After the Wave text

 This is an article I wrote about my experience surviving the Indian Ocean tsunami on December 26, 2004.  On another post, I (badly) shared the images from Bellarmine Magazine where it appeared.  There are two sections that are included here that did not make it into the print version.  

Bellarmine alumni Ned Berghausen writes about his experience in Thailand during and after the tsunami

I was in southern Thailand on December 26^th when the tsunami hit.  I was staying on a small island called Ko Phi Phi east of Phuket. The island is only accessible by boat, and there’s no transportation on it beyond foot traffic.  Most of the development on Phi Phi is on a narrow isthmus, called Ton Sai, between two bays, which is where I was staying. 

I had decided to spend Christmas on the beach, taking a vacation from my life in Bangladesh, where I’m a Peace Corps Volunteer.   I was traveling by myself.  The plan was to meet up with my family in Bangkok on the 28^th, and from there to take them to Bangladesh for a visit.

I stayed at the Ban Thai guesthouse on one of the main walk-throughs on the way to the beach.  The morning of the 26^th started in much the same way the previous two had: another beautiful, hot day in paradise.  I woke up a little before 10 AM (I’d been up celebrating Christmas until 4 the night before).  My room was on the ground floor, adjacent to the lobby, which opened up onto the footpath.  I heard some of my friends talking in the lobby.  I got up, started milling about, and popped open my first water bottle of the day.  After saying my good mornings, I decided I’d lie down for a little longer.  A few minutes later, I heard people on the street yelling and running.  I popped my head out the door to see what was going on.  I decided it was probably nothing.  I’ve gotten pretty jaded to public disturbances in my year and a half in Bangladesh where a different rally seems to go down the street every other day.  I figured it was probably the Thai equivalent.  But this was different: the running continued and the tenor of the shouts increased.  A friend later said that he thought there were terrorists loose. I took another look, glancing left, the direction the people were coming from.  At the end of the street, I saw a dark gray mass of water that looked like a flash flood coming my way.  That’s when I started running with the crowd. I ran not knowing where we were going or what it was behind me.  Over some buildings, I could see the tops of palm trees as they went down on the beach.  I was wearing a sarong, which I’m now embarrassed to report fell down during my run.  At the time, I was too full of adrenaline to care.  The crowd led me to a three-story bar against a hill a block and a half away.  I managed to get away from the wave, scrambling up to the top.  The water I saw was about knee high and thick with sand.  Nothing like the beautiful clear blue waters of the surrounding beaches.  The water came on hard, but it didn’t seem terribly forceful.  I thought it was a freakishly high tide.  At that point and for the first few hours afterwards, I didn’t have any idea of just how badly the area around me had been ravished.  I thought the water might just go down, and vacation would go back to normal, disregarding this strange disruption.

People I talk to are mostly eager to hear about the Big Wave.  I didn’t see the big one you see clips of on CNN; I’m not sorry about that. If I had seen it, I doubt I would have seen much more after that.  Phi Phi, being so small, got hit on both sides by the tsunami.  The first hit steam rolled right over the Ton Sai isthmus into the bay on the other side as if the strip of land wasn’t there.  I’m not sure why the area surrounding my guesthouse was spared.  Perhaps because it was a little closer to the hills and not in the center of things?  Looking at a map, I feel like where I was should’ve been totally decimated, too.     The tsunami wrapped back around the island, and hit a second time.  That’s what I saw.   

The wave is consequential, but beyond being the cause of the disaster, it’s probably the least important aspect of my experience. To my mind, the aftermath is where the story really begins.   The wave lasted only five minutes, and most of the water drained back out to sea within two hours.  By contrast, I was on the island for another 30 hours.

I spent the two hours following the wave back at my guesthouse trying to recover some of my belongings and trying to figure out what exactly had just happened.  For what looked like a minor swell of water, it sure did a lot of damage, throwing a refrigerator through my door, and wrapping a big desk around a pillar in the lobby.   The ground level of the surrounding area was smashed to heck, and the dense gray water remained at knee level.  It was opaque and treacherous, hiding shrapnel in the sand, and giving off a noxious smell from sewer systems it had opened up. 

No one was sure what the wave was and where it had come from.  One person reported feeling a tremor around eight that morning.  The worst possibility was that a nuclear bomb had gone off somewhere.  We were under an information blackout: no electricity and cell phones were signal-less.  The uncertainty of the situation reminded me of September 11^th at the point when it wasn’t known if more planes were in the air and if the worst was over yet.   In both cases, I felt as if the world was coming apart. 

Amid rumors of further waves, I set out with my Swedish friend Erik to get to higher ground. We followed the path towards the beach. As we walked out from the immediacy of my area for the first time, I finally got a sense of how bad things really were. If you’d asked me to, I couldn’t have told you where I’d hung out on the beach the previous 3 days.  There had been a resort with a great restaurant and a hundred bungalows there before.  Now they were completely gone.  Everything for hundreds of yards inland of the water was utterly obliviated.  There was no sign that anything had ever been there, except endless rubble. 

The beach was a nightmare landscape.  I’ll never forget the feeling of walking through that desolation.  I saw boats that had been thrown up and wrapped around the trees. There were pools of sandy gray tsunami water, often mottled with oil or smelly with sewage. Random detritus floated in it. The turf was uneven and mixed with shrapnel: glass, corrugated steel sheets, broken wooden planks studded with nails, and other cheap construction materials from beach shacks. Thick mud fought me for my flip-flops while the rubbish cut my feet up

And then, walking out towards the beach, I saw my first seriously injured person.

It’s difficult for me to write about the rest of my time on Phi Phi in a linear fashion.  My sense of time warped after helping that first hurt woman.  There were so many more wounded that followed the first that the ensuing 28 hours or so were a blur of activity, and remain so in my memory.  It’s brief, flickering moments that stick with me.

        Not long after we found that, a fighter jet flew overhead, supposedly one of the two in the Thai Air Force.  I was standing on the edge of the jungle when I saw it--it looked like a fighter you’d see dropping napalm in Vietnam.  Needless to say, I felt like I was in a war zone.  Following the fighter, helicopters started touching down and taking off again at the other end of the beach.  

            During the day, I helped in search and rescue operations and in carrying people out of rubble and down the beach towards where the helicopters were landing.  We used makeshift stretchers, usually doors or pieces of plywood. 

            During the long night, I helped carry wounded people on makeshift stretchers and helped load them onto helicopters.  The face of one of the wounded, a beautiful Thai woman, particularly sticks in my memory.  As we got her near the cargo hold, she, by chance, opened her eyes and looked directly into mine.  It caught me off guard and I momentarily stopped loading.  She looked as if she was in the grip of some dreadful, confused dream. My eyes must have momentarily interrupted the dream by giving her something familiar to seize on, another human being.  Her look implored me to make this nightmare end.  It broke my heart.  I shook it off and went back to loading.

              I won’t ever forget choppers coming down near the field hospital.  Each one would whip up a storm of sand and rubbish and lash it with incredible force against our team of volunteers.  The shout, “Chopper incoming!” would prompt me turn around and crouch away from the blast.  The force came close to knocking me over.  The debris whipped so hard, it felt like getting sandblasted, like my pours were being sandpapered open and my skin scoured off.  Still, it was more important to make sure that the wounded weren’t getting blasted, so usually I’d be covering somebody up.  After I got off Phi Phi, I couldn’t believe how much sand I had caked on my skin.  There were especially big buildups behind my ears.  The funniest was my friend CiCi, who’s black.  He looked like he’d crawled out of a sand dune, or like a chameleon trying to blend in with the desert.  I wonder if he ever got all the sand out of his corn-rolls. 

            I stuck around on Phi Phi with the core of the rescue team until we were sure everybody, wounded and well, had gotten off the island.  Following that, the group of us took the last chopper out.  It was a Vietnam-era Huwey helicopter operated by the Thai Air Force.  The Thai guys piloting it looked like real fighter jocks with their sunglasses, helmets, and combat jumpsuits.  They made chopper piloting look cool.  It was surreal getting into the ‘copter on the makeshift helipad where I’d spent so many hours helping people and getting them out.  I can’t describe the wash of emotions I felt when we finally lifted off.  Prior to that moment, I didn’t know that I ever would really get off Phi Phi.  As the ground receded below me and I got a look at the war zone from above, I felt triumphant.  I’d survived. 

It was equally surreal when our helicopter came in for a landing on the mainland.  Below was a well-maintained highway with new-looking cars zipping along.  There wasn’t any sign of the tsunami, or even that anybody knew it had even happened. 

  A police transport truck took our group to an immigration office.  On the way, we passed a café where a group of foreigners were drinking beers and coffee without a care in the world.  It’s hard to take in that juxtaposition of events. 

I got out of southern Thailand on the night of the 27^th.  My plane ticket was originally for the 28^th, but Thailand’s air companies were running continuous, free flights to get people out.  I was put on stand-by, and then told, “Your plane’s boarding right now.  Go quickly.”  I said a hurried goodbye the rest of the rescue team and got on the plane.  I managed to get to the hotel in Bangkok my family and I had planned on meeting an hour before they did.

It’s tough to summarize a tsunami: the experience changed my life, but I’m not sure if I can explain how just yet.  I saw some incredible things. The most important of them were not the destruction caused by the wave, but the heroism and selflessness of people who stepped up to help. The wave itself required nothing more than surviving.  It was choosing to help in the aftermath that was the challenge.  I feel thankful that I was able to do something, even just to play a small part, after the wave. 

 

Ned Berghausen is a 2002 graduate of Bellarmine, with a philosophy major and theology minor.  He’s currently serving as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Bangladesh and can be reached at ejberg4@yahoo.com

 

 

 

I cut these two paragraphs out of the article for space.  They fit under the “images that stuck with me” section:

 

  Some of the things that stick with me aren’t obviously significant.  I think of a little vignette: I was walking at the base of some hills with a Canadian veterinarian and her Thai husband. Amongst the strewn out garbage was a small wooden shrine called a spirit house, toppled with the rest.  The Thai man hesitated as we walked past it, unsure of whether to keep hurrying onto the next wounded person, or spare a moment.  He stopped, righted the shrine atop a rock, and pressed his palms together in front of his chest in the Thai symbol of reverence.  That took about five seconds, all told, but it touched me to see it.  It seemed to convey a deeper meaning, like putting the world right again after it had been turned on its head, or acknowledging the divinity in the world despite all the hell in immediate evidence.

 

  I remember being at the top of one of the immense hills that make up the two points on either side of Phi Phi.  The spot is called Lookout, and from there you can see the double crescent of Ton Sai isthmus fanning out perpendicularly from the hill.  It was close to the end of the night for me.  The choppers had stopped coming a few hours before, and we’d ascended the steep peak to try to recruit some of the masses huddling at the top to help out with rescue work when the sun came up.   It was our last stop before returning lower down to stay for the night with a group of injured.  I caught a fleeting glance of the island below. I felt bad dawdling, so I only permitted myself a bare second, but the view was spectacular.  The scene was illuminated by a full moon. I looked down at the isthmus where all the drama of my previous day had occurred.  I tried to pick out the wreckage and ruin, but the distance softened the edges, and everything looked serene.  I imagined the wave rushing in across the now peaceful bay, but at that moment the ocean was enchanting.  For the space of a heartbeat, I was up above the horror and devastation I’d previously been down in, and what had come before seemed nothing but a silly dream.