!K for Katrina --- agk's diary 3 September 2025 @ 05:04 UTC --- written on GPD MicroPC, ssh to vi, on Model M keys while memories come back --- Three stories. The first told by my friend Travis, tactical paramedic back then. Later, public health data guy, then physician's assistant, finally dead by suicide: *** We got toe tags when we deployed. Anybody put up a fight, or we didn't like them, we're supposed to shoot to kill, tag 'em, bag 'em, call in GPS coord- inates. We were health professionals, there to help. We're supposed to kill our patients? Before I made sense of the situation I killed a guy. I shouldn't have. Some medics liked the license to kill or their zombie fantasy. Bodies in the morgue at Belle Chasse Naval Air Station Joint Reserve Base had our bullets in them. I don't know how many, but the only reason to transport the bodies so far was access-control. So there wouldn't be consequences for what we did. --- Second story: we listened to patients, went and looked at "Angola South." With no hospital, no court, no police command structure, no waste pick- up, the city's first act after landfall and the levee failure was chain-link fence and razor wire in the Greyhound bus depot. Child of Guantanamo Bay, parent to Alligator Alcatraz, people grabbed off the streets or from their home by independent police posses sat in cages on oil-slicked asphalt with no booking, no arraignment, no charges. I protected one of the clinic's neighbors from being kidnapped to there, a big intellectualy- disabled 40-year-old with tarditive dyskenesia from decades on anti-schizophrenia drugs. He was drunk and lonely that day. I hugged him, kept him in the clinic til the police posse left, then walked him back down the street to his dad's house. We participated in a press conference to expose it. Friends tried to find the disappeared. Many bussed to Angola Penitentiary in north Louisiana without charges. It's a men's prison surrounded by swamp that used to be a slave plantation. Years later I met a woman with an Angola ID. She told me they were kept outdoors in the rodeo bull pen, in the heat, in full sun. They sat or lay on mats on the ground inside a chainlink and razor- wire fence, air made hotter by exhaust blowing from the guard-shack's air conditioner, coke can sadist- ically set in guard shack window, beads of water condensing on cold aluminum. The city was eager to above all have a jail again, after Orleans Parish Prison TVs were taken so prisoners didn't know the storm was coming, sheriff and guards evacuated, at least 650 prisoners left locked in. Prisoners awaiting arraignment drowned downstairs in cells that filled with water. Them upstairs awaiting hearings had no water or food, no way out, toilets full of shit in the heat. --- Third story my cousin couldn't write down. She looted nursing home pharmacies when she ran out of retail pharmacies. She kept narcotics. Three times a week she delivered us unexpired, above-flood-line meds from our essential drugs list. One nursing home told its story step by sickening step as she saw it, entered, and was drawn into what happened there. Sites all over Katrina's world did that to us. She was alone that day. Out front a fifteen-passenger van stalled in the water. A towtruck stalled in front of it. Inside was evidence the staff tried to feed and care for residents and theirselves without microwave or stove, refrigerators and air conditoner broken, no clean water or bedsheets, shoes and socks nasty in ten centimeters of indoor flood. They were clearly in there more than a week after the van and truck stalled. They stacked the dead in a violent-smelling room, then there were too many. My cousin found blister cards of meds worth taking. Once, in Mississippi, I told this story. The young woman I told realized it was where her grandma died. So now I can't, won't, remember the facility name or location. Movies normalize horror like this. We weren't in a movie. There were times you just fell down a stair- case to hell.