Posted on 12/09/2005 7:11:46 PM PST by Libloather
Guardsman: New Orleans duty worse than Iraq
By MARY BROWNFIELD
Published: December 9, 2005
'IT WAS a difficult deployment, because a lot of the guys had just come back from Iraq,” said John Hanson, a U.S. Army National Guardsman and building maintenance specialist for the City of Carmel. “And what we found in New Orleans made it worse.”
It wasn’t the hurricane-destroyed homes or the emptiness of the city that made the mission a challenge, but the state of the high school he and his platoon were ordered to get ready to reopen. Hurricane Katrina left 119 schools closed, according to Hanson, but O. Perry Walker High School in one of the city’s poorer neighborhoods was one of those that suffered relatively little structural damage.
“The only part that had been damaged was the auditorium. The roof had blown off,” he said of the school, which is Mayor Ray Nagin’s alma mater. “When we started to assess the rest of the school we were very surprised to find it was just disgustingly filthy and unkempt” — not from storm damage or use as an evacuation center, according to Hanson, but simply from years of abuse and neglect as a school.
“The exterior doors on the ground floor were bolted shut, the door handles were missing, and they had replaced the glass in the windows with cheap Plexiglas,” he said. A theater-turned-classroom contained 5-foot-deep piles of student records. He found whiskey bottles and condoms in the custodian’s office. Hardly any drinking fountains worked. All the lockers were bolted shut, reportedly to curb the pervasive problems of drug abuse and violence.
The bathrooms, with broken fixtures and inoperable lights, were covered in graffiti and so disgusting that Hanson said he heard stories of students asking their parents to take them to restrooms outside the school.
The classrooms’ contents indicated which teachers were devoted to students’ success and which apparently couldn’t care less, according to Hanson. A wood shop teacher seemed to be using the school’s equipment and materials to make furnishings for his own home.
“It was very difficult to justify the mission to a lot of the men,” Hanson said.
During their month at the school, the guardsmen saw no parents and only two students, as well as a few administrators and teachers. Some thanked them for their work as they loaded numerous gigantic dumpsters with broken furniture and trash, cleaned every surface inside and out, and even painted murals on some interior walls.
“By the time we were done, we owned that school,” Hanson said. But he worries the 35-year-old school will revert to the neglected state perpetuated by the state and local governments that failed the students. Prior to the storm, the school district was found to have mislaid $74 million, and a private auditing firm was hired to take over, according to Hanson. The Guard’s work was arranged by the auditor.
“I was trying to tell as many people as I could, ‘This has to change,’” he said. He invited a Times-Picayune reporter to tour the buildings, and the resulting story, entitled “School in shambles,” prompted a vigorous defense. Ronald Ayler, principal there from July 21 to Aug. 26, said the school had been in fine, clean shape before the hurricane hit and that police, firefighters and evacuees occupied it after the storm and prior to the Guard’s arrival.
“Judgments such as those rendered in the article only serve to anger community supporters and diminish the image of school personnel,” he wrote. “Solutions that bolster student achievement and morale, as well as active community support, are our core priorities.”
Racism, malaise
The entire New Orleans deployment — which ran from early October to Thanksgiving week — was difficult, Hanson said, but “I’m not in the I-Get-to-Choose-Army, I’m just in the Army.”
The streets of the city were mostly empty, and buildings showed the obvious aftermath of inundation by water and mud, including piles of sodden insulation and moldy sheet rock. Refrigerators, cars and boats were piled on top of homes or on each other.
“It was really pretty shocking,” he said.
The soldiers spent several days working traffic control alongside New Orleans police officers, many of whom were disillusioned and suffered from fatigue and malaise. Some cops slept in their cars, Hanson said, as the guardsmen helped secure the streets at night.
They handed out food and water to people in St. Bernard Parish.
“We saw people who had already started to clean out their houses,” he said. “They swore they were going to come back and rebuild.”
Despite the grim surroundings, he felt more comfortable on that part of his mission.
“The humanitarian stuff — those are the reasons I joined the Guard,” said Hanson, who signed up in 1998 and spent more than a year in southern Iraq, returning in March. “I saw every emotion, from one end of scale to the other. Some were shocked and asked, ‘What do we do now?’ All I could do was give them food and water, and say they were going to be OK.”
But even as they helped, they encountered the racism prevalent in the South. Locals freely used “the n-word” and addressed the African Americans in Hanson’s platoon as “Boy.”
And while they were working near St. Rita’s Nursing Home, where 35 people died during the hurricane, three badly decomposed bodies were found.
“The mission affected me more, emotionally, than my whole trip to Iraq — as a parent, as a citizen of the United States, as a taxpayer, and as a soldier and a guardsman,” he said. “I’ll never go back to New Orleans, or Louisiana. Not unless I have to.”
Sounds like the Guard was taking more than they were supposedly dishing out...
'He found whiskey bottles and condoms in the custodian’s office.'
I wonder what the Custodian was up to...
It's those ISMs again.
Blanco and Nagin will get off with not even a little slap on the hand.
I don't think this one can be put onto Blanco...
Nagin yes....hell it's his alma mater, but Blanco is a bit too high for this one, unless someone can prove that she was drinking the whiskey and using the condoms....
Students can do a lot to keep their own schools clean. Bolted doors are a different matter.
Locals freely used “the n-word” and addressed the African Americans in Hanson’s platoon as “Boy.”
And, would these have been black locals ... or, would they have been white locals?I have read that that word is used far more pervasively in the black community now than it is in the white community.
I lived in New Orleans for decades ... and never saw an example of what he has described as racism prevalent in the South. I will admit that I have been gone a while ... and conditions could have deteriorated in the interim. I would suggest a careful reading of the entire article with particular emphasis on:
“I was trying to tell as many people as I could, ‘This has to change,’” he said. He invited a Times-Picayune reporter to tour the buildings, and the resulting story, entitled “School in shambles,” prompted a vigorous defense.It sounds to me as though he was on the receiving end of vilification for ripping the scab off of the condition of that school and then calling in the Times Picayune to publicize it.
Son was in NOLA for 5 weeks with CO Nat'l Guard. Police (those that remained) are totally corrupt. They warn the crack dealers, when the Guard patrols are in the area.
This has been true for decades. Some people , black as well as white, will do without almost everything in order to keep their children out of the public schools in New Orleans. Not only will they not learn anything in the public schools ... but, also, they may not even survive.
"People told me that families in New Orleans scrape money together anyway they can to send their kids to private or parochial schools. The state employee I worked with at the shelter told me the public schools in New Orleans are so bad that good kids turn bad in the environment."
This is the truth.
My daughter was in second grade in Jefferson Parish.
Things were better there, but not much.
There was no way I was going to allow her to attend public school.
BTW, this was 26 years ago.
The local and state "leaders" have been falling down on the job for a very long time.
Good post bump!
I'll bet there's an amusing story behind that one.
man that's ANY state.
It's higher and more prolonged than ANY one governor or administration. The entire system is rotten at it's core.
Interesting.... Will Coward Dean suggest we pull out of New Orleans?
If they educated their underpriviledged population, they might risk the underpriviledged voting them out of office once they start to know enough to understand how incompetent their local officials really are. We can't have that now can we?
How cares if they can read, hold steady jobs, or improve their economic situation as long as they can be herded onto buses once a year to vote.
lol...
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