On the evening of Sunday, September 11, 2005, I was out with a patrol from Bravo Company checking on the hold outs in the Indian Village, the desperately poor community on the south side of Gentilly Road.
We went out to check on a forty-four year old woman named Mimi Bartholomew who had survived the flooding in her neighborhood by standing on a crate in her bathroom. She refused to leave her house—she’d been born there and had nothing else in this world but that modest piece of property. She was also diabetic.
Will Cokel, one of the battalion’s medics, had come out to try and get her blood sugar level since she had been without useable insulin since the power failed on the 29th of August. Mimi quickly impressed all of us as a true piece of work. She was chatty and fresh and full of a sense of independence. Truth was, under the façade I think she was very scared, and very glad to have the attention of a full platoon of soldiers.
Shortly after leaving Mimi’s house, we came across Harold and his son. Harold lived about four blocks from Mimi’s place, and his son had come to stay with him during the flooding. His son had this little go-cart, and we’d seen him zipping around the devastation in the AO on and off throughout the day. Turned out, he had an eye infection, and Will had him lie down on the hood of a derelict car so he could treat him with anti-biotic drops.
I took photos of all of this, then linked back up with Will when he finished up. Together, we trailed SSG Sean Davis’ platoon back toward the Baptist Seminary. The sunset suffused the area in a reddish glow that made the landscape of abandoned cars, tilted stop lights and downed power lines look almost apocalyptic. 
We walked across Old Gentilly Road, the Seminary in sight, looking forward to MRE’s and a few hours of sleep. Will and I were deep in a very serious and personal discussion when a woman started shouting for help. We looked over toward the railroad embankment where the police had burned a pistol earlier in the day and saw a group of volunteers huddled around a small boat. “We need a medic!” the woman called to us. “We have an injured man.” Will took off running, and I trailed behind. When we reached the group, we found the man had been bitten by a dog he’d rescued while out on a boat patrol just a few minutes before we arrived.
Will opened his medical gear and went to work, swabbing and cleaning the wound. In the meantime, I struck up a conversation with the woman. She was blond, very beautiful but with features that betrayed a soul-weariness I connected with immediately. 
After all the self-inflicted damage we’d seen to the neighborhood we’d come to stabilize, I had become very bitter about the exposed reality of human nature. I couldn’t believe Americans could do this do each other. Not once had we seen any local show even the slightest bit of selflessness.
Then I met Gretel. She was the woman who called over to us, and as we stood watching Will work on her friend, I learned her story. All of 28 years old, she’d been working as an ER nurse on Long Island, New York, when Hurricane Katrina struck the Gulf Coast. As the scenes of devastation and despair played across the TV screens at the hospital, she resolved to do something about it. She finished a twelve hour shift, got her daughter to her mom’s house, and drove to New Orleans.
That selflessness came at a great personal cost. Her hospital told her that if she left, her job would not be waiting for her when she returned. She was also set to start the physician’s assistant program at Adelphi University in a few weeks. When she called and told them she probably wouldn’t make the start of the new school year, they told her that she’d lose her slot in the program. Her decision to help those in New Orleans cost her the job that supported her family and the chance of a better future for herself and daughter.
How many people can say they’d give those things up and travel the breadth of the country to take care of total strangers?
As I stood face to face with Gretel, scribbling in a notebook as we talked, I realized I had met a human being whose profound depth of humanity and selflessness served as a counter-balance to everything we’d seen. Her story staggered me.
She made her way into the city and ended up at the LSU basketball arena, which had become a makeshift hospital. Day after day, hundreds of dead, dying and wasted human beings struggled through the arena doors. Nursing home residents appeared, some of whom had no names and only “DNR” (Do Not Resuscitate) scrawled on across their foreheads in black ink. Gretel worked non-stop for days.
At one point, she finally found a few minutes to take a break, and she stepped out front for some air. Down the street came a vagabond, obviously in distress. He staggered toward the arena, then collapsed in the street. Gretel turned to go get a pair of gloves, and when she returned, she found a reporter filming the man’s distress. Ignoring the hack, she rushed to the man’s aid. The reporter complained and said she’d just ruined his shot. 
She wheeled on the reporter and asked the one question that I know just about every sentient American has wanted to ask those who film human misery, “Why didn’t you help this man?”
“It isn’t my job.” The camerman said defensively.
Gretel didn’t let him off the hook, “You are a human being, of course it is your job.”
Wow. I listened to this in stunned silence, hardly able to contain the tears I felt building up behind the façade I was trying to maintain. After the last patients made it out of the arena, Gretel attached herself to an animal rescue group and set off into the city in search of dying critters. Along the way, she saved a German shepherd that captured her heart. She resolved to get him back to Long Island as a gift for her daughter.
As her words poured out, we both became emotional. All the pent up trauma she’d experienced, all the misery, chaos and sadness she’d witnessed, flowed out in this one conversation. I couldn’t believe she wasn’t embittered by her experience.
When I asked her about that, she told me the people kept her spirits up. She had a very different experience than we did. Those who made it to the arena were utterly grateful, full of quiet strength and hope. They didn’t fight or push or get violent. They waited patiently as the desperately outnumbered doctors and nurses did their best to care for them. In them, she saw the bright of human nature. That's exactly what I found in her.
As we stood beside the edge of the floodwater, I felt my spirits lift. Gretel’s tale was what I expected to find when we first stepped on the plane to come down to New Orleans. This was the sort of American we could all be proud of: determined, capable, courageous, selfless- a rock in the center of the storm.
Overcome, we both started to cry. We embraced, and I realized as I held this woman who moments before had been a complete stranger that I would never make it as a journalist. I am not put together to be unbiased or dispassionate. I am a writer, not
a reporter.
This woman and her strength of character had single handedly restored what I had lost out in the ruins of the Gentilly neighborhood: my faith in my fellow human beings. After seeing the worst of what we can do to each other at the meat market, I’d found a person who embodied the best of us.
I hugged her and felt reborn.
Later, as Will and I walked back to the Seminary, I broke down again. A surge of sadness swept over me, and as I tried to explain what I’d learned to Will, in the back of my mind I struggled with why I felt so despondent. 
I only figured that out long after the company had turned in for the night. I lay under my poncho liner on the walkway out in front of the Seminary’s music hall. Overhead, helicopters buzzed back and forth over the blackened city. Across from me, Spike Olsen was snoring like a congested heffer. Vinni Jacques was sawing wood, too. I stared out into the night’s sky, watching the helicopters paint the area with search lights until revelation struck.
Hindsight always shows us the defining moments of our lives. We can look back on decisions or events that shape who we are. Meeting Gretel was one of those high water marks for me. At age 38, I had no doubt that I had encountered the finest human spirit I’d ever meet. I could not help but to mourn the passing of that moment.
Three years later, I’m more convinced than ever of the righteousness of that epiphany.
