Bismarck Tribune

By KAREN HERZOGBy KAREN HERZOG

To describe a place beyond words, Mike Nathe reaches for the closest one he can think of:Surreal.

Defined as "bizarre" or "grotesque," surreal is a series of mental pictures that Nathe, a Bismarck funeral director, brought back with him from two weeks in New Orleans, working as part of a team called D-Mort, an immediate response team charged with retrieving and processing bodies in the wake of disasters.

Surreal is the sight of New Orleans receding behind you at dusk - "everybody leaves New Orleans at dark," Nathe said - pitch black behind a 20-mile lake where land used to be.

Surreal is the view down dead streets of a drowned city, no life, no people, no traffic.

Surreal is the pervading tension of traveling with armed guards.

It's neighborhoods inhabited by left-behind pit bulls, many trained to fight. It's seeing and hearing stories of aid workers finding refuge behind closed doors in houses, where packs of dogs have converged. Dogs starting to "pack up," reverting to their ancestral ways.

Dogs drinking the standing water while held by owners' leashes, and dead within the hour.

No mosquitoes, at least not then, but the skies filled up with swarms of helicopters, thick as flies.

And, he said, "everybody had a gun. I've never seen so many guns."

It's people wanting to hear the gory details of body retrieval when you come back.

Nathe won't discuss those, even with his family, he said. It's out of respect for the people who died and their families.

Nathe, owner of Bismarck Funeral Home, signed up with D-Mort in July 2001.

On Aug. 30, the call came. The next day, he was on a plane to Houston as part of a 25-member task force that was one of the first in New Orleans, going through neighborhoods, houses, nursing homes, hospitals, where bodies had been found.

Their job was to retrieve, process and do their best to identify the people who were found, with the goal of reuniting them with their families either immediately or somewhere down the road, Nathe said. For most, it was their first deployment - team members become federal employees when deployed - although some had been at Sept. 11, 2001, he said.

The first two nights, Nathe and the team slept on the floor outside a racquetball court at Louisiana State University. Their daily briefings told them to expect 5,000, maybe 10,000 fatalities.

"That was sobering. We knew we were in the middle of something big," he said.

A morgue facility was set up at St. Gabriel, a former school and police facility. It became an armed camp, with high security, where bodies were brought, about 75 per day when Nathe's team was there. Pods, with generators to cool them, were installed to hold up to 500 bodies each, he said.

More than 1,000 bodies have been found, and Nathe predicts that the total will reach about 3,000.

The D-Mort teams accompanied the 82nd Airborne through unlocked houses to identify and retrieve people who had died, recording whatever information might be useful later - house numbers, names on prescription bottles, where they were found.

The heat and humidity were intense. Nathe had never felt anything like it, he said. The team, wearing Tyvek suits ("like wearing a tarp," Nathe said), worked 14- to 16-hour days, searching attics where temperatures reached 120 degrees; in one case, carrying 43 bodies down from the upper floors of a hospital. Arriving at a nursing home in a Humvee, they found eight residents left behind, "left to die," he said. Houses built merely on cinder blocks were searched; sodden walls, floors and ceilings always at risk of collapsing underfoot, full of debris.

After a while, Nathe could put the scenario together from the scene: Houses locked, suitcases packed in cars left out front, and no escape holes in the roofs - there would be bodies in those homes.

"You can live a couple of weeks without food, but not without water," he said.

When bodies reached the processing center, they were decontaminated and every effort at identification was done - X-rays, dental X-rays, DNA samples and fingerprints were taken. The information was then fed into a database to help reunite them eventually with their families.

Up at 3 or 4 a.m., to sleep at 11 p.m. or midnight, adrenaline carries one through the days, he said. He never felt tired then, but exhaustion has followed him ever since.

Whatever you see on television, it's not like being there, he said - hearing sniper fire, traveling with guards, the putrid smell of hot swamp water, desolation.

"Looking down streets with no cars, no people, nothing. You never get used to it. A whole city, deceased."

The team bonded tight in a hurry, he said, watching one another's backs.

"I'm proud of what we did, to help recover these people," he said.

The people seemed to feel the same way.

Team members were told to conceal their FEMA ID tags, fearing that people would swamp them with needs or hostility, but people recognized the D-Mort team's distinctive green shirts and would come up and hug them and offer their sympathy.

Nathe is still processing and decompressing, he said.

Among other things, it makes him appreciate North Dakota.

"I'll take a snowstorm any day," he said.

(Reach Karen Herzog at 250-8267 or karen.herzog@; bismarcktribune.com.)