Page 73 of No Greater Love
I poured myself a glass of water with hands that wouldn't stop shaking, my mind spinning back to another version of myself—one I'd worked so hard to forget.
* * *
Biloxi, Mississippi. September 2005.
The smell hit you first… mold, sewage, and something else, something organic and wrong that you learned not to think about too hard. Hurricane Katrina had come and gone a week ago, but the devastation still looked fresh, like the storm had just finished carving through the Gulf Coast with deliberate cruelty.
I was supposed to be helping coordinate relief efforts, but mostly I was just trying not to throw up. My fatigues were already soaked through with sweat despite the early morning hour. My head felt like someone had been using it for target practice, and I wanted a drink- a beer, a shot,anything- so bad, I was shaking.
I hadn't yet fully recovered from the night two weeks ago, the night Chief Petty Officer Parker had found me passed out in my rack at 0400, reeking of vodka and vomit.
Based on the empty bottle he found on the floor, Chief Parker calculated, with the same clinical precision I'd later learn in nursing school, that my blood alcohol content had probably peaked somewhere north of .4. Potentially lethal.Shouldhave been lethal.
"You know what you did, Crawford?" Parker had said, personally marching me to the shower and pouring black coffee down my throat until I could stand upright. "You not only almost destroyed your entire military career, you almost fuckingdied."
I'd nodded, but honestly, neither prospect had seemed particularly tragic at the time.
"Lucky for you, there's a hurricane bearing down on the Gulf Coast, and they need volunteers for disaster relief. So I told the CO you'd volunteered to deploy to Biloxi to ride it out at the Seabee base and help with recovery efforts." His voice carried the kind of disappointed authority that cut deeper than any formal reprimand. "We'll deal with your other problems when you get back.Ifyou get back."
That's how I'd ended up in Mississippi, supposedly coordinating with relief organizations and the USNSComfort, but mostly just trying to stay sober long enough to not get anyone killed.
Then the Red Cross nurses showed up, and everything changed.
There were about twenty of them, a motley crew of women ranging from fresh-faced twenty-somethings to silver-haired veterans who looked like they'd seen every disaster the world could throw at them. They'd been deployed from hospitals across the country—Minnesota, Oregon, Texas, everywhere—and they moved with the kind of practiced efficiency that reminded me of the best corpsmen I'd known.
"You Crawford?" The woman addressing me was maybe forty-five, with salt-and-pepper hair pulled back in a no-nonsense ponytail and eyes that missed nothing. "I'm Linda Kowalski, team supervisor. We're told you're our Navy liaison."
"Yes, ma'am," I managed, trying to project competence despite feeling like death warmed over.
"Good. We need someone who knows military logistics and won't faint at the sight of blood." She looked me up and down with the kind of assessment I recognized from battlefield triage. "You look like hell, sailor, but you're standing upright, so you'll do."
What followed were the longest and most educational weeks of my life.
These women—and they were all women, I realized, which challenged every stupid stereotype I'd carried about nursing being somehow "lesser" than what we did as corpsmen—were nothing like I'd expected. They worked eighteen-hour days in conditions that would have broken lesser people. No electricity, no running water, no real medical facilities. Just skill, determination, and an apparently bottomless well of compassion.
I watched them deliver a baby in a Walmart parking lot while the mother waited in line for FEMA assistance, the asphalt so hot it burned through the soles of our boots. I saw them counsel a man who'd lost his entire family while simultaneously treating his infected wounds and helping him fill out insurance paperwork. They were nurses, social workers, therapists, and case managers all rolled into one.
"How do you do it?" I asked Linda one evening as we cleaned up after treating what felt like our thousandth patient of the day. "How do you just... keep going?"
She looked at me with those sharp eyes, and I had the uncomfortable feeling she could see straight through to the mess I was inside.
"You do it because someone has to," she said simply. "And because tomorrow there'll be another person who needs help, and the day after that, and the day after that. You can either be the kind of person who shows up, or you can be the kind who finds excuses. But you can't be both."
The truth of her words hollowed me out, because I knewexactlywhich kind of person I'd been since coming back from Iraq. The excuse-finding kind. The kind who drowned his problems instead of facing them.
Two weeks later, when Hurricane Rita threatened to make landfall and the evacuation order came down, I got to see what "showing up" really meant.
"All non-essential personnel need to evacuate immediately," the Red Cross coordinator announced during our morning briefing. "Buses will be here in two hours."
I expected the nurses to start packing, to follow protocol like any sensible person would. Instead, Linda stood up and crossed her arms.
"We're not leaving," she said, her voice carrying the kind of quiet authority that brooked no argument.
"Ma'am, I understand your dedication, but?—"
"No, you don't. You don’t understand at all." Another nurse, a young woman from Portland whose name I'd never learned, was on her feet now too. "These people have been through hell. They've lost everything. We're not abandoning them now just because another storm might come through."
One by one, all twenty nurses stood up. To a person, they refused evacuation.
