Riding through Katrina with the Red Baron's Ghost Read online

  He was born in 1892 in Breslau, Germany. His father was a reserve major in the army. The boy harbored a quiet dislike for discipline. He never questioned the decisions of his parents nor complained to them.

  He enjoyed playing in the woods, spending happy, carefree hours stalking prey in the shadows of dense forests. He was a strong, wiry lad who was absolutely honest; he was determined to excel in whatever he chose to do.

  Richthofen was my age when he climbed a water tower by way of a lightning rod and tied his handkerchief to the top. I remember exactly how difficult it was to balance on the gutters, the author quoted from Richthofen’s autobiography. Ten years later, I saw the handkerchief still tied high in the air. I tried to emulate his feat by climbing a tree to reach the top of my junior high school. I had no handkerchief, however, and before I got very far, Mr. Monroe, an eighth-grade teacher, told me to come down.

  At the beginning of World War I, Richthofen joined a cavalry unit. Bored by the slow pace of trench warfare, he joined the “flying service” in 1915.

  Like other restless fighting men his eyes turned skyward to the German and Allied air machines that droned idly over the battlefield, Titler wrote. He envied them; at least they could see the tide of combat.

  Every time he shot down a plane, Richthofen bought a two-inch-high silver trophy cup to commemorate the event. His squadron with its tents and equipment moved from base to base to be on the front lines. The pilots painted their planes bright colors. Richthofen himself flew a red Fokker triplane, hence the name Red Baron. The squadron became known as “The Flying Circus.”

  Fame was his, Titler wrote about Richthofen. He could have had gaiety and the attentions of any admirer he chose, yet he preferred to hunt alone in the shadowy forest, enjoy the companionship of his dog, Moritz—and practice the art of soldiering. What made him tick? Why was he so deadly? How is it, someone will ponder, that his name still grips the attention of all manner of people?

  Back in my room after dinner, I imagined what it would be like to have someone speak of me as Lt. Karl August von Schoenbeck spoke of Richthofen: He had a noble way of speech and never swore or used foul language of any kind…. He shone with calm in the most critical moments.

  It would be something to be Richthofen, I thought. To be called the Red Baron. To be that famous. To be bigger than life. To live in a way that was exciting and so different from everyone else. Sports defined boys my age and I was not good at any of them. I had asthma. I was not a fast runner and often struck out when playing baseball. My friends rarely asked me to play football and soccer. However, alone in my bedroom, I could see myself flying and being the Red Baron. Soaring aloft, shooting down my enemies, leading a squadron I’d call the Bald Eagles. I decided that if the Vietnam War lasted long enough, I would become a fighter pilot.

  About a week after I finished The Day the Red Baron Died, my mother showed me a story in the Chicago Tribune headlined “The Red Baron’s Granddaughter.” It was about a German model who claimed that Richthofen was her grandfather. Yet Titler had written that Richthofen had never married. My mother suggested that I ask him about the story. How? I wanted to know. She told me to write to him in care of the publisher. That night, with her help, I drafted a letter.

  October 22, 1970

  Dear Mr. Titler,

  In reading your book, The Day the Red Baron Died, which was a very good book from which I learned many things, I understand the Red Baron never married.

  I reconsidered and wrote above the first sentence, I am 13 years old. I then continued, describing the Tribune article and the woman who claimed to be Richthofen’s granddaughter. I think the woman is a fake, I wrote, and then crossed out the sentence and began again: I would like to know from you if this woman is pretending to be the Red Baron’s granddaughter. After some additional thought, I added or not.

  About a month later, I received a reply. Butch snatched the letter from me and held it above his head, and I chased him around the house until he relented and gave it to me. I hurried to my room and ripped open the envelope, tearing a “Victory Over Communism” sticker Titler had used to seal it.

  November 25, 1970

  Dear Malcolm,

  Many thanks for your letter. I much appreciate your kind words and am pleased to know you enjoyed The Day the Red Baron Died.

  Titler assured me that the woman in the article was not the Red Baron’s granddaughter. Richthofen, he explained, was a common German name, and he thought the reporter had incorrectly assumed the model was related to the von Richthofen of Red Baron fame.

  I read the letter several times, especially the end, where he thanked me again for writing. He said he appreciated my interest and confidence in his work. I taped it to the draft version of my letter and put it in my desk.

  * * *

  September 16, 2005

  Dear Mr. Titler: I arrived in Baton Rouge late this afternoon. I rented an SUV and drove to my editor’s office not far from the airport. He said he had an assignment for me and pointed to a desk. I sat down and waited. He appeared flustered. He was trying to get answers about the condition of patients in New Orleans hospitals. He answered two phones at once, holding the receivers against both of his ears. He’d hang up, the phones would ring again and he’d answer them two at a time. He soon forgot about me. After an hour, I wrote a note telling him I was going to New Orleans. I gave it to him and left. He barely noticed. He was still shouting into the phones as I walked out of the door.

  I got on Interstate 10 and drove south. Before I left Kansas City, I had arranged to live in an RV. It belongs to a couple in Gramercy, Louisiana, a town about sixty miles outside of New Orleans. The RV has room for three people. A Star photographer, Norman Ng, and a reporter with the Fort Worth Star-Telegram are already there. My bunk will cost one hundred dollars a night, meals included. A disaster can be a money-making proposition for those who know how to cash in. I’ll have access to the couple’s kitchen. I’ll be able to connect with the Internet through a phone jack. No wireless yet because of damage from the storm. Evacuees and aid workers occupy all the hotels and motels for miles around. I was lucky to find the RV.

  “I’m on my way,” I told Norman.

  The drive to Gramercy took forever. Convoys of military trucks and Jeeps hauling Porta-Potties took up all lanes; ambulances and police cars followed. Helicopters hovered overhead. The day was overcast and hot. A wet, clingy kind of heat. Families sat outside motels in T-shirts and underwear, the humidity settling over them like another layer of clothing. They glanced up at the choppers, hands cupped over their eyes, squinting against the glare. Seeing nothing, they turned to look at the line of aid vehicles inching past.

  Through my open window I could hear the static of battery-powered radios, the scratchy volume like the buzz of insects. Boys dragged twigs on the pavement and played as if they were on a family outing, while their exhausted parents held bottles of water against their foreheads and watched them chase one another without really seeing them, their empty stares never wavering from whatever they were really thinking about.

  I stopped at a McDonald’s for coffee. It was packed with people who had fled New Orleans. They shouted into their cell phones, pleading with someone on the other end to rent them apartments sight unseen. They offered one thousand, two thousand, three thousand dollars a month and higher. Pacing. Back and forth, back and forth, spilling their drinks, phones pressed against an ear and a shoulder, working off their frustration with sharp jabs and flustered waves of their hands. They paid for their meals while still talking in a line that stretched out the door, their pleadings as a whole rising in one undecipherable and desperate clamor. A line stretched out the door. I was reminded of refugee camps in Afghanistan, the long wait families endured for food, the confused faces of their children and the sense of defeat in the faces of everyone. In December 2001, I decided to play social worker in Kabul and brought rice to a family I’d seen living in an empty, mortared building downtown. Other homeless fam
ilies mobbed me, and the rice was ripped from my hands. I remember the dank smell of the place, of fingers clutching at me and of distorted faces shouting in a language I did not understand. My driver and I fled to his car, chased by a despairing mob. I don’t recall ever having felt so scared and helpless.

  At the McDonald’s, I decided a cup of coffee wasn’t worth the kind of wait facing me. I left and rejoined the slow procession south, passing more motels with more half-naked families sitting outside in the putrid heat. An hour later I took the turnoff for Gramercy.

  My new home, the RV, stood at the end of Magnolia Street not far from a Winn-Dixie supermarket. Norman was outside taking photos, his lean body heavy with camera gear. I parked, got out and we slapped our palms in a high five. We were both exultant about being out of Kansas City and working the biggest story of our lives since 9/11 and the start of the second Iraq war.

  In Gramercy, Norman told me, Katrina was like a bad thunderstorm. It rained hard and the power went out for a while but that was it. Some trees fell and branches blocked a few driveways, but not a whole lot more. As Norman spoke, I heard the cough of a lawn mower and noticed the flicker of a TV through the open curtain of a house. Nothing out of the ordinary. The only complaint Norman heard from neighbors: mail had not been delivered in days. He warned me that cell phone usage was erratic at best: sometimes you’ll get a signal, most of the time you won’t.

  Borrowing Norman’s satellite phone, I called your house, Mr. Titler, but no one answered. I unpacked my sleeping bag and spread it on a cot in the rear of the RV. It’s been a long day. I’ll try you again tomorrow.

  * * *

  Although Titler had settled the matter of Richthofen’s granddaughter to my satisfaction, I still had more questions. In my next letter, I asked him if he knew where I could buy a copy of The Red Knight of Germany, one of the first English biographies of Richthofen published in 1930. Titler had listed the book in the bibliography of The Day the Red Baron Died. He compared The Red Knight of Germany to a cheap dime novel. I liked the title, however, and, mindful of my limited budget, I told him I wanted a paperback edition.

  December 18, 1970

  Dear Malcolm,

  It’s good to hear from you again. Getting a paperback edition of The Red Knight of Germany might be something of a problem. It was quite a few years ago that I saw it in the paperback edition and I hope it’s still available.

  Titler suggested I contact five used bookstores, including Bohemia Bookshop in Sussex, England, where I found a first edition, red clothbound copy for six dollars. It arrived wrapped in brown paper bearing blue stamps with the image of Queen Elizabeth II. The bookshop owner, Frank Letchford, called me “Master Malcolm.” I liked that. Opening the package, I inhaled aromas of long ago. I liked that too.

  He killed one hundred men in individual combat, the author, Floyd Gibbons, wrote, shot them, burned them, crushed them, hurled their bodies down to earth.

  Richthofen, I knew, did not kill one hundred men, but I didn’t care. I enjoyed the mythic suggestiveness of the overwrought sentences and finished the short book in hours.

  I didn’t write to Titler again until March 1971, after I’d spent a day with my friend Tom. He enjoyed reading history too, and I showed him my copy of The Day the Red Baron Died. We leafed through it examining photographs arranged together in the center of the book. One picture, of Alfred G. Franklyn of the 110th Section of F Anti-Aircraft Battery, Royal Garrison Artillery, caught our attention. He stood beside his gun with his head tipped back, helmet pushed off his forehead, mouth open, squinting into the sky. He claimed to have killed Richthofen. According to Titler, however, Richthofen was too far from Franklyn’s position for him to have fired the fatal shot.

  Studying the photograph, Tom said Franklyn should have been a conscientious objector instead of a soldier. Tom’s parents opposed the Vietnam War. I disagreed, arguing from the point of view of my parents: The United States fights wars to spread democracy. Allied soldiers during World War I were on the side of freedom. Tom and I argued until we couldn’t remember any more of our parents’ opinions.

  Looking back on that afternoon, I understand that we were two boys mimicking the adults in our lives who had been confronted by a war they didn’t understand. The TV images of dead and dying American soldiers in Vietnam defied the patriotic, even mawkish, depiction of conflict they’d grown to believe in their youth during World War II. For some of them, the shock of Vietnam led them to protest the war. Others, like my parents, dug deeper into their belief that every war involving the United States was just and good and deserved their support. Children like Tom and I inherited our parents’ ideas without thought; without a clue. In all likelihood we would pass on our no-gray-areas beliefs to our own children. So it goes from one generation to the next.

  After Tom and I parted, I walked home and wrote to Titler about Franklyn. I wanted to know why he persisted in thinking he had killed Richthofen when the evidence showed he had not. Titler responded two weeks later with Franklyn’s address. I understood his unwritten suggestion: I should ask him. Titler also enclosed some of the white-and-blue “Defeat Communism” stickers he affixed to his letters. I had told him my parents appreciated his politics.

  March 30, 1971

  Dear Malcolm,

  Here is Sergeant-Major Franklyn’s U.K. address. When you write to him please give him my warmest regards. As to your other question, I’m afraid I don’t really know why the Germans were called “Jerries” in World War One, but I imagine Mr. Franklyn could tell you. If you find out let me know, I’ve often wondered about it myself. Warm regards, Malcolm, and all best wishes, Dale M. Titler.

  I folded his letter and put it back in the envelope. Then I took a piece of notebook paper and drafted a note to Franklyn. I used stationery to write the final copy. I told Franklyn my age and that I was very interested in the “controversial death” of the Red Baron. I understood, I continued, that he thought he had killed Richthofen. In a postscript I added, “I got your address from Dale M. Titler who asked me to give you his warm regards, so, warm regards from Dale M. Titler!” I sealed the envelope and walked to the Winnetka post office.

  * * *

  September 19, 2005

  Dear Mr. Titler,

  This morning I made my first trip into New Orleans. I’d not gone far when I stopped at a National Guard checkpoint on eastbound I-10. The guard turned away drivers ahead of me. Only the military, aid workers, reconstruction teams, police, and reporters can enter the city. A young guard member checked my press ID. He grinned in a self-conscious way, still getting used to his role, his authority.

  “Thank you, sir,” he said and waved me through.

  The incident triggered a memory: Afghan soldiers used rope stretched across a road to stop traffic. The commanding officer would demand ID from my driver, Khalid, and then ask for money, usually just a few dollars. His handful of men, meanwhile, requested baksheesh, a tip, from me. I ignored them and waited for Khalid to pay the bribe. When the commander waved us through, I reimbursed Khalid and counted what money I had left to be sure we had enough to pay the bribe at the next checkpoint.

  I didn’t bother to share this memory with the National Guardsman, although it crossed my mind that he may have served in Afghanistan. Certainly I met quite a few guardsmen over there, but I was well past him when this occurred to me. I drove onto I-10, its flat expanse snaking ahead of me gray and vacant. A damp wind whipped around my SUV and across what looked to me like flattened swamps. Fallen trees formed rails across the ground as if someone had deliberately placed them in rows so many feet apart, their broken trunks splintered like rotted mouths of teeth mere inches above grassy floodwaters filled with debris.

  I was alone except for the few military jeeps racing past me. Vacant buildings ripped to shreds, entire floors gone, stood exposed on both sides of the interstate, their empty windows like eyes staring at nothing. Miles and miles of these ruins stretched past me as far as I could see until t
hey became tiny blurred squares merging into the horizon.

  I continued driving for what felt like miles and saw no one. Even the jeeps had stopped passing me. I felt I had fallen under a spell, the emptiness and overcast skies hypnotic, and I missed my exit. I made a U–turn and drove back the way I had come. A police car passed me, and the officer waved and I waved back; old laws suspended in a deserted city. I experienced a little boy’s joy as I drove in a manner I would never get away with anywhere else. Piles of chairs and discarded clothing had collected beside the interstate, the remains of what people had taken with them when they fled New Orleans on foot. An old man slept in a cardboard box. Was he homeless or a Katrina refugee? Homeless now.

  I turned onto Franklin Avenue. The stoplights didn’t work, and I raced through empty intersections into a world organized by a cubist sculptor. Boats sat on top of houses. Cars stood upright on their bumpers against trees. Dogs barked from the roofs of pickups stranded on traffic islands. Receding water formed moats around houses.

  Back in Kansas City, I had listened to newscasters describing New Orleans as a war zone. Today I thought that was a poor description. The quiet struck me as that of a ghost town, the smashed windows and entryways open in dark, silent screams. I could imagine how it had been before the hurricane. People moving about, traffic. I could feel them on the sidewalks and in their cars. Yet I saw no one.

  On St. Claude Avenue, in the Ninth Ward, I noticed the open front door of Mike’s Food Store. A shovel leaned against the building. I stopped to speak to a man carrying stuffed garbage bags to the curb. His name was Hai Pham, and he was a Korean immigrant. His clothes hung off him heavy from the sweat of his labor. Pham told me he didn’t understand the senseless, willful destruction of his store, and he never would. Yes, he knew why people would steal food and water, even beer and liquor. But to overturn shelves, demolish a freezer and steal his money? No. He could not understand that.