Dispatches From the Edge_ A Memoir of War, Disasters, and Survival - Anderson Cooper [61]
A silver crucifix would not have been well received in Meridian in those days, so my father asked for it to be removed before he took the body back to Mississippi for burial.
A few months after Katrina, I notice, in the Times Picayune, a funeral announcement for a woman whose body has recently been recovered. Her services are being held in the Lamana-Panno-Fallo Funeral Home. It turns out that they moved off St. Claude Avenue years ago, but are still in business near New Orleans. They weathered the storm, and are now helping its victims return home.
Aftermath
IT’S TUESDAY, JUST over a week since the storm, and the floodwaters are receding, a bit more each day. Last week there were not enough police; now there are too many. Thousands of law enforcement personnel from all around the country have descended on New Orleans. The bodies, however, remain uncollected, and hundreds of residents are still trying to tough it out, refusing to leave their homes and their pets.
“This is a dog and pony show,” a New Orleans cop says to me, laughing. “Twenty thousand law enforcement officers in the city right now, for what? Three thousand people? There are all these agencies with firepower meant for Iraq. I’ve got guys who I’m responsible to drive around and help patrol, and they’re frustrated with me because they’ve got no action: ‘We want some action, we want some action!’ ‘Well, you know, I’m sorry we can’t provide any action for you so you can go out and play war games with your toys that you’ve never gotten to use.’ It’s a joke. It’s way, way, way too much, way, way, way too late. It’s like a big Mardi Gras parade of police, only there’s nobody to catch any beads, ’cause there’s nobody left out there.”
FBI, FEMA, ICE, ATF, LAPD, ERT, NYPD—all the acronyms are here, and they all look the same: Oakley shades, narco-tactical vests, sidearms strapped to their legs. They stand around wearing T-shirts with steroid slogans, clutching high-caliber assault rifles, angled down, their index fingers at the ready.
Everyone wants to help, but there’s just not much for them to do. I get stopped at a checkpoint by some National Guard troops. I show my ID, but one of the soldiers wants more.
“Do you have a letter from the battalion commander?” he asks me.
“I don’t need a letter from the battalion commander,” I say. He nods and waves me on.
“Nice going, Obi Wan,” Neil Hallsworth, my cameraman, says to me. “We’re not the droids you’re looking for.”
I’M NOT SHOCKED anymore by the bodies, the blunders. You can’t stay stunned forever. The anger doesn’t go away, but it settles somewhere behind your heart; it deepens into resolve. I feel connected to what’s around me, no longer just observing. I feel I am living it, breathing it. There is no hotel to go back to, isolated from the destruction, as there was in Sri Lanka. We are surrounded, all day, all night. There’s no escape. I wouldn’t want to get away even if I could. I don’t check my voice mail for messages. I don’t call home. I never want to leave.
We’re sleeping in trailers parked on Canal Street, not far from the old Maison Blanche department store where my father worked. At night sometimes, when the broadcast is done, we sit outside the trailers in small groups, staring at the silhouettes of empty buildings. We don’t need to say a thing. There is a bond that’s forming among us. We are in new territory, on the cliff’s edge. This place has no name, and all of us know it. The city is exposed: flesh and blood, muscle and bone. New Orleans is a fresh wound, sliced open by the shrapnel of a storm.
I’M NOT SURE when it happened, when I realized that something had changed. I don’t think there was a precise moment, a particular day. It’s like when you’re mourning and suddenly you become aware that the pain has faded. You don