Navy veteran returns to find home in shambles
Friends help him find his cherished service mementos.
Navy lifers tend toward neatness. Tight quarters demand tidiness and organization.
That was the sort of trailer Butch Neuenschwander, 47, left behind near midnight Saturday, following knocks on his door and shouted warnings about a fast-rising river: A smartly put-together, efficient abode. Retired from the Navy in September after two dozen years of service, including tours that took him through Gulf Wars and tsunami relief work, he had found his latest port of call in a pretty trailer park on a bend of the Blanco just east of San Marcos.
Gently, but swiftly, he roused and collected his 11-year-old son, Lawson, got in his truck and evacuated.
The trailer he came back to, after the river receded, was decidedly unNavy-like: A sad, impossi- bly messy chamber, one in which furniture, motorcycles and toys had floated about and then been cast willy-nilly to the ground, covered in a thick, odious-smelling mud.
On Wednesday, like property owners across Hays County, he met with his insurance agent and salvaged what he could, taking account, in a sense, of an entire life.
He’d have to leave behind, among many other things, the 2014 Harley Street Glide and the custom-made bright-green 2007 Big Dog chopper, motorcycles that he rode in the Patriot Guard, the crew that escorts returning military personnel.
And, also lost to a sewagey smelling mildew, the whole Elvis get-up: The suit, the wig, the glasses, the Taking-Care-of-Business necklace — he still remembers the day Elvis died, his mother calling him inside and her sobbing at their home in Oklahoma. He sang Elvis in Las Vegas, of course, and at Navy installations around the world.
In the service, he was known variously as N-13; Commander Butch; and, simply, Sir — any way to avoid pronouncing that daunting last name.
This week his girlfriend Maysoon Al-Hasso put out an APB for people with trucks to help move whatever could be rescued. Pals, loyal to Commander Butch, heeded the call. On Wednesday, a half-dozen or so of his friends were helping sort out the salvageable from the impossible.
They had packed up his son’s Legos; guns and ammunition; medals, commendations; and a Commander Butch jacket.
“It looks like a washing machine at the bottom of a river,” Al-Hasso said, describing the inside of his trailer.
And in one upper storage closet, in the on- ly spot on the trailer to remain dry, were a half-dozen tubs of clothes and cherished memorabilia, including his Navy dress uniform and the trophy he had won as coach of the University of Texas rugby team.
On Wednesday, Neuenschwander appeared lightheartedly resigned to the devastation. He recalled that when he initially came back, he found the company car he had left parked by his trailer — he does safety work for a massive retailer — had a 500-gallon propane tank sitting atop it, one that had been washed from a couple of hundred yard away.
“Like my new hybrid?” he had asked a friend. “It’s a good hood ornament!”
But the jokes masked the devastation he had endured, said Al-Hasso.
He still hasn’t brought his son back to the RV site, called Pecan Park and now largely devoid of trailers, except for a half-dozen or so that are incongruously smashed on top of each other or caught up in trees, left haphazardly behind by the river.
“I’m so glad he didn’t see this,” Neuenschwander said.
There were, finally, the small, valuable finds, things tarnished but not forsaken.
He had proudly displayed a tidily folded American flag that had been given to him upon his retirement from the Navy: It had flown over the U.S. Naval Academy, from which he had graduated; the State Capitol of Texas, the place where he retired; and on the USS Arizona Memorial, marking the site of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.
When he first entered the trailer the cherished flag appeared gone, vanished in the muck of the world.
But there, on the floor, in the mud, he could make out a black bit of beautiful geometry.
“It was still tight, 5 pounds heavier with the mud caked on,” he said. “Anyone else would have asked what’s this black triangle, but I recognized it right away.”