Page 328 - James Caan - The Real Deal

The Real Deal

were left alone. And it was cold, really cold, and the knowledge
that the temperature would drop as much as twenty degrees
overnight told me the death toll from exposure and hypothermia
would rise if aid wasn’t delivered quickly.
We carried on walking and came to huge crack in the road. At
the bottom of the crevasse was a car. We passed a tower block that
was now only one storey high. I’ve since learned that the quake
was so intense it did what geologists term ‘liquefy’ the founda-
tions. Bricks and mortar became dust in seconds and buildings fell
in on themselves. It is horrific to try to imagine what must have
happened in that building.
As we walked, we came across bits of road where cars and
lorries had survived but then had nowhere to go. With no roads,
there was no easy way of bringing aid in. The ground was too
steep for planes to land: helicopters would be the only way. My
friend with the HDO had arranged for us to be taken in one of the
military’s helicopters to see the scale of the disaster. The destruc-
tion we had witnessed in Muzaffarabad did not stop, and the
further we got from the towns the harder it would be to reach
survivors. We flew over the remains of countless isolated villages
perched on the sides of mountains. Even in good conditions it
would be hard to get more than a mule up there.
The scale of need overwhelmed me. There were no schools, no
hospitals, no shops, no town halls left from which to organise
relief. No water supply, no sewage: everything had gone, including
the stores of harvested food that were now rotting in the ruins. We
passed a valley that appeared to be full of nothing but dust. It was
cold, grey and unbearably sad. I couldn’t believe the things I was
seeing, and I still can’t really express the effect seeing those things
has had on me. I feel as if I have seen something I shouldn’t have,
that no one should have to see, and on that trip I was actually
learning what it means to be alive. I was profoundly moved by
what I saw. I still am.

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