The Foreign Service Journal, January-February 2020

52 JANUARY-FEBRUARY 2020 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL were not life-threatening, but required evacuation as soon as we could get flights in the next days. For those huddled together in the dark front yards of ruined houses waiting for an embassy van, it must have been a very long night. Around 2 a.m. I noticed that the embassy cafeteria had been turned into a makeshift hospital. Americans from all over Port-au-Prince had come looking for help. Some were sleeping on the floors; others were lying on cafeteria tables with IV lines stuck in their arms. A young American woman in her early 20s who had bandages all over her head and shoulders wandered listlessly around the cafeteria. Back in my office, I was beginning to get emails asking for help. An employee of our embassy in Guatemala asked if I could locate her husband, who was a captain in the Guatemalan Army working as a staff officer with the United Nations peacekeep- ing force. The wife of a good friend in Nicaragua wrote that her daughter was at the Montana Hotel with a group of volun- teers from Lynn University. We were able to evacuate the Lynn University student the next day, and both stories eventually had happy endings. In every call with the task force in Washington, I would ask for helicopters from Guantanamo at first light to evacuate our injured. After a few hours they told me to expect a helicopter at 8 in the morning. The drivers took the seats out of two vans so that we could put stretchers in the back, and then drove up to the clinic in Petionville. We would be ready to move our three critically injured colleagues to the embassy by 8 a.m. Washington, in exchange, kept asking for firsthand informa- tion on the airport. At around 4 a.m. the RSO put together a security escort, and we drove to the airport. We drove through the dark and quiet streets of Tabarre, but even the darkness couldn’t conceal the homes and stores and a large hotel col- lapsed into heaps of rubble like so much crumpled paper. In the parking lot of the airport we found a group of American college students. Terrified by the events of the night, they were hoping to catch the first flight out. We convinced them to go get some sleep at the embassy. u The first rays of sunlight began to lighten the sky as we pulled out of the airport parking lot. The narrow streets of the city center were hopelessly clogged with rubble, so we diverted to the slum of Cité Soleil, where the embassy funded a model community policing program. The small homes with tin roofs of the neighborhood appeared to have weathered the earthquake well, but the schools, churches and other public buildings had succumbed to the weight of their heavy poured-concrete roofs. We passed the police station that the embassy had built at great cost. It looked intact. Further on, we came to a barricade manned by Bolivian troops of the U.N. stabilization mission MINUSTAH. They were waving everyone away. Our armored motorcade with diplomatic plates gave them pause, and they let us through. We had hardly gotten through the barricade when I saw why they didn’t want traffic on the street. The barracks of the Brazilian U.N. military unit had collapsed, and Brazilian soldiers were swarming the building like ants, removing the rubble to get to their trapped comrades. Hundreds of human figures silhouetted against the rising sun picked through the ruins brick by brick, stone by stone. I later found out that 15 Brazilian peacekeepers lost their lives in that building. Back at the embassy we dispatched vans to pick up our American personnel scattered all over the city. It was almost 8 o’clock, and Washington assured me again that a helicopter would arrive to evacuate our wounded. A U.S. military officer with compound fractures was being brought down the mountain by Drug Enforcement Administration Chief Darrel Paskett to be evacuated. The two vans with our critically injured Human Rights Officer Kathey-Lee Galvin, her husband and the defense attaché’s staff member were on their way. We received word that the helicopter would only land if we could secure the soccer field adjacent to the embassy. RSO Lesniak grabbed an AR-15, and the two of us headed out to the soccer field. Steve stood promi- nently at guard so the helicopter crew would know that we had secured the field. The bright sunshine and warm tropical morn- ing felt good after a sleepless night. Right at 8 o’clock we saw an orange-and-white U.S. Coast Guard helicopter approaching the embassy from the northwest. Once landed, the aircrew looked nervous. They had had a long, two-hour flight across the Windward Passage, and perhaps expected to encounter a riotous scene. They said they couldn’t stay long on the ground and asked where the injured U.S. military officer was. I told them that he was on his way down the mountains, but that our three injured embassy personnel Hundreds of human figures silhouetted against the rising sun picked through the ruins brick by brick, stone by stone.