrounded by water and Indians,” says a cop with a cowboy hat and swimming goggles around his neck.

“Why are you wearing swimming goggles?” I ask.

“Because if things get really hot, I’m just going to swim out of here.” I can’t tell if he’s serious or not. I don’t think he knows, either.

I feel like a character in a Joseph Conrad novel. I’ve turned the bend in the river and found an isolated tribe armed to the teeth. They’ve been out on their own too long and are dazed by the horror.

“We’re survivors, man. We’re survivors,” a young African American cop tells me, clutching a shotgun. He’s talking to me but stares far away. “It’s a war zone, man, but we’re alive. The criminal element tried to get us down but they couldn’t get us. We stayed together. They thought they could get us, but they can’t. That’s how it’s going down.”

He graduated from the police academy just four weeks ago. “Nothing they showed us in the academy could have prepared us for this,” he says, slowly shaking his head, “but you gotta do what you gotta do.”

Tricked out like a storm scavenger, one cop wears a Kukri tucked in his belt. It’s a thick knife with a curved blade, used by Gurkhas in Nepal. I had one when I was a kid. It’s said that a Gurkha can split a man from his collar bone to his waist with one slice of a Kukri. I don’t ask this guy if he’s ever used it.

The police say they’ve been taking incoming fire the last couple of nights. Now they’ve posted snipers on the roofs of surrounding buildings. “Shoot to kill, man. Shoot to kill,” one cop says, smiling.

They loan us their boat so we can go out into the Lower Ninth Ward. Actually, it’s CNN’s boat. Chris Lawrence, a reporter for CNN, brought it into New Orleans the day after Katrina and loaned it to these cops so they could rescue their families and others.

“Shouldn’t the city have had some boats ready for you guys to use?” I ask one of the sergeants.

He just stares at me.

“Don’t get me started on the list of things this city should have done,” another cop says, spitting. “You’d think they would preposition some vehicles or some extra ammunition or guns, but they didn’t. There was no go-to point if disaster happens, no word on what to do. Nothing was in place. Nothing.”

The French Quarter wasn’t flooded, but it’s a short drive from it to the water’s edge. We climb into a pickup full of police, all of us huddled in the back. Guns stick out from all directions. It’s the first time these police officers have been out on patrol. We drive down St. Claude Avenue, strangers in a strange land. A few residents glance at us as we pass. They move slowly, still shell-shocked by the storm. Some carry gallon jugs of water. They’re searching for food. I squint, and for a second I’m back in Somalia, riding in a pickup with a half-dozen gunmen. No rules, no future, no past. Only this moment, this feeling. It’s gone as soon as I think of it.

“Watch the windows at the school,” one of the cops says, and they all spin around, pointing their guns at a large three-story building we’re passing on our right.

“That’s Frederick Douglass,” one of the officers explains. “It’s been taken over.” He doesn’t say by whom, but he’s clearly nervous, unsure what kind of reception we might receive in this neighborhood.

Many of the windows in the school are broken, and the front doors are wide open. At the top of the building, carved into the façade it reads,
FRANCIS T. NICHOLLS PUBLIC HIGH SCHOOL
. The name sounds familiar, though I can’t place it at first. Once we’re about a block away, I remember: My father graduated from high school in New Orleans. Francis T. Nicholls was his old school.

MY FATHER’S FAMILY
moved to New Orleans in 1943. He was sixteen years old. His mother came because there were jobs in the city and because her two married daughters had already moved here with their husbands. My father lived with his mother and five of his seven siblings in a ground-floor apartment in the Ninth Ward, a few blocks from Francis T. Nicholls High School.

My grandmother got a job at Higgens-Hughes, a plant that manufactured boats for the war effort. My grandfather didn’t like New Orleans, and had stayed in Mississippi, trying to keep the farm going. He couldn’t find workers, though, because so many men had left to fight or to labor in factories. When he finally decided he couldn’t keep the farm running, he leased the land and got a job as a fireman for the Mississippi railroad.

My father fell in love with New Orleans from the start. It seemed to him a foreign and mysterious city. He saw his first opera in New Orleans and his first ballet as well. Compared with Quitman, it was like living on another planet.

He graduated from Francis T. Nicholls in 1944. In his scrapbook, I found a clipping from a New Orleans paper describing the graduation ceremony.

Next to the article, my father had pasted a picture of his senior class. The school was segregated then. In the photo, the boys all wear ties and vests, the girls knee-length dresses. My father stands off to the side, a smile on his face. He drew an arrow above his head, and wrote
ME
on the side of the page.

It made me smile. When I was five I’d done the same thing. My parents threw a party for Charlie Chaplin when he returned for the first time to the United States after living in Switzerland for some twenty years. I was photographed shaking his hand, and the picture was printed in several New York papers. I cut it out and taped it into my photo album. Above my head I’d drawn an arrow and written in big, bold letters,
ME
.

I WAS NINE
years old when my father brought me to New Orleans for the first time. I don’t remember where we stayed, but I know it was in the French Quarter. I loved Bourbon Street: the music, the lights, the sidewalk performers. It seemed so taboo, so adult, dangerous but just slightly so, like a dirty Disneyland.

We went to visit the places of his youth, though many of them had disappeared. The streetcar he used to take to the First Baptist Church was gone; so was the two-story apartment building where he’d lived.

He was surprised to see Francis T. Nicholls’s name still carved into the façade of his old school. Nicholls had been a governor of Louisiana in the late 1800s and was a well-known racist. In New Orleans, however, they never erase history.

I have pictures of us strolling the streets of the French Quarter, sitting on a stoop spooning gobs of cherry-colored ice into our mouths. We went to a cemetery to visit a famous witch’s grave. The old headstone was freshly marked with white-chalk crosses left by those who still believed in her spells.

Somewhere on Bourbon Street we posed for a picture dressed in period costumes—a sepia snapshot I still have to this day. (During the Civil War, my father’s ancestors fought on the Confederate side, and my mother had relatives who’d been Union soldiers, so to me the Civil War had always been a battle between “mommy’s side” and “daddy’s side.”) In the photo, I’m clutching a shotgun; he’s in a Confederate uniform, his hand resting on a sword. I didn’t see it then, but looking at the photo now, I see the fear in his eyes. He’d already had one heart attack, the year before. He must have known that his heart was weakened; perhaps he felt it with each beat. A year later he was dead.

NOT LONG AFTER
we launch the boat in the Lower Ninth Ward, we pass by the body of a woman floating facedown behind a house. A few feet away, on a garage rooftop, sits a box of unopened MREs (Meals Ready to Eat), emergency food dropped from a chopper trying to help. A few blocks from the dead woman, we find the body of a man sprawled on top of a car. His corpse is swollen and discolored.

Nearby I see a large white dog sitting in a partially submerged tree. There are dogs everywhere—stranded on steps, barking at the boat, floating on suitcases in slicks of oil. I see a dog lying on something; it appears to be dead. I ask Chris, my cameraman, to get a tight shot of its face. Both of us get startled when the dog suddenly opens its eyes. Excited, I decide to wade over to it, to give it some clean water, but as soon as I step out of the boat, I sink to my chest. I’m wearing waders, but they go up only so far, and water pours into them, destroying the microphone transmitter attached to my waist. The dog is scared by the sudden movement, and swims off.

THE NEXT DAY
we are back in the boat, watching a Coast Guard helicopter prepare to pluck two people from their front porch. We shout at one another to steady the boat. The chopper’s heavy rotors blow dirty water in our mouths, our eyes. The water is black, filled with gasoline and oil, human waste and human remains, the carcasses of countless animals.

A boat filled with rescuers from a nearby parish tries to signal the chopper that they can pick up the two people on the porch. The rescuers have no radio communication, however, and are invisible to the helicopter pilot above. They watch the Coast Guard diver being lowered into the water, shake their heads and motor on. There’s no coordination, and they’re angry.

We wait until the chopper flies off, then check the house to make sure no one else is there. Drenched with the filthy water, we motor back to dry land to rinse out our eyes and disinfect our skin.

None of us talks about what we’ve seen. We focus on how to put the story together, which pictures will work, which sound bites to use. I suppose it’s easier that way. Each of us deals with the dead differently. Some don’t look, pretending they’re not there. Others get angry, sickened by what they see.

ONE DAY, I
run into a paramedic who launches into a lecture about why corpses in water float (gases build up inside the body’s cavities and get trapped) and why they sometimes develop post-mortem head injuries (they get knocked about by the water and debris). I must appear interested, because he describes in great detail how shoulder muscles can rupture when a drowning person begins to convulse, and how coroners often find injuries to a victim’s hands and fingertips, because when they drown, they try to grab hold of something as they die.

“There was this one body, we called him Harry the Swimmer,” a soldier from the Eighty-second Airborne tells me, shaking his head. “He was just floating around, and every day we’d have to check to find out where he’d floated to. Harry the Swimmer. We finally tied his shoelaces to a stop sign, so he wouldn’t float away.”

I write it down, and it sounds callous and cruel, but you can’t judge until you’ve been out there, day after day, in the heat and stench.

“You find yourself making weird jokes to stay sane,” the soldier tells me, embarrassed he’s already said too much.

AT DUSK ON
Sunday, I meet a young psychiatry resident from Tulane University. His name is Jeffrey Rouse and he’s been treating cops and first-responders at a makeshift clinic set up in the Sheraton Hotel by another doctor named Greg Henderson.

When the storm hit, Rouse got his family out, then came back to the city with bandages and medicine. He also brought his nine-millimeter Glock, which he still wears strapped to his waist.

“I was not coming back to this town without this,” he says, putting his hand on the Glock. “I have a sworn oath to help. And the last thing I want to do is hurt somebody. But I had to get here to help.”

Rouse is clearly exhausted, shaken by what he’s seen, and what he hasn’t. “Where was the help for the helpers?” he asks. “People have died when they didn’t need to. If a psychiatrist has to come in on his own with a gun and a backpack to help, that’s not a failure of an individual, that’s a failure of the entire system.

“This is the only chance we get for a test run if something even more horrible happens or something as horrible happens with a nuclear device in this country. And we botched this one. We won’t get a chance to botch it again.”

THERE’S PLENTY OF
blame to go around. What began as a natural disaster has become a man-made one. Nowhere is that clearer than at the New Orleans Convention Center.

“This is where hell opened its mouth,” Dr. Greg Henderson says, standing on a garbage-strewn street outside the Convention Center one week after the storm. “You remember that scene in
Gone With the Wind,
after the battle of Atlanta, where they just pull back with all the bodies lying in the street? That’s exactly what it looked like outside the Convention Center, the entire front of it was covered with people just lying there.”

Dr. Henderson is a pathologist. He was in New Orleans for a conference at the Ritz Carlton Hotel when the storm struck. Rather than flee the city, he decided to stay and see if he could help. He approached several New Orleans police officers who told him there was no clinic for first-responders, so he decided to set one up in the Sheraton Hotel on Canal Street.