Suite Serendra

The Doctor’s name was Amin, like the late dictator of Uganda, and that was all I knew about him, except that he had a contract relationship with the Department of Veterans Affairs. I had a letter directing me to report to his clinic on Beauregard, which is what Walter Reed Drive becomes as I drove west across the Leesburg Pike. I looked in the shrubs as I approached the intersection.

There was trash in the hollow by the road, and I could not make out the cage that surrounds the old District Boundary Stone, SW-5, that has stood there since 1793. I always wonder if the stones will emerge from the summer growth in the fall, or if someone has carried them away.

The clinic was another block or two further on, on the south side of the street. I parked the car and hobbled in to the first floor.

The office had the name “Serendra Gupta” on a plaque next to the glass doors, and some other names. But I just thought of it as suite serendra, and abandoned myself to the hands of the system.

Going to a contract doctor of the VA is one of those social experiences where you realize how segmented society has become. It is like the Department of Motor vehicles, filled up with people who have problems you can barely imagine. The business office was more comfortable in Spanish than English, though they were nice enough, and the Doctor himself, when he arrived, was from Bombay .

“Mumbai,” I corrected, and he smiled.

He had me disrobe and clamber onto the examining table. He manipulated the leg that is part of the controversy I have with the Department, and said that I might want to think about having it replaced. I told him that sometimes I thought of little else, and then we talked about the problems of the disputed provinces of Jammu and Kashmir , and the regional implications of the Iranian nuclear program.

He made a few notes in faint pencil on the survey I had filled out, and sent me on my way. Which in the course of things, happened to lead my auto across the District and all the way to College Park . The most direct route took me through a part of town I do not often go, across the frontier of the financial district, and into the neighborhoods where the homes are boarded up.

I passed the Old Solider’s Home, a VA legacy that dates back to the Civil War, and thought I caught a glimpse of the little cabin that Mr. Lincoln used as a summer retreat from the muggy air down at the White House.

Some of the displaced evacuees from the Gulf storm hare housed here, since there is plenty of room behind the tall fence topped by barbed wire. I am pretty sure it is to keep intruders out, rather than to confine the inmates.

The Home made me think about the next storm that is forcing the evacuation of Galveston and the evacuees who came from New Orleans . Houston is emptying out as Rita intensifies over the warm waters of the Gulf of Mexico .

It is a heck of a week on the Homeland Security Front. Two leaders of national response were on record as saying things didn’t seem to be working out that well.

Tom Ridge , the man that the President tagged with setting up the Department of Homeland Security, is saying that state and local preparedness for the hurricane was inadequate. He was careful not to criticize the President. Governor Ridge thinks there were plenty of “tabletop exercises” to prepare for the real thing, but for some reason they had never planned for the worst that would come.

I guess it was too hard to think that.

Rita’s path is uncertain. At this moment it looks like Texas is in the way, and the official sin Galveston are ording mandatory evacuation just in case. They have the institutional memory of the worst case. In 1900, a storm submerged the entire island and swept everything away, killed just about everyone who stayed. Mayor Bill White of Houston will make his own decision today.

Vice Admiral Thad Allen, Chief Operating Officer of the Coast Guard and the federal official in charge of recovery efforts in New Orleans , is one of my favorite Federal Officials. He looks like his Dad, a Chief Petty Officer. He is burly and his voice sounds like thick water passing over gravel. He said almost half of the National Response Plan didn’t work after Katrina roared through the Gulf.

The plan was re-written after the establishment of The Homeland Security Department to account for the new centralization of authority. You would think that would have made things better, or at least smoother, but it did not.

Back in the Pentagon, responsible for Homeland Defense, the criteria for readiness was to be prepared to fight two major regional contingencies simultaneously. We called these “MRCs” in the olden days. That meant having a force structure capable of fighting the Russians at the Fulda Gap in Germany , while simultaneously handling an opportunistic North Korean invasion of South Korea .

According to Admiral Allen, the NRP did not account for two simultaneous catastrophes, which I take to mean first the hurricane and then the flooding.

I hate to be picky, but it sounds like one disaster with two components to me. I don’t think we could have got away with a two-MRC defense plan that counted the Russian parachute drops behind the lines as a separate contingency from the tanks roaring through the Gap.

I agree with the Admiral on just about everything he is doing, including getting into it with goofy Mayor Ray Nigel. There has to be a designated grown up in the mix someplace who is not sweating re-election.

With a third disaster in the offing to test a response plan that was inadequate to handle two, or perhaps just one, we shall see what happens. New Orleans tried the same approach I took with the Department of Veterans Affairs. I assume things will work out, one way or another.

Copyright 2005 Vic Socotra

www.vicsocotra.com

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