“The humanitarian stuff — those are the reasons I joined the Guard,” said Hanson, who signed up in 1998 and spent more than a year in southern Iraq, returning in March. “I saw every emotion, from one end of scale to the other. Some were shocked and asked, ‘What do we do now?’ All I could do was give them food and water, and say they were going to be OK.”
But even as they helped, they encountered the racism prevalent in the South. Locals freely used “the n-word” and addressed the African Americans in Hanson’s platoon as “Boy.”
And while they were working near St. Rita’s Nursing Home, where 35 people died during the hurricane, three badly decomposed bodies were found.
“The mission affected me more, emotionally, than my whole trip to Iraq — as a parent, as a citizen of the United States, as a taxpayer, and as a soldier and a guardsman,” he said. “I’ll never go back to New Orleans, or Louisiana. Not unless I have to.”
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