Hurricane Katrina (August 2005)

Hurricane Katrina (August 2005) is recalled as a disaster whose devastation reached well beyond its best-known impact on New Orleans. In Will Robie’s account, it also exposes the distance he had placed between himself and Cantrell: thousands of miles away in Afghanistan, he neither checked on his hometown nor contacted his father, because at that point he no longer cared about either of them.

The storm and its reach

Katrina came ashore in August 2005 as an official Category 3 hurricane. The account emphasizes the extraordinary force of its effects after landfall, likening them to those of a Category 10 storm. The storm crushed and drowned what lay in its path, and, after the levees failed, floodwater filled New Orleans. Although the city received most of the media attention, large parts of Mississippi were devastated as well.

Cantrell largely escaped the storm’s worst effects. Sheila Taggert says the town was mostly missed, while towns on either side were not so fortunate and she lost good friends. Her recollection places the relative safety of Cantrell beside the losses suffered nearby, rather than treating the state’s destruction as a distant backdrop to the better-publicized disaster in New Orleans.

Robie far from home

When Katrina struck, Robie was in Afghanistan, where the Central Intelligence Agency had loaned him to the DoD. He was killing Taliban fighters from long range as part of the campaign against those responsible for the September 11 attacks. His tour had lasted so long that he could barely remember its duration; he received little news from the United States, though Katrina’s scale made it known around the world.

The distance was both geographic and personal. From nine thousand miles away, Robie did not check on Cantrell or his father, although he might have been able to. He says he failed to do so because he did not care. Cantrell and his father had ceased to feel like part of his life, and his daily experience of killing in combat had left him, at least then, immune to the effects of widespread death. He disliked that response, but could not deny it—and wondered whether some of that numbness remained.

Memory and consequence

The hurricane returns in a later conversation at the Gulf Coast, where Robie and Sheila look out toward the water. The scene turns from the open horizon to the past: Sheila asks where he was when Katrina came ashore, and Robie’s recollection supplies an answer that is less about his location than about his state of mind. The disaster becomes a measure of how completely he had withdrawn from his former home and family.

Katrina’s significance in this passage therefore rests on two connected scales of loss. The storm devastated communities across the Gulf region, including areas of Mississippi overshadowed by coverage of New Orleans; for Robie, its date also fixes a moment when distance, combat, and indifference had severed his sense of belonging to Cantrell and his father.