The dead are never as quiet as they seem.
More than 20,000 people died in a matter of hours in half a dozen countries in South Asia in one of the most catastrophic tsunamis of recent times, and the death toll is only going to climb. Although the world quickly forgets such natural disasters -- the body count in Bam, Iran, was 30,000 and it was just last year; hadn't forgotten, had you? -- the memory of the dead always lingers for those who meet them.
Ten years ago, an American relief worker named Rich Moseanko found himself in eastern Africa during a humanitarian crisis. That wasn't odd. Moseanko has spent the better part of two decades working in areas most people are desperate to leave.
Death on a massive scale: Some of the tsunami's countless victims in Indonesia; below, empty coffins awaiting transport in Thailand.
(Beawiharta -- Reuters)
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What was unforgettable was that when he got out of his organization's truck near the city of Goma in eastern Zaire (since renamed Congo), he stepped into a Rwandan refugee tide of nearly a million people. The dead, felled by cholera and other diseases, were lying along the roadside by the score. Within days, more than 1,500 people would be dying every day. More than 25,000 are thought to have died in all, though no one really knows.
You know what Moseanko's most difficult job was?
Finding enough trucks to haul away the corpses.
"Going to bed every night with the smell of death in your nostrils, walking around all day with it, you just don't forget that," says Moseanko, the Los Angeles-based director of disaster relief for the nonprofit group World Vision. "The soil around Goma was volcanic rock, which meant there was nowhere to bury the bodies. We finally convinced the French [soldiers] to dynamite some holes for mass graves. I don't know that anybody was even keeping track. It went on for weeks."
Mass death isn't hard-wired in the brain as something that it is supposed to see, like thunderstorms or rain showers. People are supposed to die alone, perhaps in ones and twos, and those are the deaths that are personally meaningful. Human scale is intact.
But the exposure to huge numbers of the recently and unnaturally dead is not a category that the brain keeps on file. The image -- or the smell; anybody who has worked around large numbers of the dead will tell you it's the smell that's the most disturbing -- entwines itself in the long whipcord of memory, and there it remains, never to leave.
"Anyone who tells you that it doesn't affect you when it's all over just isn't being truthful," says Dewey Perks, chief of Fairfax County's Urban Search & Rescue Department, which has been sent by the federal government to work in some of the worst disaster zones in the world. Perks has worked earthquakes in Armenia, Turkey and Iran that killed tens of thousands, whose corpses were dropped in mass graves to prevent disease.
The mind does try, though. Aid workers, journalists and soldiers who have worked around mass death and misery will tell you the only way to keep working is to personally block out what one's eyes are seeing and focus on tasks at hand. It's a key tool of survival, and it isn't new.
To cite but one relevant example from the scrapbook of history: On Aug. 27, 1883, the volcano Krakatoa erupted off the coast of Java -- not far from the current disaster -- setting off a series of tsunamis. More than 36,000 people died.
A single sheet of water destroyed the entire town of Telok Betong in seconds. As recounted in Simon Winchester's recent bestseller "Krakatoa: The Day the World Exploded," an engineer named R.A. van Sandick, sitting on a steamer in the bay, had a front-row seat to the wall of water. He still couldn't tell friends what he saw.
"The tremendous dimensions of the destruction, in front of one's eyes, make it difficult to describe," he wrote, as if being an eyewitness were a hindrance to an accurate description of the event. The best comparison, he judged, was the wave of a magic wand "on a colossal scale and with the conscious knowledge that thousands of people have perished in an indivisible moment."
