Richie Serino is a big cheese now, the deputy administrator for FEMA, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, and he has a big office in Washington.
But he's OFD — Originally From Dorchester — and you can take the boy out of Dorchester but, well, you know. So while he has a place in Dupont Circle, his heart is still in Dorchester and that's where you'll find him every Memorial Day, because that is where, in the Cedar Grove Cemetery, they remember those who gave all on the battlefield. Last week, he was on a different kind of battlefield. It was Missouri, and it looked like someone dropped a nuclear bomb. Technically, it was a tornado.
Richie Serino is, in his own words, "a street medic.'' He cut his teeth on the streets of Boston, rushing gunshot victims to the hospital. He saved more than he lost. He pulled mangled bodies out of mangled cars. He breathed life back into little kids handed to him by firefighters with soot-covered faces and he put oxygen masks on those same firefighters at different fires. Over 35 years on the street, he saw a lot.
"Nothing I saw on the streets of Boston or anywhere else could prepare me for what I saw on the streets of Joplin,'' he said. That's because while there are still streets in Joplin, there's nothing else.
"The only thing you can see, standing in Joplin, is part of the hospital,'' he said. "Everything else is gone. Obliterated. Just gone.''
He had been in Georgia, then Mississippi. And he thought that was bad until he got to Joplin. The tornado's path was 6 miles long and a half mile wide.
"We came across a family. There was a woman, her daughter, and the daughter was holding a baby. They told me the great-grandmother had died in the house in the tornado. There was no house. They were just standing in the ruins. Four generations, one of them gone in the tornado. They were going through the debris, trying to find something, anything, a memory. Something they could hold onto. And I asked them what could we do for them, and the grandmother turned to me and she said, 'Son, we're OK. We're alive. There's folks worse off than us. Why don't you go help those folks.'
"I was blown away,'' Serino said. "These people had nothing but the clothes on their backs and their lives. And they wanted us to help somebody else.''
Serino drove around Joplin for hours until it dawned on him. There were flags everywhere. American flags. They stuck up like tree stumps. Attached to crumpled cars. Pushed into the ground.
"People put flags in whatever was left of their homes,'' he said. "It was this incredible gesture, this defiance, that whatever they had been dealt, they wouldn't be defeated. To see the power of the tornado was one thing, but the reaction of the people was so much stronger. I mean, I'm there as the federal government. I'm there trying to help people, reassure people, tell them that there is assistance for them, that we can help them. And what I saw was people helping each other. Something more powerful than a government, than a tornado. I don't think, in my life, I was ever more humbled or proud.''
He went to a Sonic, to get a burger and a soda. He met firefighters from somewhere in the Midwest, he forgets where. They had come to salvage the homes of Joplin firefighters who had been too busy trying to save their neighbors to worry about their homes.
"The faith-based community was amazing,'' he said. "The Southern Baptists had tractor-trailers, with kitchens to feed people. The Lutherans mucked out houses, and the Mennonites rebuilt them.''
Richie Serino considers himself blessed. He saw the awesome, overwhelming power of nature. And then he witnessed something even more powerful: the human spirit.
© Copyright 2011 Globe Newspaper Company.
