NOLA NG heroes

Unlike Sean Penn, who brought his publicist and a photographer and got splashed all over Rolling stone magazine, the real heroes were ignored.
This local news story may or may not get publicity (if it does, it is because someone posted it on Lucianne.com, not because CNNI was looking for everyday heroes)...
After the storm, a small group acted on instinct rather than orders. Through four hectic days and helpless nights, filled with unanswered screams of the stranded, they pulled people from rooftops and attics and guarded the remaining firearms and equipment in the flooded armory, with the help of a pit bull -- "Katrina" -- they retrieved from the floodwaters that first day. ...

With more than 40 people in four small craft, the soldiers made their third foray into Katrina's winds, by then at their most vicious. Even more debris whipped around them and into their faces as they made their way to Building 35 on higher ground. After the storm passed, the small armada began ferrying soldiers to the Mississippi River levee, where Blackhawk choppers evacuated them to the Superdome and other refuges. ...

The dog's rescue was the first of what the soldiers recalled as about 75 to 100 -- the rest all people -- they would perform during the following days.
"She hasn't left my side" after he fished her from the flood, Venable said of Katrina. "She's in my backyard in Slidell as we speak."
Cries for help
The day after the storm, the soldiers awoke at 5:30 a.m., untied their boats and set out into St. Bernard and the 9th Ward. Venable made his first trip with Faust, down Delery Street just inside the Orleans Parish line. It seemed every other house had someone waving or hollering for help.
At another house, they saw an old man on his roof in nothing but his briefs. He pointed them to the duplex next door. They could hear screams from a family trapped inside.
They had no tools to break open the roof, so they used the boat anchor -- twice. The first time they broke through the wrong side of the duplex.
On their second try, they found five women and girls from three different generations, two of them small children. "God bless you," one of the women said.
At another house, Venable and Faust rammed a locked door with their boat to break it down, freeing an old couple, Pete and Bertha. The couple had lived there 60 years. Pete said he'd never been on a boat, much less a helicopter...
"I told you we should have left!" the woman told her husband, who laughed off her scorn.
In one of their first rescues, Anderson, Black and Mula coordinated with a Coast Guard helicopter that picked up five people in a rescue basket tethered to the aircraft. The human cargo was then dropped into the boat and proceeded to devour all the Gummy Bears on board.
That Tuesday, the soldiers continued to drop people at the levee, still unaware that the St. Claude Avenue Bridge had become the main hub of the rescue operation.
Black recalled the moment he first approached the bridge, another one of those moments when the scope of the disaster became more disturbingly clear.
"There had to be a 1,000 people there," he said. ...