The Foreign Service Journal, January-February 2020

THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | JANUARY-FEBRUARY 2020 51 to update the Operations Center on what we knew about the situation in Port-au-Prince. I had hardly gotten on the phone with Ops when they passed me to the Secretary’s office. After an exchange of brief but heartfelt greetings with the Secretary’s counselor, Cheryl Mills, Secretary Hillary Clinton came on the line. I told her Port-au-Prince had suffered a catastrophe of biblical proportions. We were working to free several embassy officers from the rubble, and it was possible that there had been embassy fatalities. I described the destruction I had witnessed in Delmas and told her that our guards were reporting the same all across the city. The Secretary told me her thoughts and prayers were with us, and said she had set up a task force that would work through the night to get us relief. u The embassy building had survived the earthquake, but the upper floors had been badly shaken. Ceiling tiles and lights had fallen. Lamps and computers were all on the floor. Bookcases were overturned. It took me 15 minutes to get everything picked up off the floor of my office and the computers back up and running. Intending to fix a pot of coffee, I stepped into the front office kitchen only to see the contents of the refrigerator and the cabinets all shattered on the floor. Shards of glass and white porcelain carpeted the floor and filled the open kitchen draw- ers. I couldn’t deal with it. Coffee would have to wait. Under Secretary for Management Patrick Kennedy and Southern Command Deputy Commander Ambassador Paul Trivelli hastily organized a task force in Washington to deal with the crisis. Much of my night was spent in long conversa- tions with them. They asked if the airport was open. The lights of private planes could be seen taking off regularly as anyone rich enough to get away from the apocalypse was loading their families, in some cases their injured, into their own aircraft and flying them to Santo Domingo or Miami, or any place where the earth didn’t shake. Three embassy houses on a ridgeline had collapsed and slid down the hill. Our human rights officer and her husband and the noncommissioned officer from the defense attaché’s office were trapped in the rubble. Their neighbor, Security Officer Pete Kolshorn, and a couple of Haitian guards worked tire- lessly into the night to rescue them. With violent aftershocks rearranging the rubble every 15 minutes, the rescue operation put the rescuers’ own lives at risk. But they persisted and got their injured comrades up to the top of the ridgeline. All three had broken bones and open wounds. During the two hours it took to get them out of the rubble, we sent a scout to the three hospitals in town. All three were overwhelmed and would not even open their gates to us. A Haitian doctor who lived nearby gave initial attention to our three wounded colleagues and helped Kolshorn move them several blocks through rubble to the main street. An embassy roving patrol vehicle that had been trapped up in the highlands managed to meet the party on the other side of the rubble. The Haitian doctor advised moving them to the clinic of a plastic surgeon he knew in Petionville. It wasn’t ideal, but it was our only choice. The doctor asked us to send oxygen tanks because one of the male patients had a collapsed lung. In the expectation that one of our drivers would find a way through the rubble that separated the embassy from Petionville, I asked Dr. Steve Harris, the head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention office in Port-au-Prince who had set up a provisional hospital in the embassy’s health unit, to get me all the oxygen, morphine and casting supplies he could spare. There were only two tanks of oxygen. That would not be enough to keep the male patient alive, the Haitian doctor told me; but it was all we had, and we dispatched the driver with the supplies. u Through the night more and more wounded came to the embassy looking for help. One of the ambassador’s bodyguards with open wounds and broken bones came carrying his infant son who had multiple fractures. His wife and other children had all been killed when their house collapsed. By midnight we still had not located a large number of embassy personnel. With so many streets blocked by rubble, it was a real challenge to reach them. Assistant RSO Rob Little offered to take his motorcycle and go looking house by house. Rob knew Port-au-Prince better than any of us, and at 6 foot 6, he was intimidated by nothing. For the next two hours he drove around the neighborhoods where embassy people lived, assem- bling them in areas where they could be picked up by our vans as soon as the roads were cleared. Some of the embassy homes had been completely destroyed, but their occupants were miraculously spared. Several officers sustained injuries that Three embassy houses on a ridgeline had collapsed and slid down the hill.