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The team takes pictures—Click. Click—then records the woman’s GPS coordinates. Later they’ll mark the spot on a map. It’s dotted with small circles for each of the bodies they’ve found so far.

“Do you ever get used to this?” I ask David Cash, the team’s doctor.

“Hurricane Ivan, Opal, the Pentagon, Oklahoma City,” he says, listing some of the disasters he’s worked on in the last eleven years. “You never get used to it; it just needs to be done.”

I ask Chris Davis, my cameraman, to take some tight shots of the woman’s hand and one of her feet. The image of her body, covered in the bedspread, will be too grisly for television, but I don’t want to ignore the reality of what’s happened here. Dr. Cash and his team climb back in their vehicle. We get back in ours, and follow them out.

I never thought I’d see this here, in America—the dead left out like trash. None of us speaks. There’s nothing you can say.

Chris is having a hard time with the bodies. I see it in his face. At first, I don’t understand what the problem is. Then I realize it’s his first time.

MY FATHER’S CORPSE was the first one I ever saw. His wake was at the Frank E. Campbell Funeral Chapel in New York. I passed the building for years on my way to school and never knew what went on inside.

I didn’t recognize him at first. I hadn’t known how different the dead really look—the sickening stillness, the flatness of an embalmed face. He resembled a figure cut from some soft stone.

I remember the clothes my father wore in the casket, the unnatural way they lay on his body. Already I felt his absence, missed his embrace, the comfort of having him near. At night we’d watch TV. He’d stretch out on the floor on his back, his head perched on a pillow. I’d lay perpendicular to him, my head resting on the soft part of his stomach, which rose and fell with each breath.

My father was born a Baptist but had long since moved away from the fire-and-brimstone preachers of his youth. He no longer went to services, and his funeral was held in a Unitarian church.

“When you mark ‘Unitarian’ down in the hospital,” I remember him saying, “they don’t know what it means, so they don’t send any minister to bother you.”

After the funeral, I stood in a receiving line with my mother and brother. People I didn’t know filed past, shaking my hand. Later, there was a gathering at our apartment. A few friends from school. A teacher I particularly liked.

My nanny, May, who’d helped raise me since I was born, had just returned from a trip home to her native Scotland. She rushed back when she learned of my father’s death.

“Don’t worry, May. Everything will be okay,” I told her. Years later she cried as she recounted the moment. “Of course, it wasn’t okay,” she said. “Nothing was ever okay again.”

IT’S WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 31, 2005. I’m still in Waveland, Mississippi, reporting on Katrina’s aftermath. Women sob searching for family photographs. Middle-age men beg to use my satellite phone. Every conversation starts the same: “Mom, it’s me. I’m alive.”

I see the president’s plane fly over Mississippi.

“Do you think he can see the corpses from so high up?” a resident asks me as we watch the jet streak by.

It’s more than forty-eight hours after the storm, and there’s still no one to pick up the dead. It’s unconscionable. Soldiers have a motto: “Leave no man behind.” I saw it stenciled on a blast wall on an army base outside Baghdad. They’ll risk life and limb to recover the body of a fellow soldier. Many have died over the years doing just that. There are front lines in America as well, and right now Waveland is one of them. These people should not be left to rot.

As dusk falls, I go back to the site where the dead woman was lying. She is still there. I think about trying to move her, but I have no equipment, no gloves, and besides, there’s nowhere to put her. I feel powerless, weak.

For the last two nights, I’ve been a guest on Larry King Live, and listened as politicians