The Things They Carried: A Photo Essay
www.popularmechanics.com: Early in the morning of January 13th, news cameras began to roll, capturing the magnitude of the January 12th earthquake in Haiti. Little did the public know, nearly half a day earlier, senior military leadership was already huddled in an upstairs meeting room at US Southern Command (SOUTHCOM), on the phone with the US Embassy in Haiti just an hour after the quake hit. Decisions were made as the quickly as the information could flow in, and within days of the disaster, the U.S. Military would have well over 10,000 people in the Haiti theater. As the mission expanded into Operation Unified Response, the US Navy, Marines, Air Force and Army became the backbone for almost all relief efforts into or out of Haiti, delivering more than 2.6 million bottles of water, 2.2 million food rations, 17 million pounds of food and 150,000 pounds of medical supplies. Behind those statistics: The largest logistical hat-trick in N. American History. These are the quiet heros, from airfields in Kansas to Marine Forward Operating Bases on the southern Haitian “claw.” These are the men and women who left home on no-notice deployment, some with fewer than eight hours to pack.
These are the combat air controllers who, in the first two weeks after the quake, landed and departed 4000 flights with nothing more than lawn chairs, binoculars and handheld radios. This is the sailor who said, aboard the USS Bataan, “Believe what you want to believe. We’re not here for the glory. We’re here to get our job done.”
For Haiti, that job is far from over. 13,000 US servicemen and women are still hard at work in Haiti and among the 19 ships offshore. The future for Haiti is still uncertain, and the country is just now clearing away the rest of the rubble. These are stories of how Haiti survived. —Benjamin Chertoff
Photographs and text by Benjamin Chertoff
www.benjaminchertoff.com
Photo Editing by Monika Robinson
www.merdesignstudio.com
Copyright 2010, Benjamin Chertoff
(Some images and text used with explicit written permission by PopularMechanics.com)
