Who: Jennifer Sardam\r\nWhat: Hurricane Katrina\r\nWhen: October 2005\r\nWhere: New Orleans\r\n\r\nCasper resident, Army journalist covers post-Katrina operations in La.\r\n\r\nBy Jennifer Sardam\r\n\r\nI stood in the middle of New Orleans\' Ninth Ward, one of many areas decimated by Hurricane Katrina. Raising the Nikon D1 camera slung around my neck, I began to shoot rapidly. The mud-coated sea of debris around me made it hard to believe I was still in my own country.\r\n\r\nThe eerie calm of the Ninth Ward belied the turmoil that had rendered it this way only a month before. Sludge-covered cars with busted windows, some teetering atop others, littered the landscape amidst scattered masses of splintered boards that were once homes. A barge had crossed over into the neighborhood when the adjacent levee broke from flooding. Its monstrous bulk bore down upon a school bus like a symbol of the chaos that placed it there. It was hard to accept the scene I saw before me as reality. It was worse than anything I\'d seen on the news. I was sent there to document it as an Army National Guard journalist, but it was hard to imagine I could do it the justice that reality did so well.\r\n\r\nNotification of my deployment had come only days before, and it had taken me by surprise. I was running the exhibit booth with my boss at a conference on a clear day in Jackson, Wyoming, when my cell phone rang. A friend from my Wyoming Army unit told me we had to be at the Laramie armory, bags packed and ready the next Wednesday morning. My mission as a member of the Wyoming Army National Guard\'s 111th Press Camp was to provide coverage of U.S. Army and Air National Guard units participating in hurricane relief operations. Until that point, my knowledge of the damage done by Katrina came from the devastating images I saw coming from the major news networks, flashes of distant reality neatly framed in my television. My everyday thoughts at that time were focused toward personal financial concerns and projects due at work. I never thought I\'d find myself standing in the center of the hurricane\'s aftermath in a place that seemed a world away from home in Casper, Wyo.\r\n\r\nI\'d been in the active-duty Army for seven years and spent almost five more years in the Army National Guard. For the last seven years of my military service, I\'ve been a print and photojournalist working in the public affairs field. I assumed that one day I would be called to deploy. Yet, for all of this time, after being stationed in Alaska and Germany, and taking part in military exercises in countries as far away as Korea, this was my first real-world mission. I always thought if I were ever mobilized, it would be to go to Iraq. Yet I found myself on American soil helping people just like you and me.\r\n\r\nMy journey began at the Rock Springs Army National Guard armory, where I joined my unit and others in the Wyoming Guard. During two days there, we received hepatitis A and B and tetanus vaccinations, ensured all of our military documentation was up to date, and loaded our duffel bags and other cargo onto a pallet that accompanied us on a C-130 aircraft to Alexandria, La. Once there, we shuffled through a never-ending line of other arriving Guardsmen from many different states to get chow, and then settled into enormous tents where we battled mosquitoes with bug repellent, and walked a short distance over dirt to get to the showers.\r\n\r\nAfter a few days of the usual military \"hurry up and wait,\" we headed for The Big Easy.\r\n\r\nThere we bedded down on cots in an open hangar at Naval Air Station Joint Reserve Base New Orleans, located on the outskirts of the city. We continued to fight the overbearing humidity and heat there with huge fans working overtime. It was an improvement over accommodations in Alexandria, over three hours northwest of New Orleans. Eventually, during our last two weeks there, we moved all of our belongings to the temporary lodging area that everyone called the \"tent city.\" We set up a makeshift wall to provide privacy between the men and women in our unit, and it was \"Home, Sweet Home\" until our departure.\r\n\r\nMy other seven unit members and I spent one month there on the base, working out of a crowded office to write, edit and transmit our stories for publication. It was a bit of a transition getting used to Army living again, but after a few days it no longer fazed me. After a full day\'s work, I was too exhausted to care where I lay my head at night. I thrived on the feeling that I was part of something greater than myself and found myself fueled with excitement over getting the chance to really exercise my journalistic skills. I wanted this job from the day I enlisted in the Army. But print journalist was a hard-to-come-by military occupational specialty in a small job field when I joined, and it wasn\'t until I\'d served four years active duty as a radio communications specialist, that I finally attained it.\r\n\r\nSoldiers from a Maryland public affairs unit had already been on the base for two weeks when we got there. They took us out on the first day to familiarize us in finding our way around the city. It was important that they did so, because once they left, it was up to us to get around in the communities to do our stories. I didn\'t know what to expect. I hung on to every word our guides said, shaking my head in disbelief as they related the things they\'d seen. As I did so, I stared out the vehicle window in awe at the passing destruction. I saw enormous uprooted trees, ragged downed power lines, and a high-rise hotel with blown out windows. I saw a house where someone had marked \"HELP\" twice in bright, red paint on the roof, and I silently hoped whoever made the request was found in time.\r\n\r\nMy previous concerns quickly paled in comparison to the wreckage I saw before me. Suddenly the worries of canceling business travel plans, and writing up instructions to leave with my boyfriend so he could manage my bills, faded into the background. Before I left, I had been frustrated and felt overwhelmed by the interruption of day-to-day activities. Once I came to New Orleans, I realized many of these Louisianans no longer had their everyday lives to return to, as I did. The ones who did survive were starting over from nothing, in a new town, without a loved one, or missing a home they\'d lived in for decades. It just seemed a world away from Wyoming - from its mountains, dry climate and swiftly approaching winter - to this place with soaring temperatures that left clothing soaked in minutes. Being there had a way of stripping away all of the details and showing me what was most important in life. The unbreakable human spirit and rampant kindness seemed to be more valuable currency than the once precious possessions many people had lost to the hurricanes.\r\n\r\nIf I wanted to jump full-swing into the profession I loved, then here was the time and place for it. There was no shortage of action. Stories begged to be covered. Everywhere I went, I encountered soldiers handing out meals ready to eat (MREs) and bottles of water to residents, or I heard of people making a difference in the lives of others. For the first time in a long time, I wasn\'t only partially involved in life, somewhere watching a clock and checking off items on a task list. I was contributing to something larger than life.\r\n\r\nMy experiences as a soldier there not only enabled me to do my job and tell a story with words and photographs. They had deep significance for me.\r\n\r\nMy unit assigned me to cover a visit by former President George Bush, Sr. I also had the opportunity to shake hands with current President George Bush, as I stood in a massive military crowd. He made a brief but meaningful speech about our role in helping the victims of Katrina and the state of Louisiana, and then he thanked us and waved from the ramp as he boarded Air Force One.\r\n\r\nBut the most inspiring memories of my time there come from my interviews and encounters with the people of Louisiana. I grew up in the South, so I understand the hospitality that sometimes seems foreign to people who have never been there. But I cannot put into words the pride it gave me when people personally thanked us. It went beyond the expected hospitality. A number of restaurants were thanking soldiers by not allowing them to pay for their meals or were giving automatic discounts. When we ate at a local Chinese buffet, a lady seated in the restaurant came to our table and directly addressed us all. She apologized in advance for any unfriendliness we might come across in New Orleans. She wanted us to know that \"99.9 percent of the population is glad you are here.\" I think all of us were moved by her words. I felt this goodwill everywhere we went in the city. The people were so welcoming. Drivers would honk or wave when we passed in our humvees. This was the first time I\'d seen or felt a direct impact from my contributions as an American soldier.\r\n\r\nThe people I met made me proud to be there and further strengthened my sense of purpose.\r\n\r\nI have fond memories of the times I spent with a group of ladies at a middle school outside the city. These ladies, the regular cafeteria staff of the Harry S. Truman Middle School in Jefferson Parish showed their appreciation to our Wyoming units and Arkansas Guard soldiers by stuffing us with homemade red beans and rice, sweet squares of cornbread, gallons of iced sweet tea, and tasty servings of coconut cake. They were extremely kind and told us how glad they were to have us there. We enjoyed their presence just as much, if not more than they enjoyed ours. Their genuine hospitality and welcoming spirit made me feel like I was one of their grandchildren who had come for an infrequent visit, and they were doing all they could to spoil us before we left. We looked forward to their evening meals during the course of quite a few tiring days, and when it came time to return to Wyoming, we weren\'t yet ready to say our tearful goodbyes.\r\n\r\nMy coverage of stories took me to communities inside and around New Orleans.\r\n\r\nIn the community of Algiers, I accompanied medics from a California field artillery unit on foot, as they walked door-to-door offering free tetanus, and hepatitis A and B immunizations. Children came running out at the sight of us, and one little girl showed no bashfulness at all as she came up, hugged me, and smiled up at me, while her bold sister tried vehemently to get me to photograph her.\r\n\r\nI wrote a feature on a first sergeant from a California unit who was returning to what was left of his grandmother\'s house, a place where he\'d spent long stretches of his childhood. I donned a pair of hip waders and followed the man and his uncle into the shabby structure, dodging boards with rusty nails, and wearing a protective face mask to filter out any particulates. I couldn\'t believe the damage inside, and I looked incredulously upon a chair stuck in the ceiling and snapped photos as the first sergeant dug beneath dirty, jagged glassware in kitchen cabinets, searching for his grandmother\'s jar of rare coins she\'d requested.\r\n\r\nAnother story led me to the small community of Violet. Stranded dogs bounded unafraid and hungry, up toward the sides of our slowly moving vehicles. We moved in a convoy, our vehicle behind a truck bed full of Georgia firemen and ahead of a humvee carrying California Guardsmen to pull security. I cautiously followed the firemen and armed National Guardsmen inside the former residences. The parts that still stood housed tattered, disheveled blinds and pictures of chubby-cheeked children flanked by white walls and ceiling fans blotched with mildew. Floors were slick with inches of mud that clung to my combat boots. I photographed an unblemished American flag that stood vertically, as if with determined pride, in the middle of a storm-ravaged yard.\r\n\r\nNow and then, we encountered the former residents of these homes. Outside one home, I found a middle-aged couple cleaning around their house. They told me they had survived by escaping their swiftly flooding attic and jumping in their boat, where they rode out over five hours of the storm\'s 150-mph winds.\r\n\r\nDuring my coverage of a project to salvage the damaged Jackson Barracks Military Museum and its relics, I met Stan, its curator, and was amazed by his resilience. He had lived in the city for over a decade, Katrina had taken his home, and yet there he was, still faithful to his position, trying to uncover the historical remnants of a military past from the rubble, so some of it could be restored. He said there was no such thing as a problem, and that he only saw opportunities. He said this even as he stood among the wreckage of a once proud display of military equipment, not far from the theater of the museum that still held three feet of filmy, toxic water.\r\n\r\nAt a school in the town of Belle Chasse, I photographed a group of soldiers greeting students and presenting teddy bears to the children returning to school after a month of being displaced. For some of the children, it might have been the only toy they had, since many of them had lost their homes and the possessions therein.\r\n\r\nAn hour south of New Orleans, I passed through the small towns of Empire, Port Sulphur and Buras. The damage there was even worse. Shrimping trawlers had run aground beside the roadside and lurked like strange specimens out of context. A large rectangular fish truck was propped at an odd angle against a tree as if a giant\'s hand had reached down and rearranged it more to his liking. As we drove toward Port Sulphur, large sections of land just off the edge of Louisiana Highway 23 were obscured by water, looking more like lakes. About 100 feet out, I could barely see the tops of trees, their branches reaching upward as if trying to untangle themselves from the muck below, to escape their watery prisons. Just minutes down the road, a detour took us around a doublewide trailer that sat squarely across the median blocking two lanes of the highway.\r\n\r\nBut, although we had a job to do, we did get a day to see the sights. I chose to spend mine with a cup of chicory coffee and a plate of beignets (square doughnuts heavily dusted with powdered sugar) at the famed Cafe Du Monde. Past the little town of Desallemandes, an hour from New Orleans, I took an air boat tour of the swamp country with a couple of true Cajun tour guides. I also walked along Bourbon Street in New Orleans, listening to the drifting sounds of blues and zydeco.\r\n\r\nIt was surreal. It almost appeared that things were going on as usual, as if nothing had changed, when just miles away, whole lives had been altered forever. But, when I looked more closely, I noticed representatives of Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), police at every turn, and now and then, a desert-camo humvee rolling through the backdrop of the fairly bustling street scene. I had always wanted to visit New Orleans, but I don\'t think I ever envisioned doing it this way. The city and its people left an indelible mark on my life.\r\n\r\nI found it difficult to return home after only a month, and to turn away from a situation that for many is far from over. I can close the cover on this chapter of my life experiences. I can return to normality and try to find the right words to describe my experiences there in answer to the questions family, friends, and coworkers ask.\r\n\r\nI can jump back into my awaiting life, back to work, and back into the arms of the one I love. But Louisiana has changed me. It has made me more thankful for what I have, given me the opportunity to touch the lives of others, and to be more keenly aware that nothing in life is ours forever. We have to live and appreciate each and every day, each tiny detail of our lives, because in life nothing is ever certain. \r\n\r\nOriginally posted on the Memory Archive: http://www.memoryarchive.org/en/Hurricane_Katrina_2005%2C_by_Jennifer_Sardam