August 17, 1969: Hurricane Camille struck Biloxi, Mississippi. I was there, in the Army, attending school at Keesler Air Force Base. My wife and I and our 5-month old baby and a dog named Jacque were living in a rented house on Racetrack Road on what was called the back bay. We had moved essentially all of our possessions there in a home-made trailer that I had built from the bed of an old pickup truck. This was my last school before I was to be deployed to Vietnam. One Sunday morning, about a week after we moved there, I was looking out my kitchen window and saw my upstairs neighbor tying his trash cans to our cyclone fence with some rope. Very strange, it seemed to me. I went out and asked him why he was doing that, and he said, “Haven’t you heard? There’s a hurricane coming.” Well, I had not heard, because I had no television and no radio and no phone. I didn’t know we were about to experience one of the worst times in our lives. My story about the experience is long and pretty horrible, and maybe some day I’ll write about it. But for now, the following films will show you what it was like.
