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Lt. Gen. Russel Honore’s Memoir Survival is a Gem
The larger-than-life voice of three-star Lt. General Russel L Honore (U.S. Army, retired) fairly bellows out of the 274-page history-packed, dog-eared, underlined pages of my copy of his recently released memoir, titled Survival. Part biography, part history, part polemic, and part petulance, Honore’s story about KatrinaLand reads like Louisiana Creole jambalaya tastes. The eighteen chapters boast compelling titles, such as “The Patience of the Poor,” “First Army’s Storm Surge,” “Running Against the Wind,” “Get Those Damn Weapons Down!” and, my favorite, “Avoiding the 1,200-Mile Screwdrivers,” i.e., the sniffers and snifflers, often bosses, who watch a disaster unfold on television from 1,200 miles away and “no-no,” “tsk-tsk,” and neurose on leaders lashed to ground zero, wherever it may be. Honore’s book is a first rate stemwinder, filled with knowledge, insight, compassion and humor.
Honore served as commander of the Joint Task-Force Katrina in the aftermath of Katrina--“a third world disaster in a first-world nation,” he quips. He reported to the U.S. military command above him and to local and state civilian leaders such as New Orleans Ray Nagin (“tired, edgy and in need of a shave”) and Louisiana Governor Kathleen Blanco (“a pleasant, amiable woman”). Honore recalls, “I could not unilaterally start making decisions about how we would be employed because of the restrictions on the use of active-duty military troops within the continental United States under the Posse Comitatus Act. Essentially, active-duty troops are able to assist and provide support to civil authorities in times of disaster to save lives. But they cannot do law enforcement and are not in charge of anything except themselves.” Nagin and Blanco, he observed, were both under a “great deal of stress” and were also “victims of Katrina…Victims tend to act and speak like victims and that becomes quite apparent to those who are not victims,” he writes. Blanco, he learned, was “quite disappointed that [he] had not brought a large number of troops to handle what appeared to her, based on what she was seeing on television [from the safety of Baton Rouge], to be a situation in New Orleans where civil authority was breaking down and the city was on the verge of chaos from looter, arsonists, and roving gunmen. It was an impression that many people were beginning to develop as a result of media coverage of Katrina’s aftermath.”
The book’s major thesis is that the United States, which once possessed a strong culture of preparedness and now lacks one almost entirely (except in the U.S. military, which “over the years has created one of the best cultures of preparedness”) must change to survive. This change process will entail a cultural shift from a disaster response-driven mentality to a disaster preparedness-driven mentality. The U.S. has a National Response Framework, Honore points out, but no National Preparedness Plan for disasters. “A disaster breaks everything, including the response plan, just as Katrina did. But even a good response plan is just what it says it is: a response. It is not a preparedness plan. The response plan does not provide for the preposition of key assets, military or civilian, in areas that are prone to hurricanes, floods, tornadoes, wildfires, earthquakes, or any number of other natural disasters.” Honore continues, “In order to mitigate the effects of storms like Katrina or other disasters, there would have to be a cultural shift in how governments, businesses, the education system, and individuals prepared for them. Preparation would have to become as important as response.” Honore interprets the “looting” behavior of some in New Orleans as rational when one considers people who are poor enough and hungry enough will do whatever it takes to survive. “After Katrina we saw people breaking into stores and taking out food and water so they could feed themselves and their families. Some people call that burglary. I call it survival. Some of those people did what they had to in order to stay alive. That does not justify what happened in New Orleans. But if that food is there, and you’re hungry, and your family’s hungry, the human instinct is to eat.” What about stealing mattresses? Honore told reporters, “What’s the big deal? Are you going to let grandma lie on the ground when you’ve got mattresses right there you can use?” On the vast subject of the media’s response to Katrina, Honore avers, “In any disaster, when there is a lot of emotion involved, there’s a fine line between whether the media are reporting what they are seeing, whether they are reporting what they are thinking about what they are seeing, or whether they are reporting what they feel about what they are seeing. A good story probably has a little bit of all of that, but when it comes out of balance, it can be problematic for a democracy. In New Orleans some of the reporting was out of balance because the networks seemed to be competing against one another to see who could get the most sensational story out to the world before that story was fully vetted or put into proper context. The poor were demonized and disparaged in some of the early, more sensational reporting. But all that many of those folks were trying to do was survive until help arrived.”
Honore ponders the thinking behind whether the military should be put in charge of homeland defense. At one time, Congress rumbled that “the military was the best organized and best equipped to do the homeland defense mission,” writes Honore, who is not so sure about this. “The role of the military is to play the away game. The home game is up to law enforcement and federal agencies. Inside individual states it is the responsibility of that state’s governor and the National Guard to respond. The whole notion of putting the military in charge of homeland defense was a bit frightening. People were looking for an easy answer and the military seemed to provide it. But how do you take a federal force and use it within the United States without violating the Posse Comitatus Act? The question was, How much leeway should be given to the military in a domestic crisis?” Honore provides the reader with a ringside seat to this and other provocative dialogues, which rarely make it out to the civilian world. A related point, says Honore, is that “the media [know] little about disaster relief and the laws that govern it. They [do] not know about the Stafford Act of the Helms-Biden Act or the Posse Comitatus Act. Many were merely bodies on the scene who were giving the American public impressions and feelings rather than news.” On disaster plans, Honore notes an old Army saying that goes, “A plan seldom survives first contact with the enemy. A plan is basically good intentions. The key question is not ‘Do you have a plan?’ The question is ‘Are you executing that plan? Can you take the plan and adapt it to the situation on the ground, no matter the situation?’ On the difference between the New Orleans environment after Katrina and Baghdad, Honore opines, “The Army trains not only to prevent chaos, but to deal with it. Without those skills the Army would just have a bunch of MBAs running it. The situation in New Orleans after Katrina was nothing compared to conquering Baghdad. While this was emotionally charged and people were sick and dying, it was not on the scale of a combat operation. It was a permissive environment in the sense that no one was out there trying to kill us. All we had to do was deal with the water and the people. When dealing with food, water, and movement of people, it’s a matter of logistics, not tactics. There is an old axiom in the Army that if logistics was easy it would be called tactics. Joint Task Force-Katrina was function of, and a lesson in, logistics.” Honore shares the inside story on his telling soldiers to, “Get those damn weapons down!” He writes, “Just a few minutes before noon the first of the cargo trucks carrying relief supplies came rolling down Poydras Street and turned right past Harrah’s onto Convention Center Boulevard. As soon as that first truck came into view I realized that the word had not gotten down to the soldiers’ level about how they should carry their weapons. A solider leaning over the cab of the lead truck had his M16 up and ready to fire, as if he was on patrol in downtown Baghdad, not downtown New Orleans. At the same time about a half-dozen trucks filled with heavily armed New Orleans police and SWAT members from across the country pulled out into the street. Every officer in those vehicles had their weapons at the ready as if expecting an ambush. ‘Get those damn weapons down!’ I shouted to the soldier in the first truck. ‘Hey! Weapons down! Weapons down, damn it! Put the weapons down!...Put that weapon on your back! You’re delivering food!’ I yelled at the soldiers,’” ordered Honore. What was the response to his directive? The soldiers immediately lowered their weapons. The response from Governor Blanco’s Adjutant General Bennie Landreneau was, however, confrontation. “‘You can’t tell my soldiers what to do,’ [Landreneau] said with an edge in his voice,” recalls Honore. “I told him I did what I thought was necessary at the time. He still did not like it and made it clear that I commanded the federal forces and he commanded the Louisiana National Guard forces.” Landreneau was also upset about Honore’s personal supervision of the unloading and placement of the food and water at the convention center. “He thought that was something his soldiers should have done. My explanation was that because of all the unknowns we were dealing with that day, particularly the concerns over what might happen when we dropped off the relief supplies, I wanted to be there in case there were serious problems. I felt it was incumbent on me to be at the leading edge of that particular problem rather than sitting at a distance waiting for reports from my staff.” American leaders in government and private organizations can learn much from Honore’s approach: top leaders—not other organization staff—need to be visible, audible, and frequently available to people who are processing a disaster.
These recountings are a tiny sampling from Honore’s book. Reading the history of his childhood as a Creole African-American (he is not Cajun) and his professional military career is to capture a glimpse of rich, nuanced American cultures that many of us are not otherwise privy. His theories on training to simulate defeat, rather than success, are mind-bending. His insight that people of New Orleans normally exaggerate about things helps explain why police officials in New Orleans used unfortunate words, such as “sniper,” when they really meant that someone thought they heard something that sounded like gunshots. Honore is on to the subtleties of language in the context of uncertainty. The word “sniper” has a keen emotional effect on people, even during the calmest of times. Honore recalls a friend once telling him, “Honore, you’re not very good at writing.” “I know,” Honore replied, “but I can communicate.” This book is more evidence of his remarkable gift. Russel Honore’s Survival is a gem and should be required reading for all emergency management, public health, journalism, communications, American history, black studies, political science, sociology, economics, geography, public policy, public administration, law enforcement, fire management, teaching, and business diploma and degree programs. |
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