My dining room chairs

 Thanksgiving is a time to enjoy being nostalgic, by telling stories and sharing family traditions. But, this year found another surprise, in the source being our dining room chairs. We made many valuable friendships during our time as a Navy family and some people we never forgot. 

My social media picture was intended to highlight the centerpiece on our dinner table but my lost and now found friend Lynne, she saw the chairs.

During our shared experiences living in the special Subic Bay community in the Philippines, we created lasting memories because our friends were young people with growing families who came together from every conceivable walk of life. One of those special friends were neighbors who shared our carport on our street in base housing, where our houses can be described as more or less like Baltimore row houses without marble steps.  We had zero influence about who our neighbors might turn out to be, but fortunately all of the Navy folks in our neighborhood were wonderful people. Our shared carport created a special relationship with the Northover family.  John and Dick became instant friends and Lynne seemed to look to me for advice about nearly everything from what to serve for dinner and how to shop for cloisonné. Nevertheless, the years fell away and we lost contact, although their last known address was in San Diego. Recently, while browsing around my Ancestry account, I tried to find the Northover family but, unfortunately, during my search, I found an obituary for John, so I did not go any further in my search.  Somehow, mental telepathy seemed to be transmitted via social networking!  Lynne received one of those pop up messages about people who might want to connect with her and my name showed up in her news feed. 

 How did she confirm it was the real "me"?  She went to my Facebook page where she saw the Thanksgiving picture I put up to show off our table centerpiece.  "I knew it was really you when I saw the dining room chair," she told me in a delightful surprise instant message.  In fact, she owns the exact same set of dining room chairs as mine, because we both custom ordered them from the artisan furniture maker who made them  for us with Philippine Narra wood, when we showed him a picture from the Ethan Allen catalogue.  Narra wood is the national wood of the Philippines and is more or less equivalent to Rosewood in beauty and quality. Lynne kept her married name, although she remarried after John's untimely and sudden death.  She still owns the boat they shared, named "Wisp of Heaven" and her son races it in the San Diego Harbor. As a result of a social media picture with the unintended image of my dining room chair in the photograph, I am reconnected with a dearly missed friend, who I hope to visit with again soon.  As a matter of fact, Lynne lived in South Portland Maine when she was a teenager because her father was stationed there during his time as a Coast Guard officer.  

And the  moral of this story is that a chair is always a way to welcome a friend into our homes, even on social media!  Our friendship with Lynne is now joyously renewed. The emotional beauty of Thanksgiving. 

Thanksgiving tradition: Let's write about why we must eat leftovers

Maine Writer:  In fact, my husband Richard is not fond of leftovers, so that is the reason I typically serve them to myself for breakfast.
When we lived in the Philippines, I saw women who went to market to purchase just one carrot or a few leaves of cabbage. It breaks my hear to see wasted food. Of course, we are fortunate to live in the land of plenty, but we should learn more about how large parts of the world's population are just a few meals away from starvation and rampant food insecurity is horrible for children. 

 So, I found this essay to be of interest, published in the Moscow-Pullman Daily News, by Danny Tyree. 

“Do you mind if we have leftovers?”
When my wife poses that question, I always answer, “No, that’s fine,” because (a) I genuinely enjoy leftovers, (b) I don’t want to cause extra trouble for her during meal preparation and (c) I can’t afford the airline tickets to transport a Tupperware container of six-day-old broccoli to all those “starving children on the other side of the world who would give their right arm for a fraction of the food you and your siblings are wasting.”

(Julie's two cents- this last (c) is the reason I eat "leftovers" for breakfast....truly!)

And don’t forget the wretched excess of New Year edibles. The only thing that drops faster than the Times Square ball is my good cholesterol.

Yes, even though urbanization and feminism have gotten us away from the notion of needing to fortify a clan of hungry field hands, tradition and gluttony still make us cook/take-out/“five-second rule” way too much food.

Human beings really should hold themselves to a higher standard than my tomcat Moggie. No matter how much dry food he finds already on his plate, he expects a few “fresh” bits dropped on the plate before he’ll deign to eat. His mother neglected those all-important lessons about starving cats on the other side of the world.

(Yes!) The right attitude and right recipes can help us stop wasting all that food. A creative chef can turn yesterday’s turkey into turkey sandwiches, turkey hash, turkey soup and countless other variations.
One of my friends spent several years writing a book about repurposing kale and fruitcake. Ironically enough, it wound up in the remainder bin. (Ya' think? Haha!🤣)

Of course, there are limits to reinventing last night’s supper. Your children’s delicate sensibilities should be taken into consideration when contemplating leftovers. Don’t torture them by making them eat carrots two days in a row after their busy day of watching the same “PAW Patrol” and “Peppa Pig” episodes for the 500th time.
Maybe you’d better be sitting down for this, but leading researchers have determined that the people least likely to lend a hand whipping up a new menu item are the most likely to gripe about leftovers. (“Next, we won a research grant to study washing the dishes. (Don't you just wish?) Sweet. Let’s celebrate. What … lobster AGAIN?”)
Although leftovers are a societal bone of contention year-round, they are particularly controversial in the last month of the year, as Americans race to finish off the wretched excess of Thanksgiving leftovers before the creation of a wretched excess of Christmas leftovers. (“I’ll be home for Christmas … if only in my relaxed-fit sweatpants…”)

I grew up eating whatever was set in front of me (I tried eating what was set behind me, but my career as a budding contortionist couldn’t handle the chiropractic bills), so I grind my teeth when I hear some effete snob regarding himself as too good to eat leftovers. (Whoa … grinding my teeth dislodged some leftover cranberry sauce. Better the second time around.)

Citizens in First World countries are notorious about sending food to the landfill. We need to revive the World War II motto “Take all you want, but eat all you take.” Then we can stop being tolerant of a chuckled “Guess my eyes were bigger than my stomach.”
Maybe the right response is, “But my boot and your rear are a perfect match.”
Tyree welcomes email responses at tyreet...@aol.com.

Let's write about Lion Feuchwtanger

 The Road To Hell: Berlin, 1933

Adolf Hitler (1889-1945)

This echo excerpt was published in Persuasion: 

An excerpt from Lion Feuchtwanger’s “The Oppermanns.”

Excerpting from The Oppermanns, a novel written by the Bavarian-Jewish novelist Lion Feuchtwanger in 1933. A reissue of the English translation with a new introduction by Joshua Cohen, the winner of this year’s Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, is published by McNally Editions.

An outspoken early critic of the Nazi movement, and one of Germany's most famous writers, Feuchtwanger fled into exile months before he wrote The Oppermanns. The book is based on his own experience and that of his family and friends, as well as secret reports smuggled out of Germany by anti-Nazi activists. Following its publication, Feuchtwanger and his wife were both imprisoned by the Vichy regime in France. They eventually fled to the United States, where they lived until his death in 1958.

According to the historian Richard J. Evans, The Oppermanns was “the first great masterpiece of anti-fascist literature.” 

Set in the aftermath of Hitler’s rise to power, the novel revolves around the Oppermann brothers: Gustav, a literary critic and the book’s central character; Edgar, a prominent surgeon; and Martin, the manager of the family’s furniture company. With painstaking realism, Feuchtwanger charts the institutionalization of anti-Semitism and the decay of German democracy through the brothers’ desperate attempts to come to terms with a country overrun by “barbarism.”

This scene takes place the night after Martin Oppermann is confronted by Herr Hinkel, an employee of the Oppermann family’s furniture company and a member of the Nazi party, who demands that Martin fire four Jewish workers and replace them with “Aryans.”

— The Editors.

During the night, toward dawn, they arrived at Martin Oppermann’s house in Corneliusstrasse. Thrusting the bewildered maid to one side, one of them entered Martin and Liselotte’s bedroom armed with a revolver and truncheon; he was followed by four or five more, all very young men.

“Herr Oppermann?” inquired the leader in a courteous tone.

“Yes,” said Martin. It was neither fright nor a desire to be disagreeable that made his voice sound gruff, it was merely that he was still half asleep. Liselotte had started up. She stared with wide, terrified eyes at the lads. It was said all over the country that those who fell into the hands of the state police were lucky, but woe to those who fell into the hands of the Nationalists. And these fellows were Nationalists.

“What do you want from us?” asked Liselotte anxiously.

“We want nothing from you, madam,” said the young man. “You are to dress and come with us,” he said to Martin.

“Very well,” returned Martin. He tried to work out the young man’s rank in the stormtrooper army. It was indicated by the metal ornament on the collar, the “mirror” as it was called. The man had two stars, but Martin did not know what the title of his rank was. He would have liked to inquire, but the young man might take the question as a sign of contempt. Martin was very calm. It was common knowledge that many were done to death in the cellars of the stormtroopers’ barracks, their names were known. There were only very few who came out of these cellars entirely without injuries. But, strangely enough, he was not afraid. “Don’t worry, Liselotte,” he said. “I shall soon be back again.”

“That won’t be altogether left to your decision, sir,” said he of the two stars. They put him into a taxi. He sat limply, his eyes half closed.

Lion Feuchtwanger (b. 1884 in Germany- d. 1958 Los Angeles Calif.) author of The Oppermanns, published in 1933.

His guards were carrying on a conversation in low tones. “Will we be allowed to stick him against the wall right away? I hope they let us and not the Thirty-Eighth examine him.” Martin rocked his head back and forth. What a childish way of carrying on. They wanted him to dismiss his Jewish employees. Perhaps they would attempt to bully him into it by ill treatment. Merchants of high standing and directors of industries had been dragged off to Nationalist barracks and concentration camps in order to extort voluntary resignations from them or the renunciation of some legal right. The Nationalists wanted to get possession of the industries that had been built up by the five hundred thousand Jews. They coveted their businesses, their positions, their money. They considered all means toward this end justified. In spite of all that, Martin instinctively felt that he, personally, was safe. He did not believe that he would be detained long. Liselotte would get busy on the telephone, so would Mühlheim1.

He was taken into a dreary room on an upper floor. A man was sitting there with four stars on the collar of his uniform, and there was another seated at a typewriter. The two-starred man reported: “Troop Leader Kersing with a prisoner.” That was it, the two-starred men were called troop leaders. Martin was questioned as to his identity. Then someone appeared in a more ornate brown uniform. He had no stars on his collar but a simple leaf. He sat down at the table. It was a fairly large table, a candelabra with lighted candles on it, as well as a bottle of beer and some books that seemed to be treatises on jurisprudence. The man thrust the books aside. Martin gazed at the candelabra. What a silly setting, he thought, and in the age of Reinhardt too. The chap had a leaf on his collar, had he? As a matter of fact, it wasn’t a leaf but an oak twig. They were very exact in such details.

“Your name is Martin Oppermann?” asked the man with the oak twig. It’s about time they knew that, thought Martin. It occurred to him that the thing was called a standard. Those with twigs on their collars were called standard bearers. That man was quite a big shot, a robber chieftain.

“Yes,” he said.

“You have resisted official regulations?” came the question from behind the candelabra.

“Not that I know of,” said Martin.

“In these times,” the man with the oak twig said sternly, “resistance to the regulations of the Leader is a treasonable act.”

Martin shrugged his shoulders. “I resisted the regulations of my packer Hinkel,” he said. “I am not aware that he has been appointed to discharge any official function.”

“Write that down,” said the man with the oak twig. “The accused denies his guilt and makes evasive answers. Take the man away,” he commanded the guard.

The two-starred man and three others took Martin down the stairs again and then lower still, down badly lit steps. This is the cellar then, thought Martin. They were now in complete darkness. The way led through a long passage. Martin was seized firmly by the arms. “Walk in step, man,” said a voice. The corridor was a long one. They turned a corner, then another. Someone flashed an electric torch into his face. Then they ascended a few steps. “Keep in step, you,” one of them said to him and gave him a push in the back. What a childish way of carrying on, thought Martin.

After he had been marched in different directions for about ten minutes, he was thrust into a fairly large, dimly lit room. Here things looked a bit more serious. Men were lying on boards and on heaps of rags. There were between twenty and thirty of them, half naked, bleeding, groaning, hideous to look at. “Say Heil Hitler when you enter anywhere,” commanded one of his guards, giving him a blow in the ribs.

“Heil Hitler,” said Martin obediently. They pushed through the rows of hideous looking, groaning people. There was a smell of sweat, excrement, and blood in the room. “There’s no more room in waiting room Number Four,” said the man with the two stars.

Martin was taken into another room, which was smaller and crudely lit. A few people were standing in it, their faces to the wall. “Stand over there, Jew-pig,” said someone to Martin. He stood beside the others; a gramophone was playing the “Horst Wessel Song”:

Make way for the boys of the Brown Battalions,

Make way for the boys of the Shock Brigades,

The swastika blazons the hope of millions,

The era of Freedom and Plenty begins.

“Join in the song,” came the order. The truncheons began to swing and the people with their faces to the wall sang. Then a record of one of the Leader’s speeches was played and after that the “Horst Wessel Song” again. “Salute,” came the order. Those who did not hold their arms or fingers stiffly enough in the ancient Roman salute were struck on the offending arms or fingers. Then “Join in the song,” came the order again. Then the gramophone was turned off and perfect silence reigned in the room.

That lasted, perhaps, half an hour. Martin grew very weary. He turned his head cautiously. “Stand still, will you, man,” said someone and struck him across the shoulders. The blow hurt him but not severely. Then the gramophone started again. The needle’s worn out, thought Martin. And I’m dog-tired. Even they will eventually get bored looking at my back.

“We’re going to say Our Father now,” commanded the voice. They recited the Our Father obediently. Martin had not heard it for a long time; he had only a vague idea of it. He took careful note of the words, they were really splendid words. The gramophone proclaimed the twenty-five points of the Party’s program. I’m getting training exercises of a sort now, thought Martin. Liselotte is surely telephoning by now. So is Mühlheim. Liselotte—she is the one I am worrying about most.

To stand for two hours sounds a mere nothing. But it is not easy for a man verging on fifty and unused to any form of bodily exertion. The glaring light and its refection on the wall tortured Martin’s eyes, the squeaking of the gramophone tortured his ears. But finally, after what seemed to him an eternity, though it was actually only two hours, the thing really did get too boring for them. They released him from the wall, drove him once more up and down steps and through dark passages and finally into a small room, which was rather dark.

The young men again took charge of him. Martin would have liked to talk to them, but he was too tired. The next man who spoke to him was Hinkel the packer. He was not in uniform. “I have interceded for you, Herr Oppermann,” he said, scrutinizing him with his mean eyes. “After all, we have been associated for a number of years. I think you would be wiser to give in. Sign a paper to the effect that you will comply with the regulations of the business committee, dismiss those four people and you are free.”

“I have no doubt that you mean well, Herr Hinkel,” said Martin peacefully. “But I cannot discuss the matter with you here. I can only deal with business matters in Gertraudtenstrasse2.” Hinkel the packer shrugged his shoulders.

Martin had a rough pallet in a small room allotted to him. His head ached. Also the place on his back, where he had been struck, was beginning to hurt. He tried to remember the words of the Our Father. But the Hebrew words of the prayer for the dead, which he had so recently spoken, substituted themselves. He was glad to be alone. He was exhausted. But the light had not been switched off and that prevented him from going to sleep.

Before the night was over, he was again taken to the room to which he had first been brought. Behind the table with the candelabra on it there now sat a man who had no twig on his collar, but only two stars. “You can go now, Herr Oppermann,” he said. “There are only a few formalities for you to comply with. Kindly sign this paper.” It was a statement that he had been well treated. Martin read it through, nodding his head. “If, for instance, I treated my employees in such a way,” he said, “I doubt whether they would make such an affidavit for me.”

“You don’t mean to tell me, sir, do you,” snarled the man, “that you have been badly treated here?”

“Don’t I mean to tell you?” Martin asked in turn. “Very well,” he added, “I won’t tell you.” He signed the paper.

“Then there’s this, too,” said the man. It was an order to pay two marks, one mark for lodging and one mark for board and services rendered.

The music was free, thought Martin. He paid and got a receipt. “Good morning,” he said.

“Heil Hitler,” said the two-starred man.

Taken from The Oppermanns (1933) by Lion Feuchtwanger. Translated by James Cleugh and Joshua Cohen. McNally Editions (2022).

Let's write about space and our place in astronomy!

Echo prediction about alien life in space:  Astronomy - The Daily Astronomer reported by the Southworth Planetarium, at the University of  Southern Maine, in Portland, Maine. 

Astronomers say we are not alone!

Absolutely, undeniably, categorically, irrefutably, most assuredly, one hundred and one point one percent not! Honestly, as of this writing, astronomers have confirmed the existence of 5271 exoplanets, or planets in orbit around other stars. Based on these detections, we can estimate that our one galaxy could harbor 1 - 3 trillion planets. Let's assume that we're the type of sour-souled buzz-kills capable of frosting palm trees with a single glance and so estimate that only 0.001% (one in a hundred thousand ) of these planets could give rise to life. That would still give us 10 - 30 million life-bearing planets in our own galaxy.

Planet life fantasy.

While neglecting the innumerable galaxies boasting comparable stellar populations, we pose the question: Could anyone possibly suggest that Earth is the only life-harboring world in the cosmos? No Vulcans with their impeccable logic. No Daleks with their propensity for indiscriminate violence. No phosphorescent fern-craving Blagunsdtrungs, pi-worshipping neo Archemedians or galaxy enslaving Empires or Encyclopedia Galactica? Utterly preposterous.

Or, is it?
A research team at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory has recently revisited the now notorious "Filter Theory," introduced by George Mason economist Robin Hanson. This theory posits that other alien worlds have and perhaps still even do exist. However, these races will all annihilate themselves before attaining technology requisite for space travel. Consequently, even if we are not technically alone, it will seem as though we are until, of course, we destroy ourselves and vanish from the cosmos altogether.

This filter theory is based on, what else, our own example. Consider the threats we have confronted and might face in future: catastrophic asteroid impacts, nuclear annihilation, the dominance of AI and subsequent extermination of the lesser biological beings, and, of course, the ultimate consequences of accelerated climate change induced by fossil-fuel consuming humans. The presumption -again, based solely on our own history- is that prior to attaining space-faring technology, extraterrestrial races would have to proceed through the same intervening stages through which we have already passed: development of nuclear technology, exploitation of fossil fuel reserves and the advent of artificial computing capabilities. Each of these aforementioned developments can pose an existential threat to our species.

Although we still exist, it is possible that we will obliterate ourselves long before we are able to even reach the nearest star, Alpha Cenatauri, let alone the more far-flung regions of the Milky Way Galaxy.* Remember that humans haven't ventured farther than about a quarter of a million miles from Earth. Moreover, our most distant spacecraft, Voyager 1, is only about 22 light hours from home. Alpha Centauri is 4.3 light YEARS away.

So, perhaps the answer to Dr. Fermi's question, "Where is everyone?" is simply that either no aliens exist anymore or that they'll all be destroyed before they can manage to travel among the stars. Or, and this notion is quite chilling, there is a dominant alien race that kills off those species as soon as they become star-faring.

Or, maybe, Dr. Fermi, they exist in great abundance, but we haven't yet managed to detect them. Perhaps the Milky Way Galaxy teems with life in all areas. We just haven't matured enough as a race to associate with them. Again, it is all speculation and, as such, allows for all manner of theories and ideas. We just happen to prefer the optimistic ones.

*We are assuming that even if we manage to travel out among the stars, we'll stay within our home galaxy. Unless, of course, we figure out a way to both manufacture a TARDIS (Time And Relative Dimension In Space) and find a time lord that would like to spend at least a little time away from Earth.

Let's write about science fiction sea monsters!

A Sound of Thunder and Other Stories
The Fog Horn by Ray Bradbury, is a 1951, science fiction short story, the first in his collection The Golden Apples of the Sun. The story was the basis for the 1953 film, The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms.

Out there in the cold water, far from land, we waited every night for the coming of the fog, and it came, and we oiled the brass machinery and lit the fog light up in the stone tower. Feeling like two birds in the gray sky, McDunn and I sent the light touching out, red, then white, then red again, to eye the lonely ships. And if they did not see our light, then there was always our Voice, the great deep cry of our Fog Horn shuddering through the rags of mist to startle the gulls away like decks of scattered cards and make the waves turn high and foam.

"It's a lonely life, but you're used to it now, aren't you?" asked McDunn.

"Yes," I said. "You're a good talker, thank the Lord."

"Well, it's your turn on land tomorrow," he said, smiling, "to dance the ladies and drink gin."

"What do you think, McDunn, when I leave you out here alone?" "On the mysteries of the sea." McDunn lit his pipe. It was a quarter past seven of a cold November evening, the heat on, the light switching its tail in two hundred directions, the Fog Horn bumbling in the high throat of the tower. There wasn't a town for a hundred miles down the coast, just a road which came lonely through dead country to the sea, with few cars on it, a stretch of two miles of cold water out to our rock, and rare few ships.

"
"Steamer Sounding Fog Horn", Newfoundland print by Frank Leslie

"The mysteries of the sea," said McDunn thoughtfully. "You know, the ocean's the biggest damned snowflake ever? It rolls and swells a thousand shapes and colors, no two alike. Strange. One night, years ago, I was here alone, when all of the fish of the sea surfaced out there. Something made them swim in and lie in the bay, sort of trembling and staring up at the tower light going red, white, red, white across them so I could see their funny eyes. I turned cold. They were like a big peacock's tail, moving out there until midnight. Then, without so much as a sound, they slipped away, the million of them was gone. I kind of think maybe, in some sort of way, they came all those miles to worship. Strange. But think how the tower must look to them, standing seventy feet above the water, the God-light flashing out from it, and the tower declaring itself with a monster voice. They never came back, those fish, but don't you think for a while they thought they were in the Presence?" I shivered. I looked out at the long gray lawn of the sea stretching away into nothing and nowhere.

"Oh, the sea's full." McDunn puffed his pipe nervously, blinking. He had been nervous all day and hadn't said why. "For all our engines and so-called submarines, it'll be ten thousand centuries before we set foot on the real bottom of the sunken lands, in the fairy kingdoms there, and know real tenor. Think of it, it's still the year 300,000 Before Christ down under there. While we've paraded around with trumpets, lopping off each other's countries and heads, they have been living beneath the sea twelve miles deep and cold in a time as old as the beard of a comet."

'Yes, it's an old world."

"Come on. I got something special I been saving up to tell you."

We ascended the eighty steps, talking and taking our time. At the top, McDunn switched off the room lights so there'd be no reflection in the plate glass. The great eye of the light was humming, turning easily in its oiled socket. The Fog Horn was blowing steadily, once every fifteen seconds.

"Sounds like an animal, don't it?" McDunn nodded to himself. "A big lonely animal crying in the night. Sitting here on the edge of ten billion years calling out to the Deeps, I'm here, I'm here, I'm here. And the Deeps do answer, yes, they do. You been here now for three months, Johnny, so I better prepare you. About this time of year," he said, studying the murk and fog, "something comes to visit the lighthouse."

"The swarms of fish like you said?"

"No, this is something else. I've put off telling you because you might think I'm daft. But tonight's the latest I can put it off, for if my calendar's marked right from last year, tonight's the night it comes. I won't go into detail, you'll have to see it yourself. Just sit down there. If you want, tomorrow you can pack your duffel and take the motorboat in to land and get your car parked there at the dinghy pier on the cape and drive on back to some little inland town and keep your lights burning nights, I won't question or blame you. It's happened three years now, and this is the only time anyone's been here with me to verify it. You wait and watch."

Half an hour passed with only a few whispers between us. When we grew tired waiting, McDunn began describing some of his ideas to me. He had some theories about the Fog Horn itself.

"One day many years ago a man walked along and stood in the sound of the ocean on a cold sunless shore and said, 'We need a voice to call across the water, to warn ships; I'll make one. I'll make a voice like all of time and all of the fog that ever was; I'll make a voice that is like an empty bed beside you all night long, and like an empty house when you open the door, and like trees in autumn with no leaves. A sound like the birds flying south, crying, and a sound like November wind and the sea on the hard, cold shore. I'll make a sound that's so alone that no one can miss it, that whoever hears it will weep in their souls, and hearths will seem warmer, and being inside will seem better to all who hear it in the distant towns. I'll make me a sound and an apparatus and they'll call it a Fog Horn and whoever hears it will know the sadness of eternity and the briefness of life.'

The Fog Horn blew.

"I made up that story," said McDunn quietly, "to try to explain why this thing keeps coming back to the lighthouse every year. The fog horn calls, I think, it comes..." "But-" I said. "Sssst!" said McDunn. "There!" He nodded out to the Deeps. Something was swimming towards the lighthouse tower. It was a cold night, as I said; the high tower was cold, the light coming and going, and the Fog Horn calling and calling through the raveling mist. You couldn't see far and you couldn't see plain, but there was the deep sea moving on it's way about the night earth, flat and quiet, to color of grey mud, and here were the two of us alone in the high tower, and there, far out at first, was a ripple, followed by a wave, a rising, a bubble, a bit of froth/ And then, from the surface of the cold sea came a head, a large head, dark-colored, with immense eyes, and then a neck And then-not a body-but more neck and more! The head rose a full forty feet above the water on a slender and beautiful neck. Only then did the body, like a little island of black coral and shells and crayfish, drip up from the subterranean. There was a flicker of tail. In all, from head to tip of tail, I estimated the monster at ninety or a hundred feet. I don't know what I said. I said something. "Steady, boy, steady," whispered McDunn. "It's impossible!" I said. "No, Johnny, we're impossible. It's like it always was ten million years ago. It hasn't changed.. It's us and the land that've changed, become impossible. Us!" It swam slowly and with a great majesty out in the icy waters, far away. the fog came and went about it, momentarily erasing its shape. One of the monster eyes caught and held and flashed back our immense light, red, white, red, white, like a disc held high and sending a message in primeval code. It was as silent as the fog through which it swam. "It's a dinosaur of some sort!" I crouched down, holding to the stair rail. "Yes, one of the tribe." "But they died out!" "No, only hid away in the Deeps, Deep, deep down in the deepest Deeps. Isn't that a word now, Johnny, a real word, it says so much: the Deeps. There's all the coldness and darkness and deepness in the world in a word like that." "What'' we do?" "Do? We got our job, we can't leave. besides, we're safer here than in any boat trying to get to land. That thing's as big as a destroyer and almost as swift." "But here, why does it come here?" The next moment I has my answer. 

The Fog Horn blew. 

And the monster answered. A cry came across a million years of water and mist. A cry so anguished and alone it shuddered in my head and my body. The monster cried out at the tower. The Fog Horn blew. The monster roared again. 

The Fog Horn blew. 

Then, the monster opened its great toothed mouth and the sound that came from it was the sound of the Fog Horn itself. Lonely and vast and far away. The sound of isolation, a viewless sea, a cold night, apartness. That was the sound. "Now," whispered McDunn, "do you know why it comes here?" I nodded. "All year long, Johnny, that poor monster there lying far out, a thousand miles at sea, and twenty miles deep maybe, biding its time, perhaps a million years old, this one creature. Think of it, waiting a million years; could you wait that long? Maybe, it's the last of its kind. I sort of think that's true. 

Anyway, here come men on land and build this lighthouse, five years ago. And set up their Fog Horn and sound it and sound it out towards the place where you bury yourself in sleep and sea memories of a world where there were thousands like yourself, but now you're alone, all alone in a world that's not made for you, a world where you have to hide. 

"But the sound of the Fog Horn comes and goes, comes and goes, and you stir from the muddy bottom of the Deeps, and your eyes open like the lenses of two-foot cameras and you move, slow, slow, for you have the ocean sea on your shoulders, heavy. But that Fog Horn comes through a thousand miles of water, faint and familiar, and the furnace in your belly stokes up, and you begin to rise, slow, slow. You feed yourself on minnows, on rivers of jellyfish, and you rise slow through the autumn months, through September when the fogs started, through October with more fog and the horn still calling you on, and then, late in November, after pressurizing yourself day by day, a few feet higher every hour, you are near the surface and still alive. You've got to go slow; if you surfaced all at once you'd explode. So it takes you all of three months to surface, and then a number of days to swim through the cold waters to the lighthouse. And there you are, out there, in the night, Johnny, the biggest damned monster in creation. And here's the lighthouse calling to you, with a long neck like your neck sticking way up out of the water, and a body like your body, and most important of all, a voice like your voice. Do you understand now, Johnny, do you understand?" The Fog Horn blew. The monster answered. I saw it all, I knew it all-the million years of waiting alone, for someone to come back who never came back. The million years of isolation at the bottom of the sea, the insanity of time there, while the skies cleared of reptile-birds, the swamps fried on the continental lands, the sloths and sabre-tooths had there day and sank in tar pits, and men ran like white ants upon the hills. The Fog Horn Blew. 

"Last year," said McDunn, "that creature swam round and round, round and round, all night. Not coming to near, puzzled, I'd say. Afraid, maybe. And a bit angry after coming all this way. But the next day, unexpectedly, the fog lifted, the sun came out fresh, the sky was as blue as a painting. And the monster swam off away from the heat and the silence and didn't come back. I suppose it's been brooding on it for a year now, thinking it over from every which way." The monster was only a hundred yards off now, it and the Fog Horn crying at each other. As the lights hit them, the monster's eyes were fire and ice, fire and ice. "That's life for you," said McDunn. "Someone always waiting for someone who never comes home. Always someone loving some thing more than that thing loves them. And after a while you want to destroy whatever that thing is, so it can hurt you no more." The monster was rushing at the lighthouse. The Fog Horn blew. "Let's see what happens," said McDunn. 

He switched the Fog Horn off. 

The ensuing minute of silence was so intense that we could hear our hearts pounding in the glassed area of the tower, could hear the slow greased turn of the light. The monster stopped and froze. It's great lantern eyes blinked. Its mouth gaped. It gave a sort of rumble, like a volcano. It twitched its head this way and that, as if to seek the sounds now dwindled off in the fog. It peered at the lighthouse. It rumbled again. Then its eyes caught fire. It reared up, threshed the water, and rushed at the tower, its eyes filled with angry torment. "McDunn!" I cried. "Switch on the horn!" McDunn fumbled with the switch. But even as he switched it on, the monster was rearing up. I had a glimpse of its gigantic paws, fish skin glittering in webs between the finger-like projections, clawing at the tower. The huge eye on the right side of its anguished head glittered before me like a cauldron into which I might drop, screaming. The tower shook. The Fog Horn cried; the monster cried. It seized the tower and gnashed at the glass, which shattered in upon us. McDunn seized my arm. "Downstairs!" The tower rocked, trembled, and started to give. The Fog Horn and the monster roared. 

We stumbled and half fell down the stairs. "Quick!" We reached the bottom as the tower buckled down towards us. We ducked under the stairs in the small stone cellar. There were a thousand concussions as the rocks rained down; the Fog Horn stopped abruptly. The monster crashed upon the tower. The tower fell. We knelt together, McDunn and I holding tight, while our world exploded. Then it was over and there was nothing but darkness and the wash of the sea on the raw stones. That and the other sound. "Listen," said McDunn quietly. "Listen." We waited a moment. And then I began to hear it. First a great vacuumed sucking of air, and then the lament, the bewilderment, the loneliness of the great monster, folded over upon us, above us, so that the sickening reek of its body filled the air, a stone's thickness away from our cellar. The monster gasped and cried. The tower was gone. The light was gone. The thing that had called it across a million years was gone. And the monster was opening its mouth and sending out great sounds. the sounds of a Fog Horn, again and again. And ships far at sea, not finding the light, not seeing anything, but passing and hearing late that night must've thought: There it is, the lonely sound, the Lonesome Bay horn. All's well. We've rounded the cape. And so it went for the rest of that night. The sun was hot and yellow the next afternoon when the rescuers came to dig us from our stoned-under cellar. "It fell apart, is all," said McDunn gravely. "We had a few bad knocks from the waves and it just crumbled." He pinched my arm. There was nothing to see. The ocean was calm, the sky blue. The only thing was a great algaic stink from the green matter that covered the fallen tower stones and the shore rocks. Flies buzzed about. The ocean washed empty on the shore. The next year they built a new lighthouse, but by that time I had a job in the little town and a wife and a good small warm house that glowed yellow on autumn nights, the doors locked, the chimney puffing smoke. As for McDunn. he was master of the new lighthouse, built to his own specifications, out of steel-reinforced concrete. "Just in case," he said. The new lighthouse was ready in November. I drove down alone one evening late and parked my car and looked across the grey waters and listened to the new horn sounding, once, twice, three, four times a minute far out there by itself. The monster? It never came back. "It's gone away," said McDunn. "It's gone back to the Deeps. It's learned you can't love anything too much in this world. It's gone into the deepest Deeps to wait another million years. Ah, the poor thing! Waiting out there, and waiting out there, while man comes and goes on this pitiful little planet. 

Waiting and waiting. I sat in my car, listening. I couldn't see the lighthouse or the light standing out in Lonesome Bay. I could only hear the Horn, the Horn, the Horn. It sounded like the monster calling. I sat there wishing there was something I could say

Writing about the Korean Conflict (1950-1953) also called the Korean War

50 Years Later, the Korean Battle of Chosin Ends

By Paul Richter* June 25, 2000, in the Los Angeles Times. 

In the bitter cold of December 1950, a convoy of 3,200 U.S. Army troops came under withering fire from tens of thousands of Chinese infantrymen massed in the hills east of Chosin Reservoir, in North Korea.

(Maine Writer:  The Choisin Resevoir poem by Bob Hammond: below this article.)

Twelve hours later, about 1,500 Americans from the 7th Infantry Division were dead, more than 1,000 were wounded and most of the convoy’s 40 vehicles were charred hulks or in flames. The attack was the brutal conclusion of four days of assaults by the Chinese, and when it was over, only soldiers strong enough to stagger six miles to a U.S. Marine encampment escaped capture.

For years, the units involved have been accused of incompetence, malingering, even cowardice. But now, at the 50th anniversary of the outbreak of the Korean War, the military has taken a new look at the battle and officially affirmed the contribution of what came to be called Task Force Faith.

Survivors were decorated with a Presidential Unit Citation acknowledging that, even though the Army units were ill-prepared and poorly trained, without their resistance the Chinese likely would have swept south and achieved their larger goal of destroying a Marine force of 17,000.

“The fact is, this group kept the others from being annihilated,” said Bob Hammond, 67, of Anaheim, who was a 17-year-old Army artilleryman when he faced the onslaught that killed the six other members of his squad at Chosin Reservoir.

The story of Task Force Faith is a tale of collective anguish and official redemption. It also is emblematic of America’s broader struggle to come to terms with a war that began in confusion and ended in stalemate.

In the war’s opening months, the U.S. military, shrunken by demobilization, was a shadow of the force that had whipped Adolf Hitler and the Japanese military machine in World War II. 

In Korea, it demonstrated its fallibility: faulty intelligence, ill-prepared troops and erratic leadership--all the way up to the most celebrated American war hero of the era, Gen. Douglas MacArthur, who was the top allied commander in Korea.

These questions about the performance of the troops and their leaders were agonizing to contemplate in the years after the Korean War. And for decades, many Americans chose simply to ignore or deny them. As a result, difficult issues arising from America’s “forgotten war” have remained largely out of sight for decades.

Now, however, some of these issues are finally receiving the scrutiny they deserve as official embarrassment over the conduct of the war subsides and as veterans, nearing the last years of their lives, seek to understand better what happened to them so many years ago.

For Army veterans of the Chosin Reservoir fighting, the negative perception of their performance has made the wait for official reconsideration long and painful. 

Compounding their discomfort was the way Chosin has come to be seen as a brilliant tactical operation by the Marines who fought next to them.

Marines, Army Fight Over Battle Story

Though then-Secretary of State Dean Acheson called it the greatest defeat for American arms since the Civil War battle of Bull Run, Chosin Reservoir has been celebrated as a success for the encircled 1st Marine Division, which fought its way out of the trap, bringing along its equipment, its dead and wounded, and inflicting 40,000 Chinese casualties.

Some Marines, recalling this feat, have contrasted the corps’ performance with what they regarded as the Army’s failure. The story has been a lingering source of friction between members and veterans of the two services.

The reservoir campaign unfolded as part of a huge allied counteroffensive that began with MacArthur’s daring landing of U.S. forces at Inchon in September and was intended to capture all of North Korea--and end the war--by Christmas.

As part of this drive, MacArthur sent the 1st Marine Division and some units from the Army’s 7th Infantry Division on an offensive from the northeastern coast toward the Chinese border. But as the advance continued, American lines grew thin--and the Chinese became increasingly unhappy with the Americans’ approach. China moved 300,000 troops into North Korea in the late fall, although the Americans continued to believe that they would not jump into the war.

Korean War Memorial in Washington D.C. (I have always found this memorial to be just mesmerizing! I can feel the suffering by focusing on the statues.)

While the Marine force included many battle-hardened officers and NCOs, the Army units were markedly weaker. 

In fact, the Army’s troop strength had been reduced significantly in the rapid demobilization following World War II, leaving units with fewer soldiers than often were needed to engage in combat.

Some of the Army soldiers sent to Chosin Reservoir were hastily trained teenagers, who had been rushed to Korea from cushy garrison duty in Japan. 

About 700 of the original 3,200 members of Task Force Faith were young Koreans who had been swept up in South Korean cities and pressed into unpaid service.

The Army units had meager supplies of ammunition, food and equipment. Many of the soldiers found themselves facing winter temperatures that fell to 40 degrees below zero with only light parkas and thin cotton pants for protection.

In early November, the 1st Marine Division and the Army units began a laborious advance up a gravel mountain road that wound 78 miles into the interior toward the huge reservoir, about 40 miles from the Chinese border. While most of the troops headed toward the west side of the reservoir, three Army battalions and a few other units turned east.

The Army brass told them that only a scattering of Chinese units was in the area. The soldiers set up three separate camps on the night of Nov. 27 without digging foxholes into the rock-frozen earth as military practice required or, in some cases, without setting up communication links so neighboring units could be contacted for help.

By 11 p.m., the soldiers found out that Army intelligence was wrong.

Hordes of Chinese infantrymen, some armed with captured U.S.-made Thompson submachine guns, announced their arrival with bugles, whistles and shepherd’s horns. Swarming through the camps in subzero weather, they killed some soldiers as they slept in their tents and destroyed vehicles, artillery and other equipment before they were repulsed.

Pvt. Hammond, assigned to the 57th Field Artillery, saw in the dawn’s light that only a few men in his unit were left to operate its six 105-millimeter guns.

Only slowly recognizing the extent of the threat, Army leadership first ordered the units to continue their mission.

According to historical accounts, Gen. Edward M. Almond, commander of the Army’s X Corps, flew in by helicopter and urged the men on: “Don’t let a bunch of Chinese laundrymen stand in your way.”

Two days later, the brass ordered the troops to withdraw, though some senior Army leaders privately doubted that many would make it out. For four days, the task force held out against two Chinese divisions, who attacked at night and remained hidden during the day.

Except for Marine aircraft, the Americans had no support. An Army tank unit a few miles south tried briefly to join them--but turned around after two of its tanks were destroyed by the Chinese. American aircraft tried to airdrop supplies to the units, but some were lost to the enemy. In other cases, the wrong ammunition was sent.

The Chinese were carrying only light weapons, but they had large numbers of troops and were highly disciplined. 

Clarence White, then an 18-year-old supply sergeant, recalled watching the Chinese march in formation toward the American positions as grenade launchers and .50-caliber machine guns from an Army tracked vehicle cut them down. “It was unbelievable,” he said of their determination.

Many of the Army’s officers were killed or wounded in the first days at Chosin Reservoir.

Col. Allan D. MacLean, the commanding officer, ran out across the reservoir ice to greet what he thought was an American rescue mission. It turned out to be a Chinese column. He was wounded, then captured by the Chinese.

The new commanding officer, Lt. Col. Don Carlos Faith, on December 1, ordered the troops to form a convoy of trucks for a withdrawal. The wounded, then numbering 600, were piled in the vehicles and lashed onto hoods and fenders.

But the withdrawal began in disaster as a Marine Corsair fighter plane dropped a canister of napalm too close to the column, incinerating a dozen U.S. soldiers at the head of the convoy. 

The mistake encouraged the Chinese, who increased their fire and panicked many of the U.S. soldiers, who surged down the road without waiting for orders.

For the next 12 hours, the convoy moved sluggishly as Chinese marksmen picked off drivers and trucks broke down. Finally, with Faith dead and the column still six miles north of the Marine encampment, the convoy ground to a halt.

The Chinese troops swarmed in, shooting the wounded, lobbing grenades, setting other vehicles afire and taking the few unwounded soldiers prisoner.

Thomas Sealey, 68, then an 18-year-old private, was crouching under a broken truck with only five rounds remaining when the Chinese surrounded it and poked their bayonets in his direction.

For 33 months he was held prisoner, living on two boiled potatoes a day and watching weaker soldiers die in filth and despair. Over the next several days, the last soldiers straggled in to the Marine camp at Hagaru-ri. Only 385 members of an Army force that once numbered 3,200 were healthy enough to join the Marines in their withdrawal to the sea.

The Army soldiers’ battlefield ordeal was over. But a new fight soon began--over their reputation.

A Marine chaplain who had been at Chosin, Lt. Cmdr. Otto Sporrer, returned to the states to give news interviews and write an article deploring the Army’s performance.

Sporrer, who resented the fact that the Marines had been used in the Chosin campaign, said that some Army soldiers had thrown down their weapons. 

Others feigned injuries once back at the Marine camp, he said, so they would be evacuated to safety and would not have to fight. In “Breakout: The Chosin Reservoir Campaign, Korea 1950,” a 1999, account of the campaign as seen largely through Marine eyes, author Martin Russ reported that an anonymous Marine had written lyrics about the task force, to the tune of Hank Snow’s classic country song, “Movin’ On”:

Hear the pitter patter of tiny feet

It’s the U.S. Army in full retreat.

Responding to accusations from Sporrer and others, the Army had its inspector general study the units’ performance. He found no evidence to support the accusations. In the years after the war, Col. Faith was awarded a posthumous Medal of Honor and the official Army history praised the soldiers.

Yet the stain on the Army units’ reputation has been difficult to erase.

In 1952, when U.S. military commanders in Asia proposed a Presidential Unit Citation to honor the American performance at Chosin, the Marine commander, Gen. Oliver Prince Smith, recommended inclusion of Marine components but not the Army units who fought nearby.

In recent years, some Marines, Army veterans and others have petitioned repeatedly to honor Army units as well. They cited documents from official Chinese archives showing that the Chinese had thrown two full divisions and an attached regiment--20,000 troops--at the task force. But the authorities demurred, saying that rules required them to abide by the judgment of the commander on the scene, Smith, the Marine general.

Last year, two groups of veterans again urged authorities to grant recognition to Task Force Faith. One group consisted of the directors of a veterans’ group called the Chosin Few, four-fifths of whose members are Marines.

In October, Navy Secretary Richard Danzig, who has authority over the Marines, signed a terse order calling for the Army units to be included in the citation for displaying “extraordinary heroism.” At a convention of the Chosin Few in Lancaster, Pa., on June 10, the veterans finally were honored.

Some Army veterans acknowledged that many of the soldiers at Chosin Reservoir were ill-prepared and that their officers made mistakes. But they deny that there was malingering and insist that, if any soldiers threw down their weapons, it was because they were malfunctioning or because they had no ammunition.

Merrill A. Needham Jr., a sociologist and writer who has pushed since 1993 to win recognition for the Army units, said that it made him “very emotional . . . to think of this unit, stripped of its honor.” That they “fought as long and hard as they did, basically unsupported, was miraculous,” said Needham, who has written a book, “Foot Soldiers,” about the long military tradition of Faith’s family.

Needham sees the soldiers as belonging to a centuries-old military tradition called the “forlorn hope"--a small band of warriors who are thrown into the path of likely destruction to slow an enemy’s attack.

With many soldiers’ bodies “left smoldering amid the wreckage of their trucks, or frozen in the ice of Chosin,” the Army units fit that definition, Needham wrote in a letter to one officer of the outfit. 

“Neither then, nor later, were they honored.”

The Army veterans, though, said that they now are trying to focus on the positive aspects of what happened, including the way some Marine veterans helped push the Pentagon bureaucracy to clear their names. “It was, really, the Marines that got it done,” Hammond said. And that may be a sign that, 50 years after the fighting, the wounds are healing.

One of the Bloodiest Wars in History

The Korean War was one of history’s bloodiest, a Cold War flash point that set the stage for American involvement later in Vietnam. It began on June 25, 1950, after Communist North Korea invaded South Korea. The U.N. entered the war in support of South Korea. The Soviet Union and China supported the North. The United States supplied about 90% of the troops and supplies that the U.N. sent to South Korea.

*Paul Richter covered the State Department and foreign policy for the Los Angeles Times out of its Washington, D.C., bureau.

Poem:  The Chosin Reservoir by Bob Hammond 7th Div.

The Chosin Resevoir, a poem written by Bob Hammond, is published on line in Korean War social media pages and in Brothers and Heroes: A Chronicle of Military Service of Six Americans by George J. Lambert.

“In the hills of North Korea by a lake of azure blue, rides a farmer in his ox cart on the road to Hargaru.

He is singing songs of history that his father taught to him, as his eyes survey the scenery that’s no longer gray and grim.

In his mind he hears the cannons, the reciolless rifle’s roar, and the chatter of the Burp guns, all around the Reservoir.

Mortars crashing, Carbines flashing, Screaming men and boys, Bugles, flares and Howitzers, A symphony of noise.

He is thinking of his childhood, when he saw the soldiers come, to this peaceful mountain valley, that had never heard a gun,

And he’s never understood it, he will always wonder why, why so many men had come there from so far away, to die.

How they fought with savage fury agonizing through the snow, fingers turning black with frostbite, Death was sweeping, to and fro.

MacLean and Faith, Commanders: Hodge, and thousands more, fought and froze, and bled to death at Chosin Reservoir.

In the hills of North Korea, by a lake of icy blue, there’s no monument to witness, and no crosses are in view.

Just some land of little value covered well by falling snow, but they say to listen carefully when the wind begins to blow,

And you will hear the ghostly bugles from the mountain pass, nearby. You may hear the battle spreading from the mountains to the sky.

Lives were ending, Futures pending, Fate was casting dice.

Some would live and some would die, Karma, carved in ice!

The battle long is over, but fought each night anew, in dreams of those who can’t forget;

They’re called “The Chosin Few.”

So, let the Veterans tell the stories, let the legend live and grow, let the Chosin be remembered with the Men of Alamo,

With Bastogne and with Wake Island, and the Bunker Hill Command, and wherever there’s courageous men to take a valiant stand.

Once they fought to save a nation, they could not have offered more, than the sacrifices made there at the Chosin Reservoir. In the bitter bloody battles, at the Chosin Reservoir.”

Medical ethics journalism

Let's write about Sheri Fink's investigative documentary in the best selling Five Days at Memorial.

Echo essay by Amanda Schafer, published in The New Yorker on September 12, 2013, in the Annals of Technology.

Memorial Medical Center in New Orleans was heavily damaged when Hurricane Katrina struck  on August 29, 2005.

A study guide can accompany the reading of this documentary and the link to purchase is at this site here.

In the aftermath of the storm, while the building had no electricity and went through catastrophic flooding after the levees failed, Dr. Anna Pou, along with other doctors and nurses, attempted to continue caring for patients. 

On Wednesday, August 31, United States Health and Human Services Secretary Mike Leavitt reassured the public that 2,500 patients would be evacuated from hospitals in Orleans Parish, although it wasn't clear at first where they would be moved to.

On September 11, 45 bodies were recovered from Memorial Medical Center, about five of whom had died before the disaster (originally thought to be eleven). Out of an estimated 215, bodies found in nursing homes and hospitals in New Orleans, Memorial had the largest number.

In July 2006, a Louisiana judge found probable cause to order the arrest of Dr. Pou and two nurses for second degree murder in the deaths of several of the patients, following a nearly year-long investigation by the office of Louisiana Attorney General Charles Foti.

Nevertheless, a grand jury in Orleans Parish refused to indict Pou on any of the counts. Eventually, the charges were expunged and the State of Louisiana paid Pou's legal fees.

The Moral Dilemmas of Doctors During a Disaster

Before and after Katrina: Memorial Medical Center in New Orleans (Tuscon.com): Parts of the New Orleans Memorial have not yet reopened, post 2005, Hurricane Katrina.

NEW ORLEANS, Louisiana- In the late summer of 2005, the waters loosed in the wake of Hurricane Katrina laid siege to New Orleans. 

At the city's hisoric Memorial Medical Center, the power and then the backup generators failed, creating a silence one doctor described as the “sickest sound” of his life. 

Doctors and nurses, at times in darkness, struggled to take care of patients without life-saving machines, air conditioning, or functioning toilets. After several days of desperation, some allegedly euthanized critically ill patients, even as large-scale evacuations of the hospital began. 

Sheri Fink, a doctor and journalist, published a meticulous investigation of these deaths in the New York Times Magazine and on the Web site of ProPublica, in 2009.

Sheri Fink's work won her a Pulitzer Prize.

In “Five Days at Memorial,” the contours of the Katrinia story remained the same, yet Fink imbued them with far more narrative richness, making the doctors seem both more sympathetic and more culpable. Fink also expanded on the ethical conundrums, which  festered over time and seemed to gain fresh urgency whenever the angry winds of the Katrina hurricane crashed against New Orleans. 

Which patients should receive priority in a disaster? Should doctors abandon the critically ill? What should they do if they believe those patients will suffer? Should they receive legal immunity for decisions made under duress? To a disturbing degree, the best answers seem to run counter to what key players at Memorial did and what at least one of them has advocated for since.

As the waters surged toward Memorial, hospital leaders began by acting with familiar priorities: they chose to evacuate the sickest patients and those who relied on ventilators or other devices first. But then the medical chairman decided that patients with do-not-resuscitate orders should get lowest priority, later saying he thought they had the “least to lose.” As the staff scrambled to move patients down from the upper floors, other factors played a role. One doctor worried that a patient who weighed more than three hundred pounds might slow the evacuation line; he was moved to another area to wait, rather than joining the queue. Some patients on the seventh floor seemed to get even lower priority, in part because their treatment was overseen by LifeCare, a health-care company that leased space within Memorial. As the days passed and doctors soldiered on without electricity, running water, sleep, or outside help, they flipped their moral scale upside down. Now the sickest patients—whom they designated threes on a one-to-three scale—would wait, and the healthiest would go first. This reflected “a sense among the doctors that they would not be able to save everyone,” writes Fink, citing the head-and-neck surgeon Anna Pou.

Setting the right triage priorities is one thing. But then something darker began to happen. Four days into the ordeal, Dr. Ewing Cook, who’d previously survived two heart attacks, struggled to reach the eighth-floor intensive-care unit, where he examined a patient with advanced cancer. Convinced that she was close to death and that he couldn’t possibly make it up the stairs again, he asked the nurse to raise her dosage of morphine. “There’s no question I hastened her demise,” he later said. 

Workers move patients up the stairs from the parking garage to the helipad to be evacuated from Memorial Medical Center in New Orleans, Thursday, Sept. 1, 2005, in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. (AP Photo/The Dallas Morning News, Brad Loper)

Cook allegedly spoke with Pou about injecting patients with morphine and the sedative Versed, and she wrote prescriptions for substantial amounts of morphine, which, despite the chaos, were filled by the hospital pharmacy. (Whether her intent was to relieve pain or end life remains in dispute.) 

Meanwhile, the pulmonologist John Thiele apparently injected several category-three patients with morphine and Versed. Knowing that he would soon evacuate, he felt he could not “justify hanging a morphine drip and praying it didn’t run out after everyone left and before the patient died,” Fink reports.

There are moments when doctors face genuinely tough calls about whether to let someone live or die: a soldier on a battlefield, say, who begs a doctor not to leave him behind alive. But this isn’t the way Fink describes the scene at Memorial. Some of the patients whose bodies contained high levels of morphine or Versed were apparently not on the verge of death or even in terrible pain, according to details of the investigation. A three-hundred-eighty-pound paraplegic named Emmett Everett had eaten tuna fish, crackers, and relish for breakfast. “I knew he was sick,” one staff member later said, “but, um, you know, he could talk and everything.” In fact, he told one of his nurses, “Cindy, don’t let them leave me behind.” 

Then, a doctor allegedly ended his life—without his consent. Even after the earthquake in Haiti, physicians from a field hospital said they did not amputate survivors’ limbs without consent, regardless of how urgently they thought patients needed the procedure. Ultimately, over twenty of the bodies found at Memorial contained either morphine and Versed or both. Multiple forensic experts determined that eight or nine of these deaths were homicides. Pou was arrested, but a sympathetic grand jury, which for political reasons was not privy to all of the forensic evidence, failed to indict her. No other doctors or nurses were held to be criminally responsible.

The more gritty detail Fink offers, the harder it is not to feel sympathy for the doctors and nurses. Yet much of what they did—especially the euthanasia but also the triage priorities—sets an awful example for future disasters. For starters, a D.N.R. order simply means that “a patient whose heartbeat or breathing had stopped should not be revived,” Fink writes. It reflects that patient’s wishes for the future; it does not necessarily indicate how sick he is now, or how close to death. Using D.N.R. orders in triage also risks penalizing individuals who plan for scenarios that may not occur. 

At Memorial, the early reliance on these orders meant that some patients were never carried down from the seventh floor to the staging area for evacuation. This made it harder to include them later on, even as more helicopters arrived.

A triage plan that puts the most vulnerable last is also troubling. Doctors may reason that the very sick are too fragile or too heavy to transport or don’t have long to live. But they’re the ones who are most likely to die if left in the hospitals as conditions get worse. A system that prioritizes the healthy—or the unhealthy—should also be looked at with humility. Death is unpredictable, and experts aren’t necessarily good at differentiating among critical patients. Indeed, in a small exercise designed to plan for pandemic flu, researchers asked doctors to assess the likely survival of I.C.U. patients with the H1N1 virus who were on ventilators. Their predictions, as Fink notes in her epilogue, were largely wrong.

Some doctors have been criticized for leaving Memorial, even when food, water, and pain medication were still plentiful. But with gunshots in the distance and rumors of violence and martial law, it seems reasonable that some of them chose to evacuate. “They are not the Secret Service,” the bioethicist Arthur Caplan told me. It also makes sense that they would try to lessen their patients’ pain beforehand, even if the drugs they used risked hastening death. If their intent was to end suffering forever, though, this crosses a line, Caplan and others argue. After all, who can know whether some unforeseen rescue might have materialized at the eleventh hour, however unlikely it seemed?

Pou and her team have argued that we should not second-guess doctors and should instead grant them broad legal immunity for their work during disasters. But this is neither necessary nor wise. Doctors are already judged according to the resources available and the circumstances, as George Annas of Boston University told me. The standard of care is what “a reasonable physician would do in that disaster, not in a fully equipped O.R. in New York.” And the last message we should want crisis workers to receive is that anything goes.

Terrified, weary doctors should not abandon ethical standards; they should cling to the norms of medicine, beyond when it feels reasonable to do so. This means talking to patients and respecting their autonomy, even under awful conditions. It also means making every effort to evacuate the sickest and most dependent patients first. The original—deeply reasonable—triage plan at Memorial prioritized babies, I.C.U. patients, those who required dialysis, and those who had received bone-marrow transplants (and therefore had compromised immune systems). If hospital leaders had been forced to choose some of these patients over others, it would have been reasonable to send babies over the elderly, since infants arguably have the most life ahead of them. (Alternatively, some ethicists propose simply drawing straws.)

But the grim hypotheticals risk obscuring another issue: medical workers under siege can easily lose perspective.

Although it is startling, medical workers can start to make decisions based on their own dark fears rather than the changing facts on the ground. “For heavens sake,” one of the forensic experts cited by Fink said, “Memorial wasn’t on a goddamn battlefield with enemy shells coming in. This was New Orleans, and there were helicopters and boats. And really, were they saying they couldn’t get patients off the seventh floor?”

In any disaster, medical teams must re-evaluate patients’ conditions and the available resources frequently, as Fink argues, “maintaining the ability to ‘see’ in the midst of a crisis.” This, along with better backup generators, is what may ultimately save the most lives.

Amanda Schaffer is a science and medical columnist for Slate and a freelance science writer.

Above: The former Memorial Medical Center, parts of which have not reopened since Hurricane Katrina, in 2009. Photograph by