From Despair To Hope: How One National Guardswoman Reconciles Memories Of Katrina

— -- The girl was 8 or 9 and had cerebral palsy, and she was having a seizure. Of course, she was just one person among a crush of thousands who had gathered at the Superdome to escape the flooding caused by Hurricane Katrina, but she needed help, and she needed it immediately.

Ebony Carter, then a 2nd lieutenant with the Louisiana National Guard (she's now a major), heard the commotion and hustled through the crowd to see what was going on. She picked the girl up, cradled her in her arms, and started running.

The girl's mother, carrying an infant, followed Carter as she darted down the concourse. She reached the escalator, which wasn't working, and hustled up the steps.

Carter expected to find help when she reached the top -- that's where medics had been set up since people had started arriving at the stadium a few days earlier. But when she got there, the medics were gone. The Superdome had gotten so crowded that they had been forced to move to the convention center across the street. Somebody else grabbed the girl and took her to find help.

Flooded with adrenaline from her dash up the escalator, Carter felt helplessness wash over her. Thousands of people milled around her; they all had come here to escape death, only to find misery they couldn't get away from. With no power or running water, the Superdome teetered on the edge of lawlessness. Carter found her way outside so she could be alone.

"I just cried my eyes out," Carter says. "Like, what in the world was happening? ... When you go to Iraq, you're prepared for devastation over there. But not at your home."

For years after Katrina, Carter's memories of the Superdome were so powerful that she refused to return there. But 10 years after the hurricane, now that both the Superdome and many parts of New Orleans have been rebuilt, that famed football stadium has come to represent for Carter not destruction but restoration; not despair but hope.

Carter, now 37, joined the Maryland National Guard while she was still in high school. She transferred to the Louisiana National Guard so she could attend Grambling State University in Grambling, Louisiana, where she was a cheerleader for four years.

Each year, she cheered in the Superdome during the Bayou Classic, the annual showdown between Grambling State and Southern University, two longtime football powerhouses among historically black colleges and universities. TV cameras beamed images of the game, the bands and the cheerleaders to a national television audience, and she loved being there in the thick of the action. The hype, the lights, the attention and the crowd combined to give her a joyous high.

"I remember how mighty I felt," Carter says.

During Katrina, she was working down on the playing field one day, helping someone lying on a stretcher. When she looked up and saw that the stadium was filled with as many people as had attended the Bayou Classic, she thought of her days as a cheerleader on that same field. This time, though, she didn't feel mighty -- she felt sad and helpless and "so, so small."

During Grambling's games, Carter was an observer of the main action -- albeit an enthusiastic one. But when she returned to the Superdome the day before Katrina made landfall, she was a leader.

As a 27-year-old acting company commander, she estimates she had 60 soldiers working under her. She describes herself as soft-spoken and "five-foot-nothing," so she wondered if anybody -- soldiers or citizens -- would listen to her. "I had to give all these orders. I thought -- initially to myself, and I would have never said it out loud -- 'Oh, these guys are not going to do what I ask them to do, or they're not going to respect me,'" she says.

But they did. Under Carter's direction, her soldiers first provided security at the Superdome as 10,000 people arrived before the storm. That number swelled to 35,000 as breached levees caused flooding in the city, and Carter's duties expanded. She and her soldiers did everything, including screening people as they arrived, helping evacuees find loved ones and assisting those in need of medical care.

She thinks that being a woman, even one wearing a uniform and carrying an M16, helped her amid all that chaos. "I recognized, and I don't apologize for that, that a male soldier can say something, and I can say the same thing and get the same result, but the feeling is very different," she says.

The difference, says Louisiana National Guard Colonel Ed Bush, Carter's boss, is the wisdom and grace with which Carter gives orders.

The two met in the Superdome at the height of Katrina. Bush was a major in the public affairs office then. His job was to walk around the stadium with a bullhorn, refuting unfounded rumors of rampant crime and reassuring people that the National Guard cared about them and was there to help. Carter saw him and thought, I want to do that.

"What I was doing is about as intimate as you can get. I was talking to people all day and trying to calm fears and solve problems," Bush says. "The caring side of her, that [work] appealed to her tremendously."

It appealed so much that Carter walked up to Bush and told him she wanted to work together. Bush wrote down her name and number and promised to call her. A few months later, he did, and he's been her boss in two different jobs since then. Today, Carter serves under Bush in the Office of Family Programs, where she works directly with families of soldiers in the Louisiana National Guard.

"She's tremendous at it because that is who she is," Bush says. "She cares. She genuinely wants to help. The way to make Ebony quit is to stick her in a cubicle and make her do paperwork all day long. That would drive her insane. She needs to be connected to people and help them."

And the Superdome was full of people who needed help.