Corps team helps Iwo Jima vet gain closure in the ruins
By Dave Harris, Public Affairs, Louisiana Recovery Field Office

In the span of a morning, the giant jaws of an excavator chomp and devour a lifetime of deeply rooted, indelible memories that are permanently etched into the soft soul and rugged stamina of the articulate 89-year-old World War II veteran who is watching the home he built shudder and collapse with each powerful blow.

Corps employees, military and contractors must deal daily with the human side of a house demolition. It’s so much more than physics and equipment.

An hour earlier volunteers, including Maj. Kyiersty Tingley, normally liaison officer for Plaquemines Parish, had gathered to help the disabled vet. They were there to help him find what he called his “goodies” from the flooded house he had built in the 1980s.

What kind of goodies?

“There was a set of silverware my wife had gotten one piece at a time by saving up Green Stamps,” he said. His wife had died in 2000. “There was a little black horse about this big. My wife said, ‘Look what I have for you.’ That horse doesn’t mean anything to anyone else, but that’s when I understood what love was all about. You have to look for love. It won’t jump on your shoulder.”

And there were tiny World War II replicas of jeeps in a glass case, along with a larger toy jeep. A wooden pig. Pictures. Glass polar bears. A diamond-studded cross worth $3,000.

Days earlier his daughter looked for the cross without telling him. She found it, discolored from salt water. He said he had been upset with her for not telling him.

And yet he acknowledged, “Even though most of these little things came from Wal-Mart, your life is wrapped up in those things.”

That day volunteers were ready literally to turn the house upside down to find the goodies. Within five minutes they found only some water-streaked photos.

Suddenly, the gentleman shouted, “Call off the search!”  Why now? The search had barely started. “They don’t have time with all these bulldozers standing by,” he said.

Oh, but there was still time. The volunteers had arranged, at no cost to the government, for contract crews to work around the search efforts. And a small glitch had extended the time – the demolition had been listed as “non-RACM,” a property involving no regulated asbestos-containing material.

But the checklist lived up to its intended purpose and a verification step alerted the crew that the house was, in fact, RACM. A RACM crew was nearby and seamlessly switched places with the original crew, using the same excavator. The maneuver paralleled that of an airline crew taking over an aircraft, relieving the initial crew.

Yet, the search was done.

“It would be criminal to continue searching and holding up the show,” he said. “It was a gallant effort. They can’t bring out the goodies without taking out piles and piles of debris.”

The elderly gentleman had finally and suddenly reached closure. Now relaxed and satisfied, the veteran of the war in the Pacific, having served at Iwo Jima among other battlefields, settled into stories of building his house and losing it after nearly losing his own life in the struggle.

 “I am most thankful to you for bringing the suffering to an end,” he told Corps people and volunteers. “I had to see that stuff and get them off my mind.”

A few days later, the vet called to wrap up loose ends with one of the volunteers, Maj. Tingley, who had gone out of her way to help and had talked with him often about the details of the demolition and his goodies. His last conversation with her was memorable as he left her a parting word.

“I’m going to dust off your wings in heaven.”