ANDY ROONEY

©2005 Tribune Media Services, Inc.

Report From A Son

Our son, Brian, an ABC News correspondent, sent the following email from Thailand to his wife, Cecile, who sent it to me. I don’t normally use someone else’s material but it’s good, I’m a proud father and he owes me. Television reporters have so little time on the air that they can never include any of the small details that make a story come alive.

Brian’s report from Thailand:

“We drove up the road again today to find a fishing village we heard about that had been erased by the tsunami. It takes about two to three hours every time we go up there. I had heard that they are using elephants up there to clear away some of the debris, which I had no trouble believing, but I had not seen any and didn’t think they would be a significant contribution to the effort. This is a job for earthmovers, but we were passing through the business district of Kho Lak, destroyed by the wave, when we saw two elephants clearly rigged for work. They had big chains around their necks and saddles on their backs with riders, like tiny jockeys. There was a male and female elephant.

We followed them into the forest, past the big patrol boat stranded on high ground, and back toward a mucky lagoon. I realized that in this area the wave had penetrated the mainland about a mile from shore. The elephants move so fast they got out of sight and we had to track them in the dirt. They are so big, and leave footprints that are barely perceptible. I was the only one who could read them and told the other guys I had learned elephant tracking growing up in Ro-wayton, Connecticut.

Some men in a small boat had discovered a car in the water and the bull elephants were used to pull it out. I stood on shore next to the female while she devoured a small tree. We chatted a bit. The elephants had a crew of handlers, one of them a woman who kept addressing the news crews with warnings in broken English. “Newsmen, newsmen, step back, step back!” The elephant kept stumbling to his knees on the embankments as he pulled the car. He would have killed someone if they were too close.

At one point, the handler announced, “Newsmen, newsmen, something good! Dead body this way, dead body this way!” We trekked another half mile into the bush while the elephants helped recover several bodies and spent the day laughing over “Newsman, newsman, something good!”

The trickle of bodies is constant. I saw the recovery of at least five bodies today, and wasn’t really even looking. We left and went up the road to find a place called Ban Nam Khem, north of the resort hotels. We turned to the coast and it was out there on a promontory, pretty much flattened. About 20 big fishing boats, 40 to 60 feet, were up on shore. The village used to have a thousand people and a third are missing or dead.

I can’t get over all the junk you see: cooking oil bottles, brassieres, refrigerators, boats, broken Styrofoam, dead dogs, oil, cushions, teddy bears. I look at it and wonder how they are ever going to clean up this mess ... and will they clean it up or just push it into the ocean?

We talked to several people and families that had lost everything. We ran across a young woman who spoke decent English. She said she was still looking for the body of her 2-1/2-year-old son, but she said her heart aches for the foreigners who came here and died.

Shortly before we left, a group of monks was crossing the bridge, leaving town. Their saffron robes reflected off the water in long orange stripes. On the way back down, we stopped for a short break where we had first stopped to see the elephants. They came out of the woods just about the time we got there. One of them had a body up on her back, and the bull carried a shrouded body slung from his tusks.

I’ll call tonight.

Brian