

It’s hard to overstate what these guys see. If you’ve ever experienced this magnitude of disaster, you know damned well that all the pictures and video in the world doesn’t do justice to the actual destruction and suffering on the ground.
Ex-FIL was in the Mississippi Guard. Earned 2 Bronze Stars on two (three?) tours of Iraq. Humanitarian aid, not combat, a detail relevant to the story below. He was just fine.
Came home and fought his way through Katrina on the tip of the spear. Those men chainsawed houses in half and pushed them off the road to get in. After all that he suffered PTSD, hooked up with another Guard member, left his wife of 32-years and stopped talking to his only child. He was not fine.
New Orleans got the news coverage, but the Mississippi Gulf Coast was fucking wrecked. We went to see the man in Gulfport, then headed north. The last of the damage we saw was past Hattiesburg, 80 miles of destruction. And that was going straight away, the blast radius closer to the Gulf was wide.
Some of these people are digging for corpses, some are little corpses, with their hands. Many, most?, of these people are facing serious PTSD in the near future.
Anyway, after living Ivan, I cried my eyes out over Katrina. I still tear up when I think about it, still cry thinking about what I saw the next morning. Cried when the Florida Guard rolled in to save our asses, thought I was on my own.
Taking the kids swimming in the creek now. I’m out.
What?! You need the MAC to identify a router and MACs don’t go over the internet.
I’ll let you go ahead and explain that one.