George Roark

George A. Roark

Q: This is Sam Robson with the David J. Sencer CDC Museum. It is October 15th, 2018, and I have the privilege of sitting in the audio recording studio here at the Roybal Campus in Atlanta, Georgia, with Mr. George Roark. We are going to do this interview today as part of our CDC Ebola Response Oral History Project. It's a long-term project we have going on to document some of the lives, some of the experiences of people who served in CDC during the time of the massive West African Ebola epidemic, which was 2014-2016. Thank you so much for being here with me today. Would you mind saying to start out, "my name is," and then fill in your name?

ROARK: My name is George Anthony Roark.

Q: And if you could also tell me what your current position is with the agency?

ROARK: I'm the deployment liaison for the Risk Management and Operational Integrity Offices within the Division of Emergency Operations under OPHPR 00:01:00[Office of Public Health Preparedness and Response].

Q: Perfect. All these layers. [laughs] If you could give a brief summary--if you were to give somebody an elevator pitch of, this is what I did during the response, what would you say?

ROARK: My job was primarily working with the emergency personnel staffing team and my job ended up being primarily to brief all of the deployers that went out. I gave the capstone briefing for the director of CDC to everyone that went out the door, which gave them the latest information, what we were hearing from the field, and covered all areas of safety, security, cultural norms, just general survivability tasks that they needed to understand before they went into the 00:02:00Ebola regions.

Q: We're going to back up just a bit, if that's okay. Do you mind telling me what your date of birth is and where you were born?

ROARK: March 31st, 1961, Altus, Oklahoma.

Q: Did you grow up in Oklahoma?

ROARK: I spent four years of my life in Oklahoma, my first four years. My dad was a military officer in the Strategic Air Command of the [United States] Air Force.

Q: Did he stay in that occupation for--

ROARK: He retired from the military.

Q: Where did you move from there?

ROARK: Oh gosh, we moved a lot because that's what you do in the military. We moved to Alabama, we moved to Hawaii, and then we moved back to Alabama and that's where ultimately my father retired from. So I grew up in Alabama.

Q: So you went through most of your school in Alabama, then?

ROARK: Yes. I went to Auburn University.

Q: What kinds of things did you like to do when you were growing up?

ROARK: Well, when my dad retired, he had always wanted a farm, so he bought a farm. From about thirteen years old till twenty, I was raised on a farm, and I did it all there. We raised chickens, we raised hogs, we had cattle, we had timber of course, and I did a lot of hunting and fishing, riding motorcycles, dirt bikes and stuff like that. I had a really awesome childhood.

Q: How did you decide to go to university at Auburn?

ROARK: What happened was with my parents, both of them were college educated and college was just like thirteenth grade, you had to go to college. But I didn't go the easy route. I had to work the whole time I was in school and I ended up choosing Auburn and went there. That's where my dad went, it was his alma mater 00:04:00as well, and so I went there and attended and worked my way through it. It took me five years to get out, and with the work and everything else, I didn't have the greatest GPA [grade point average] in the world, but I struggled through it.

Q: Did you continue working on the farm then, or--

ROARK: No. While I was at the university, I worked several kinds of jobs, but the big ones that really pushed me through everything, I was a bartender, and I also worked for the United Parcel Service for three years loading truck.

Q: What were you majoring in?

ROARK: I got a business degree, just a business degree, and really I majored in ROTC [Reserve Officer Training Corps] if you want to know the truth. [laughter] I was in the Army ROTC program. That was a big drain.

Q: Was that something you'd always imagined yourself going into, what with your dad being in the military?

ROARK: Not really, but my father was the one telling me that while you're there, 00:05:00you should go ahead and get a commission, you should get a commission in the military. Of course, he was a little bit disappointed when I went in the Army because he was Air Force, and his big thing was, "You went in the Army, you know that they sleep outside?" And I go, "Yeah." It helped me as well because I was getting one hundred dollars a month from ROTC, and I was also a drilling reservist, so I was getting a hundred dollars there. I needed the money, so it was two hundred dollars extra a month for me. At that time, that was a lot of money. It helped me with the other jobs that I had.

Q: Were you putting yourself through college?

ROARK: I would be lying if I said my parents didn't help me, but my father didn't--he didn't give me enough to survive on. I had to work. I remember I went to him one time and said, "This is not enough to make it." He said, "I said I'd help you with school, but if you want to live like a king, you probably need to get a job." [laughter] Because that's the way he did it too, you know? So that's 00:06:00what we did. He did help me out.

Q: Can you tell me about being in ROTC?

ROARK: It was not what I thought it was going to be when I signed up for it. It was one day a week in uniform and the classes were not real hard, but you had to put a little effort into them, but they weren't that hard. And then what happened is right after I signed the contract, there was a rotation of the guard so to speak, and a new guy came in and we went to five days a week in uniform. We were raising the flag on campus, we were doing physical training five days a week at the university, and I went in and told him I was going to quit. I said, "I'm not doing this, I never signed up for this." And they told me that I was going to be a private in the Reserves and I said, okay. So they had me and they owned me for two years. I mean, they owned me.

Q: I guess I don't completely understand. What does it mean if you're going to be a private in the Reserves?

ROARK: It means I'm not going to be a commissioned officer, I'm not going to be a lieutenant. I'm going to be a private, an entry-level soldier. My dad was a colonel and I just couldn't--there were a lot of forces against that decision. Nothing wrong with it, but I'm just saying there were a lot of forces against it. So I went ahead and just had to gut it out, which I did.

Q: How was school?

ROARK: School was okay. Business school was not really, really hard. I struggled through it. I didn't have the greatest grades in the world but I had a lot of things going on, was balancing a lot of stuff.

Q: So what happened then, after graduation?

ROARK: Well, because I went to Auburn and Auburn was like a Ranger school for ROTC. I told the professor of military science there was no way, no way am I going to go active duty. I want nothing to do with this, you have tortured me for two and a half years. I said, I am never going to go active duty. When I 00:08:00said that, that meant I was going to go in the Reserves only, be a drilling reservist. And when he did that, he says, you're on your own, you're on your own. Okay, whatever.

RCPAC [Reserve Components Personnel and Administration Center] is a Reserve Component command, and is a different command than active duty. When I got to pick my branch, I just got to pick whichever branch I wanted--well, I was in an aviation unit and I was going to go to flight school, fly helicopters in the Reserves, and I chose Medical Service Corps because I thought that would be cool, like a medevac pilot, right? Well, when I got down to Fort Sam Houston and they put me in Fort Sam, I was down there and you've got to understand, man, I knew everything about the Army at that stage because ROTC at Auburn was like ranger school. So I surfaced really high in the class because I knew so much. I knew how to do landnav [land navigation], I knew how to march, I knew how to do drilling ceremonies, I knew how to do all that stuff because they had tortured me. Well, they had a program called the Commandant's Program, and they had two slots for active duty. When I was down there, in all fairness, I was a 00:09:00lieutenant in the Army and I was in a building with one hundred eighty nurses, and I said, this ain't so bad. So they offered me a chance to go active duty, which I did, and then I was immediately shipped to [South] Korea. [laughs] To the DMZ [demilitarized zone] in Korea.

Q: Goodbye to the nurses.

ROARK: Yeah, see you. [laughter] But again, no regrets about any of that. It was great. It was a great time in my life.

Q: Did you spend a lot of time in Korea, then?

ROARK: I was in Korea for a year. I did ten years overseas in my career. I spent ten years overseas--a year in Korea, three years in Belgium, a year in Germany, six months in Honduras, I spent time in El Salvador. I saw a lot of places in the world where they deployed me over the twenty-four years I was in the Army.

Q: What years were those?

ROARK: Eighty-two to 2006, something like that.

Q: What kinds of different roles did you start taking on?

ROARK: When you become an officer in the military, the military will throw you into responsibilities far above your capacity. The first job I had, I was an ambulance platoon leader for a forward deployed medical company, and so I had about fourteen ambulances and all the crews and men and women that came with it, all the supplies and materials. I was assigned for like $2.5 million worth of property. The military will grow you up very quickly. They'll grow you up or burn you out or both. So I did that, and then I just kept rising through the ranks. I did really well in the service. I enjoyed it.

Q: Are you a married man?

ROARK: I am. I've been married twenty-seven years.

Q: Oh wow, congratulations.

ROARK: That's a big time period.

Q: How did you meet your wife?

ROARK: In Belgium. That's one of the assignments I didn't tell you about. I did three years in Belgium, and I met her there. She was a student hire at the--I was working at a hospital. I was a Medical Service Corps officer. Logistics was my background, Med-Log. I was working at a hospital there as Chief of Property and Services, and she was a summer hire there and I met her there. She was standing on a chair washing a wall, and I was like, who's that? And then I started talking to her and the rest is history.

Q: Is she American?

ROARK: No. She's actually Italian, but she grew up in Belgium, born in Belgium, but they maintain their passports. It was an enclave there in Belgium of 00:12:00Italians that were from Sicily. She's Sicilian. They came to Belgium to work in the mines because the Belgians wouldn't work in the mines. A lot of her family members actually died from black lung [disease] and stuff like that, but they're not working in the mines anymore, they've integrated into the community and all that.

Q: Was it a while before you had kids?

ROARK: Five years, and we had one child, one little girl.

Q: What's her name?

ROARK: Morgan. Morgan's at Auburn right now.

Q: Like father like daughter.

ROARK: Like father like grandfather. [laughter]

Q: When you look back over the career in the military, are there any particularly colorful moments you can recall?

ROARK: Yeah, man. When you ask it that way. I think the biggest thing that 00:13:00rocked my world was in Korea whenever there was a Black Hawk crash, and I had to go down and help them clean that up. At the time, I had orders to go to flight school. I was going back and going to be a helicopter pilot, and that changed my life when I went down and cleaned that up. I said, I don't want to do this. And then, of course, I did my time in the Middle East. I did all that mess over there. I met some of the best people that you'll ever meet in your life in the military. I think that's probably my biggest takeaway. I still keep up with those guys. And if I meet a person and they tell me that they were in the military now, in just a few minutes of us discussing things, I can know a lot 00:14:00about them. I know who they are, what they did, what they're capable of, how much they can take. Just in a short conversation of finding out what they did in the Army. That's an example, but I think the biggest takeaway was just--I mean, I loved the military. I loved it. I would've stayed longer but I was just falling apart. [laughter] Because of the military.

Q: When you talk about some of those best people you ever met in your life, can you pick one or two and just talk about them?

ROARK: Yeah. I served with a guy named Stewart Porter. He was my sponsor in Belgium when I moved there. When you arrive at a station, somebody gets assigned as your sponsor, and sponsors can be okay to awesome. This guy was awesome. I've kept up with him for years, so that's been since 1985 or so. I know all of his 00:15:00kids and everything else. We're meeting for a cruise in December, him and his family and some of his older--they're all grown now and we're going to go out. Spending those three years with him and seeing how he helped me and supported me and stuff like that, when I meet him, it will be like no time has been lost. It's like a real bond. When they talk about the bond of military people, it's real. And a lot of times if you're talking to somebody who hasn't done military time, it's hard to make them understand that. It doesn't make you superior to them, it just means that whenever you are in an organization that has as its motto, "You cannot fail, no matter what, you cannot fail," that means people will do anything to make sure that the mission is completed. It's a special kind of circumstance.

So that's one. I can just go on and on. Some of the guys are here that I met, 00:16:00that I knew on active duty, that I still communicate with. Military guys, if you saw me meet up with one of them, we will talk to each other like we are dogs. [laughter] I mean, we will say--in fact, I got in trouble the other day because I went into a meeting and there were these nameplates up there, and I won't say the guy's name but he's a really good friend of mine, and I swapped his nameplate out with instead of his name I put "Jenny Craig." [laughter] He's a little bit of a fat guy like me. He said, "Don't do that, don't do that!" I said, "Why not?" And then his boss looked at me and said, "Stop fat-shaming him!" [laughter] Anyway, but we're really good friends. We freaking love each other like brothers.

Q: That's wonderful. A lot of military guys at DEO [Division of Emergency Operations], right?

ROARK: Yeah. I think now there's probably sixty.

Q: I probably shouldn't have said "guys."

ROARK: It's women and men. It might be sixty percent, but I'm not really sure, 00:17:00but it's in that neighborhood.

Q: So what happened after 2006?

ROARK: When I retired, I went through a cancer scare. I had a melanoma taken off of me, and at the same time I had the melanoma, I had a massive back problem. They thought it was bone cancer, and I went through the meat grinder of medicine. But it turned out that it was just a really bad back, and the melanoma they caught and took off and has long since been gone. But my wife always gets mad at me. I've never had to really interview for jobs, I've always just had people call me and say, "Do you want to come to work?" I've been lucky that way. I got a job with a company, a private company that ultimately got bought by Lockheed Martin. I was there when they were transitioning to Lockheed Martin. I said, I don't like the way this is going, I don't want to do this, I don't like the way they're coming in, because they were changing a lot of our processes and 00:18:00making them more bureaucratic and difficult. I just said, I don't want to do that. So I resigned, and through a military guy, got an interview here, and I came in and the rest is history. I've been here about ten years.

Q: What did you come in doing?

ROARK: I worked for Mike Daley, who was the chief of log [logistics] in the Division of Emergency Operations. Mike Daley. He's the one that hired me, and I worked as his deputy for about two and a half years, and then I transferred to [the Center for] Global Health.

Q: You must've worked pretty closely with Mike Daley.

ROARK: I did.

Q: Can you describe him a little bit?

ROARK: Oh, he's a great, awesome guy. Retired full colonel from the Army Medical Department. He's a medical log guy like me. He's just a super soldier. Great guy.

Q: And then to Global Health?

ROARK: Went to Global Health, and I got hired by Michael Gerber. What happened there was I deployed to Haiti, and I worked in Haiti during the cholera event, and while I was there I ran into Jordan [W.] Tappero. We were on the plane coming back, and I told Jordan--because he was telling me what a great job we did and how hard we worked and all this kind of stuff--and I said, "You need more people with operational backgrounds like I have to work in Global Health." It was just a plane ride back and we were just talking about it. A week after we got back, he said, "What would a job description on a guy like that look like?" We drafted one up and sent it to him, and the next thing I know I was working in Global Health with a promotion. It was a good deal.

Q: Can you tell me a little bit about being in Haiti?

ROARK: Haiti is a confusing place. Really, really resilient people, but there's so many people trying to give them help that I think it is negatively affecting the place. In other words, they're given so much help from so many people that it's hindering their ability to get up and get running on their own. So the place is kind of a mess. Any time I go to a place like that where I have second thoughts about the adult population, I always just tell myself, look, you're here because of the kids. Because that's where the future is and we should try to make sure the kids are taken care of. What we were doing, we needed to do for 00:21:00that. But it was really, really hard working there. We had a lot of challenges, and people kept--just one thing and another, and there was always leadership stuff going on that needed to be worked on.

Q: What was one of the general challenges?

ROARK: I'll give you a challenge. We're there and we had a limited amount of supplies for cholera treatment, and those supplies were really predominantly to take care of our staff and also the local nationals who worked for the Embassy that were there. So there wasn't a lot of materials, but I had my eye on it because I knew what was needed, and these are rehydration salts, all kinds of things if somebody gets cholera to try to save their life.

Some of our scientists went to a prison in Haiti, and while they were in the prison in Haiti, they realized the prison had cholera, and people were dying. They already had bodies out front and they were covering them with lime and 00:22:00stuff to keep the odors down. The people behind the bars were screaming, "Help us, help us, are we going to die, are we going to die?" It was really a bad situation. They came back, and that was the decision that had to be made. I always ask that of people who are deploying, I said, what would you do? Would you give up your medical supplies that are there to treat your staff, the Haitians that work for the US government, and their kids? Would you give those supplies up to a prison? And that was the decision we had to make. I know how I felt about it. So I always ask, what would you do? And then I'll tell you what we did.

Q: Are you asking me right now?

ROARK: Yeah. What would you do?

Q: It depends on how easy it is to get new supplies in, I guess.

ROARK: We were having to mule everything in. That was one of my ideas. We were having problems with customs stopping our stuff, believe it or not. Why would that be? So we were having people fly down with two suitcases full of supplies, 00:23:00and then we'd bring them in, and then they would turn around and get on the next plane out. We were bringing in supplies that way. That's the way we had to do it because we couldn't afford for it to get locked up in customs and wait to pay somebody or something to get it out. So they weren't that easy to get, and the flights were really limited coming in at the time. So you asked a good question. I'll cut to the chase. The decision was that we gave our supplies to the prison. I had a fit about it. [laughter]

Q: All of the supplies?

ROARK: Most of it, yeah. But what do I do? I immediately ordered, ordered, ordered. So we got it coming in behind us, but the decision was made to do it, so that's what we did. That's pretty hard.

Q: That's a pretty good challenge.

ROARK: Yeah. It worked out okay. [laughter]

Q: Thank you for that illustration. So what do you do after Haiti?

ROARK: Well, the earthquake was before that, so we did that and then the cholera and then--

Q: Is it after that that you transitioned to Global Health?

ROARK: Yeah, after cholera I got picked up into Global Health. I worked in Global Health and just helped the ERRB, which is the Emergency Response and Recovery Branch, under Mike Gerber and Captain Mark Anderson. I just worked there supporting them as they went out and did missions. The missions they would do is to go to the field and work on the basic stuff: nutrition, water and sanitation, vaccinations, and all that kind of stuff. They would send out teams, advisors, consultants to go to certain countries and do things, and I would support all that. I helped them get out the door. I would make sure they had what they needed to get them deployed.

Q: Were there any of those times doing work up to 2014, when the world saw the 00:25:00beginning of the largest Ebola epidemic in history, that you felt you really drew upon for your work when Ebola hit?

ROARK: That I drew upon? Yeah. Well, that's kind of an interesting one, too, because I was working in Global Health and when Ebola exploded and went crazy, they were asking for volunteers to come back and work in the Emergency Operations Center. Well, that's where I was originally, so I said I need to go and help these guys because a lot of these guys were my military brothers working in the EOC deploying people, and they were overwhelmed. We had so much going on. So I went and worked in the Emergency Operations Center and started doing the deployment briefings and started helping to deploy people, and that's pretty much the rest of the story. I never went back to Global Health after that. I stayed there and Ebola went on for quite a long time and then 00:26:00ultimately, I told Mike Gerber and Mark Anderson that hey, I think this is where I need to be. So they allowed me to just transfer my slot there.

Q: When you talk about those early days when you're seeing people needing that kind of help, do you remember what exactly you were seeing?

ROARK: Well, they were sending out requests for people to come and work in the Emergency Operations Center in general, but when I went down in--when we deploy people here at CDC, it's a really difficult process because we have a lot of players involved and there's a lot of moving parts, whereas in the military it was much easier because we would deploy whole units. But here, we were deploying one person here, two people there. And they were having to go in and they have to deal with all the Department of State regulations about what's required to come in because they have to go in under chief of mission, you have to work under the embassy. The problem was just the magnitude of what was coming at us, 00:27:00and people at CDC are not as ready as in the military. In the military you know. Twice a year you go through soldier readiness processing where your fitness is judged. They give you any shots you need, they make sure you're physically fit, that you don't have medical problems, you don't have any kind of deficits that would keep you from being able to perform in a combat or deployed environment. But here, it's softer than that. We were trying to sort that out right at the time that they were deploying. Like we deployed some people who didn't have passports. We had to go and get their passports right away and do it urgently. So there were a lot of moving parts here, a lot of moving parts, and that's the beehive that I was working in for the whole time we were deploying people.

Q: Do you remember what month it was when you first started getting involved?

ROARK: I want to say it was in the fall I think of 2014.

Q: Things start to get really hot in Liberia, and--

ROARK: It was just wide open after that. It was so bad that we had to bring in people to help us from FEMA [Federal Emergency Management Agency]. We brought in people from FEMA to come and work with us, and they were very good because they had the right mentality, which was by any means necessary to get them out the door.

Q: Did you work with anybody especially from FEMA? In particular?

ROARK: Yeah. Right now I don't recall their names, but great people. They worked with us for like three or four months, and there was a group of them, a contingent of them, and they were spread out in the DEO working on various different things.

Q: When you say they had the right mentality, what is that?

ROARK: Mission focused and if there's not a way, make a way. You figure it out. There's no time for, "it just can't be done." No, it can be done. Everything can be done and we will do it. So that kind of mentality.

Q: Can you tell me more about working with the individual people who were deployed? Because it sounds like if you're not doing it unit by unit like you would in the military, it's person by person, there might be a lot of interpersonal interaction.

ROARK: I think most of them were overwhelmed at the process because the process to deploy somebody here, as I said, is a very intense process and it's usually compressed over a very short period of time, so they're just running all over the place. They're getting their physicals, they're doing--that's the thing 00:30:00where I get back to the military. We would already know you're physically fit so we don't have to put you through a physical because we know you're physically fit; at least twice a year you get checked, we know. But here we're having to check all those people, and we found some people would get in there and go, I had no idea I had high blood pressure. Well, you do and you're not going till you get this treated. So we had things that were getting captured like that, believe it or not. But the interactions with them, I think for the most part, they were kind of overwhelmed. And then on top of that, some of them, as with anybody to include me, were scared. I mean, they're going to deal with Ebola. Ebola is a scary disease. I always tell people it's like the devil's disease. It's like the ultimate disease. You give it to somebody or you give it to your kid and then you can't touch your kid while they're sick. It spreads so easy, and yet it's so fragile. Clorox will wipe it out. It's easy to kill. But then if 00:31:00somebody vomits on the carpet and the carpet is wet, it can live for like three or four days, so if you're down there scrubbing the carpet, you could get it. So people were overwhelmed and they were scared.

They didn't know what to expect, and that's where I came in because that's what I did, I briefed people and I made them aware of the things they should watch out for. Those briefings I did, I got a lot of accolades for the briefings but probably not as deservedly as I should have. I don't mean it that way, I mean I got better accolades than I deserved, is what I'm saying. [laughter] And the reason I say that is because many of the experiences I have are things I learned from other people years ago, and I just simply told them what to do, how to do it and what to watch out for.

Then I was being fed information from people that were coming back. We had these 00:32:00meetings, and this is a lot of Dr. [Sachiko] Kuwabara, right? We had these meetings where people would come back and we'd have these sit-down, after-action kind of meetings, and they would say, "Let me tell you, when I went to the airport, if you get in the wrong line you're going to spend an extra two hours." That's just one thing, but then they also talked about dealing with really some of the horrible things that happened over there because we had people that went that couldn't stay. They couldn't take it. Not the environmental piece of it, but they couldn't take what they were seeing. There are people here in the United States that really don't understand what real poverty looks like, they don't understand what real despair looks like, and then when they find themselves in the middle of that, they're going, oh my God, I had no idea. There's all the kids, they appear to be orphans and they look hungry and they're asking for food. Yeah, I've got five Baby Ruth bars in my bag, but there's fifty 00:33:00of them, thirty of them. What do I do with that? So all that mix and that compression, and then that's where I came in and I tried to do everything I could to make sure they were the best prepared they could be going in. And I did all that through stories for the most part. I told them stories.

Q: Can you--do you recall any right now?

ROARK: Yeah. We had an employee that was there, he was young, he was a doctor, and he was working with a host nation physician in one of the countries. I can't recall whether it was Liberia or Sierra Leone. But he was working with them and things were going very well, and this guy comes in one day and says he doesn't feel too good. Well, long story short, three days later this host nation physician dies of Ebola. The CDC employee had been practicing social distancing 00:34:00like he'd been taught to do and hadn't shook hands with him, there wasn't any fear of him being contacted by the virus. But he went back to his hotel, and he was in his hotel and he was like, my gosh, I can't believe that guy's gone, I can't believe he died, I was talking to him three days ago. Then he said to himself, you know what, I need to go for a run to clear my head. He's a runner, so he goes for a run on the beach at night. While he's running on the beach at night, clearing his head from the fact he just lost a friend there in-country, he came up on two guys who came out of the woods. 7.62Ã--39mm AK-47, best rifle ever made, got to give it to the Russians. And they throw their rifles up, and "What are you doing?" He says, "Oh, I'm here on Ebola." They go, "Okay, ID [identification]?" And he goes, [pats pockets]. "No ID." He says, "But I can 00:35:00make a phone call." No phone. So then they gave him the international symbol for "Can you come with us," and it's at the point of a barrel, they're pointing this way. They're walking him up the beach, he's going up a hill, and on the top of the hill is a paddy wagon, a jail truck, they're getting ready to put him in a jail truck. And he looks like me, and he's going to a jail in Sierra Leone. He's freaking out. While he's up there processing him and getting ready to put him in the truck, he sees some CDC people. He hollers to them, they come walking over, and one of them is a local national who starts to tell the guards--because these are military guys--that this guy is with us, he's a good guy, don't do this. And they let him go. But he had a traumatic event. So the reason I tell that story is because it's illustrative of several things. One is, you never go anywhere without your ID. You never go anywhere without your phone. And they were all 00:36:00briefed to not be on the beaches at night. The reason they're not on the beaches at night is because they have a smuggling problem and a murder and a rape problem. So these military guys that came out of the woodwork and said, "What are you doing here," they were doing their jobs. So that's an illustrative story for people to understand, look, when the RSO, the regional security officer, sits down and says don't do this, don't do this, don't do this, there's a reason. And when you do that with adults, they totally get it. That's just one of many stories.

Q: Taking it back just a bit to when you talked about briefing people initially, before deployment, on how to stay safe. And you talked about social distancing, and of course, not going anywhere without your ID and everything. Do you 00:37:00remember--what are some other things you would tell people?

ROARK: When you're in a country that you're not familiar with, you always travel in couples or groups because you're less likely to be a target if you travel in groups. It's the one person walking down the darkened road by himself that doesn't look like he belongs, he looks a little lost or looks like he's looking at his map, that's the guy they go after. They're looking for an easy target. Well, if there's three of us, they don't know that Sam's a dang fifth-degree black belt in Jujitsu and he's like, oh, boy, I get to go full speed. They don't know that. So they're thinking there's three of them. To take three, you're kind of thinking they've got to have at least two and maybe three to do it because they don't know what they're going to run into. It doesn't happen that way. It greatly reduces the chances of something happening to you. So that's one 00:38:00example. I talked about you can go to REI and get one of those straws you can drink water from, but you don't drink out of rivers in Sierra Leone. We don't do that. We drink bottled water. So we go through all those kinds of things. A lot of different stories about things that can happen to you when people know that you're there and you're not familiar with things. There's a ton of stories about stuff like that. If you want to hear, I'll tell you another one.

Q: Of course I do.

ROARK: This happened to an active duty guy that I know. He was a snake eater, like a superstar airborne ranger, blah, blah, blah. He flies into a country which I shall not name, he's going through the airport, and as he reaches down to grab his bag, a little kid jumps in front of him and grabs the bag and says, 00:39:00"Let me help you, let me help you." He's like, "Oh gosh, no, I don't need any help." "Please, please." The kid just pleads with him. He says, "Okay, okay, okay." He goes ahead and lets the kid drag his bag, and he's looking, the bag's almost bigger than the kid. He's thinking, give him a dollar, give him five dollars. What do I do, make his day, make him ten dollars? He [the child] says, "You take a taxi, right?" And he says, "Yeah, I'm taking a taxi." So they go out of the airport and there's a long line of taxis like you'll see. They're walking down the road and there's all these taxis lined up, and as they're walking the little kid goes, "You have to go here, you have to go here." He's following the kid. And as they're walking along, they come up on a black sedan, and there's a man standing there reading the newspaper. As he's reading the newspaper, the kid walks by, he folds the newspaper shut, grabs the bag, throws it in the trunk of the car, pushes the trunk down, and now the kid's got his hand in the face of this airborne ranger guy saying, "Hey, I helped you, I helped you." He's like, "Ah--" and he's trying to process what just happened. He's looking at the sedan, it's a nice car, he's looking at the driver, he looks like a nice guy, he's 00:40:00dressed nice, so he gives the kid five bucks and the guy says, "Where are you going?" He gets in the car with him, and off they go. They're driving, and as they drive, the guy says, "How long are you going to be here for?" He says, "A week or so," whatever. He says, "You're not looking for any girls while you're here?" "No, no, I'm not interested in any girls." He says, "Man, you just got to see our women, we've got the most beautiful women in the world." He says, "I'm not interested." "I'll show you a place up here on the left." "I'm not interested." "It's on the way to the hotel, I'll just show it to you." And he's thinking, well, he's just going to point it out to me. Instead, the driver pulls in. And when he stops, the driver jumps out. The guy is going, gosh. He gets out and he goes, and sure enough, he looks and there's a big glass [window] and there's a lot of women in there and stuff. They're all women of the working world, right? He's looking at them and thinking to himself--and by then, a young, beautiful girl has come out and started talking to him, and he's like, oh 00:41:00my gosh, and then he has a rational thought and he turns to the driver and says, "Hey, not tonight. I can't do this, I'm too tired, the flight was terrible, I want to go back to my hotel." The driver says, "No problem, sir. No problem." The little girl cries a little bit and walks off, and he gets in the sedan, and they go back to the hotel. When they get to the hotel, he stops the car again, he gets out. His stuff is still locked in the trunk of the car. He gets out and says, "How much do I owe you?" The guy says, "Three hundred dollars." He said, "What?" He says, "It's three hundred dollars." "I'm not paying you three hundred dollars, we're ten minutes from the airport, I'm not paying you three hundred dollars." He says, "But you took the tour." "I didn't take a tour, what are you talking about?" Now there's four men there, and all the four men are going, "What's wrong man, he's not going to pay? If he doesn't want to pay, he can have it for free." So what does he do? He takes his shoe off and gets out three hundred dollars and asks for a receipt. Those kind of things can happen to you when you're not prepared. That's why CDC people don't take taxis, typically.

Q: Wow.

ROARK: [laughs] I have a lot of those kind of stories.

Q: Is that a story you heard while that person was still deployed or on his return?

ROARK: No, this was not a CDC employee. This was a story from my past that I tell them to make them understand the things that can happen to you when you're out there. I got a bunch of those, to make you not want to travel overseas.

Q: Really freak you out, huh?

ROARK: Really freak you out, yeah.

Q: How do people respond to some of these stories? Is there anybody who it really affected, or other people who just thought you were scaring them, like you're saying?

ROARK: I think I had some people who said that it was not as bad as what George said it could be, which was good. That was good because they went in prepared 00:43:00for it to be bad, which is good. I had some people who said that my stories were offensive, for whatever reason, and I'll tell you one of those in a minute if you want to hear it. And then I had some people who said that--I had one senior person at CDC that told me I saved his life. I was like, I think that's a bit much. And that was involved with the concept of going to the balcony. Going to the balcony is, if you're in a dangerous circumstance or things are out of control, that you must somehow or another suspend yourself from it so that you make rational decisions. What does that mean? Going to the balcony means, if you and I were having an altercation and you were just enraged with me, rather than me taking it that way and getting in your face and pointing my finger at you, I'm better off to go to a balcony and look down on the situation and see what's going on and try to understand what's going on before I respond. It was a senior 00:44:00person who told me he went out, and what happened is, he went into a village in Ebola Land. He went into a village and saw some young men, and they started talking and started getting agitated, and he was asking his translator what's going on over there, and the translator looked at him and said, "They say you brought me here, and that I came from a village that has Ebola." He goes, "What?" They were saying that he had brought Ebola into the village by bringing this translator into the village. One of them walked over and grabbed him by the arm, and these guys had machetes. He said that he went to the balcony, and he said, "Hey, don't put your hands on me," and that he slowly backed away, and he was able to kind of buffalo them a little bit and go back to his vehicle and leave.

I had another lady that got mad at me because I said that all of us have 00:45:00prejudices in us to some degree, and we all judge things. We do, because it's a survival technique. And I said, so here's one of mine. If I see somebody who has a tattoo on their face, they go into a different category with me. It doesn't mean I think they're less than me, it just means I look at them and say, this is a person who has decided that they will never interview. Because it's just hard to explain away a tattoo on your face. Now, things are changing and a lot of people have tattoos, and I'm not against tattoos, I don't care. But I'm saying if I come face to face with somebody who has a tattoo on their face, it just puts them in a different category with me and I take that into account. And I had a lady that got really mad about that and said it was extremely judgmental and I had no right to say that in a briefing. I'm like, tattoos, it could be a 00:46:00buzz cut like I've got, it could be people with a shirt that says "white power" on it or "black power" or whatever, all these things. You cannot be so politically correct that you ignore what is reality. If I pull up to a gas station and there's a bunch of mean dudes there, whoever they are, regardless of their race, and they just look like bad news, it's better off for me to do the avoidance technique and go to another gas station.

Q: Are there some more of those general principles that you could illustrate?

ROARK: Well, for sure, wherever you're going, we need to make sure that you're culturally aware of what's important in the country and what you do and don't say. For example, if we're sending somebody to Colombia, there's nothing in the 00:47:00Colombian political climate that's funny about talking about cartels and drugs in Colombia because Hollywood has branded them with that. Scarface, all the shows that were done. And there's a lot more to Colombia than the drug trade. There's a lot more to it. So it's not funny to them. If you go in and say, "Oh, are you a member of the cartel?" That's not funny to them. We have people that have sometimes made some statements, and we had that with Ebola. We had a person that went over there, a [US Public Health Service] Commissioned Corps officer, and he was working with some local nationals and thought it would be funny to make a joke about, "If you do that again, we're going to put you in chains." That really happened, that really happened. And to this day, that individual says, I didn't mean anything by it. But words are powerful. The guy complained 00:48:00about it, and of course he was on the next flight out.

I don't know if I steered off your--because I was telling stories--

Q: No, not at all. It's the story that illustrates the point.

ROARK: My briefings during the height of Ebola were four to four and a half hours long. We covered a lot of material. And I kept the audience, I kept them listening because I have a way. I walk around the room and ask questions of people, and I keep them engaged. I tell them these stories because stories are what locks it rather than just bullet one, bullet two, bullet three. I got a lot of accolades for the way I do the briefings, but it's because I'm sort of a closeted actor. [laughter]

Q: Have you always known that?

ROARK: I like to perform. I enjoy it. It's my niche and I'm fairly good at it, but sometimes the energy goes in a different direction. I can get in trouble 00:49:00sometimes for some of the things I do and say.

Q: Do you have an example right now?

ROARK: Of something that got me in trouble? Well, there were people--you can't win everybody, right? There were assessments done of my briefings, and they were overwhelmingly positive, but there were people who felt that some of the things I did at the start of the class to make sure that I had everybody's attention they didn't like. For example, we were having a problem at CDC, everybody wants to be on their phone. And my rule was, look, I'm going to give you a presentation, it's going to be a good presentation, and I expect you to be off your phone. I don't want anybody on their phones. Well, I would plant somebody 00:50:00in the audience with a broken phone, and I would tell people, "I want you to take your phones and turn them off. For the next four hours, I'm going to give you a good presentation, and I need for you to have your head in the game because this is serious." So this one guy, the plant, would be over there with a phone, and he'd be plunking away on his phone. I'd say, "Can you put your phone away?" And then the guy would tell me, "Give me just a minute." [laughter] And I'd go, "Oh, okay." So then I would walk over to them, and by then the whole class is totally silent. And I would snatch the phone away from him and throw it against the wall, and when it went against the wall it would just shatter and fall into pieces. Everybody would go, "Whoa!" And the guy would go, "That's my phone!" And I said, "I don't care, you can leave." The guy would get up to walk out, and he would get almost to the door, and then I would look at him and he would look at me and I would say, "I was happy with my part." And he goes, "I was, too." Then we would usually hug, and then everybody would realize it was a 00:51:00gag. But then I had no problems with phones.

Q: Right.

ROARK: So I had somebody that complained about that, and they took it to the head shed and said that it was inappropriate and all this stuff. But it wasn't inappropriate because she didn't like the concept of it, it's because she thought it was real. She told them in the brief, and at that time, Jeff Bryant was the director, and Jeff [Jeffrey L.] Bryant said, "That's a gag." And she said, "I was there, it wasn't a gag." And he goes, "It's a gag, trust me, it's a gag." And she says, I was there, I saw it, it wasn't a gag. Anyway, so.

Q: Wow. So did you have to stop doing that?

ROARK: No. To be honest with you, if you want to know the truth, I had a lot of accolades, and I had some negative comments, but they were not shared with me until after the whole thing was over. Not all of them. Some of them were. Some specific things were said to me and I altered what I was doing, because I'm not trying to make people mad or hurt their feelings or anything. But the majority 00:52:00of them I did not see because they were considered to be, there's far more good in what he's doing than bad.

Q: Let's talk more about the accolades and what they particularly praised about you.

ROARK: Oh, man, there were things said, and this is going to sound like I'm bragging on myself, but they're in the documents. "The best briefing they've had at CDC, felt totally prepared, went out of his way to take what could be a very boring subject and make it interesting for everybody, stories locked on points that I needed to think about." There were even comments that in the field, when they were getting ready to do something people would say, "You know what George said, we shouldn't do that." [laughter] So that was like a really positive thing. So I had a lot of really good comments. More good than bad.

Q: Can you tell me more about those post-deployment debriefings that you had 00:53:00with people?

ROARK: Now, I didn't attend all of those. I attended some of them, but I was fed the information from there. If you had deployed and you came back, they would turn around and tell you, "What were your three ups and downs? What do you wish that you had been prepared for?" And those comments would ultimately filter to me, and if I saw that there was a trend in something, like they were saying they didn't know enough about this or didn't know enough about that, then I would get strengthened on that and then I would start putting that in the briefings. That was working really, really well. It worked extremely well.

Q: Were you also in communication with the regional security officers?

ROARK: Yeah. Now, we do most of that through OSSAM [Office of Safety, Security, and Asset Management] here. They're the ones that really have the contacts with them, but I had a rule that it was mandatory that you be briefed by the RSO. 00:54:00People would say, "Why do I have to do that? I can read about the crime and whatever is there and all that stuff." I said, "Because the RSO is the guy or gal on the ground. They know what's happening on the ground. They know what provinces just recently had a mayor assassinated, or they know where there's protests going on. They know how people feel about this, that and the other, and to not listen to that is crazy." Now, every RSO, once you've seen one RSO, you've seen one RSO. Some of them are not very good at what they do and some of them are awesome. Like in Haiti, the RSO was critical to us because there were places you cannot go in Haiti. You just can't go unless you're in an armored vehicle. It's just that bad. So the RSO was very important. I'm all about security. You'll never see me giving the security guys a hard time. I think it's a good thing. Just like the guards that protect us here at the agency. I am 00:55:00nothing but nice to them because I think that they are here to protect us. I say things to them like, "Thank you for keeping us safe."

Q: Who were some of the people you worked with most closely?

ROARK: When I built a presentation, I had to work with OSSAM, which is the safety and security. Then I had the clinical piece of it, whatever it was. In Ebola it was whichever different center was the primarily lead on it. Then we had the cultural piece of it, which I picked up from a mixture of SA, situational awareness, and the people that worked in the RAMP offices, I think they call them RAMP now. All these people, and there's a few more--we had finance in there, believe it or not. Because we were trying to brief people on what to expect and how they would do their vouchers when they came back. All that stuff was built into it. So it started off, the thing, with all these 00:56:00players that were coming in and speaking. Over time, they got jobs back in their other--and so that became my job. But once I heard them brief it three or four times, then I could pick it up and brief the whole thing, and we would just go right through it.

Q: Is there anything that we really haven't covered yet about your time in the Ebola response?

ROARK: Just that I think the people that deployed on Ebola were courageous. I think that a lot of them didn't really realize how courageous they were until it was over because courage is not just about not being afraid. It takes courage to face so many unknowns and not know what you're going to do. And I will say that about CDC people, that when they go, a lot of times they really don't know what 00:57:00they're going to face when they get there. And that can be very scary. It can be really, really scary. I think that my briefings, when I told them things, I think it helped them to know what to do when they faced something that they were not really sure what to do. They were like, okay, I remember he said if that happens, I should do something like this, or whatever. Made sure they understood the chain of command, who they talk to, what's an illegal order, what are the things that a leader can tell you to do and what are the things you don't have to obey, because there are things like that. I think that when people deploy, that it is so good for the agency because when they come back from that environment, they will have learned a lot about themselves and about other people and about what not to do and what to do. So I was very proud of my 00:58:00involvement in all that.

Q: Thank you so much, Mr. George Roark. It's been a privilege having you here. I can't believe I didn't have this part of the story until now. [laughter] It's kind of crazy, kind of insane. There's nobody who interacted with more deployers than you, really.

ROARK: I think I deployed six thousand. I think I briefed six thousand people.

Q: That's wild.

ROARK: There's people all over this agency that when they see me, "Hey, George, how are you doing?" I'm like, "I'm doing good, I don't know your name." [laughter] Some of them will come up and they--because I'm an upbeat buy and I like to have fun, so yeah, it's really good.

Q: Thank you so much.

ROARK: Thank you, sir.

Q: I am really happy we have this documented. Oh my goodness. You can tell a story!

ROARK: Oh, man, I have more. Are we still taping?

Q: We are. We can add it in.

ROARK: I'll just tell you another one because you seem like you're interested.

Q: I am very interested.

ROARK: Here's one. This actually happened to me. I was stationed in Thailand for three years, it's one of the places I was stationed in the military. So I'm over there and my wife is from Belgium, so she's a French speaker. She speaks Italian, but she's a French speaker primarily. We're sitting at the airport and there's a guy in front of us and he's as white as a sheet. He looks like he's not well. And he spoke French, so my wife said, "Bonjour," and the next thing I know they're talking, and he tells this story. This will scare the bejeezus out of you. I told this in my briefs, too. They're sitting there, and he goes on and tells his story. So he's down in a little bar down there and sitting in there with some beautiful girl and having a drink with her and everything else, and he said he looked up at the door and this guy walks in with really bad teeth and he goes, oh, man, sacre bleu. He keeps drinking his drink, and he's talking to the 01:00:00girl. Well, the guy with the bad teeth walks over and bites the Frenchman on the arm. The Frenchman is like, "Aaagh! Imbecile!" He starts pelting him with punches like bam, bam, bam. He knocks him off of him, "What is wrong with you!" He turns around and the girl has split. When he turns back around, he looks and there's two Thai cops there. They grab the Frenchman and haul him off to a jail, which is about the size of this booth, and throw him in the jail cell and there's a guy in the corner that's got impetigo, sores all over him. There's another guy over in the corner hacking and coughing like he's got TB [tuberculosis]. There's a latrine that you poop in and wash it out with a hose, and he's going, oh my God. Well, they leave him in there for about eight hours. He is losing his mind. Finally, the little latch on the door opens up and this guy looks in there and says, "Bonjour Monsieur, je suis l'avocat," I'm your attorney. He jumps up, "Oh my God, you've got to help me!" He [the attorney] said, "Shhh, what happened?" They're talking through the door. He says, "I was 01:01:00in this bar and this guy came up and bit me on my arm." And he shows him the bite mark, a human bite. He's like "Oh my God!" He says, "I punched him like three times." He [the attorney] said, "Shhh." He says, "What?" He says, "You cannot hit a Thai national." He goes, "What are you talking about, he bit me on the arm!" He says, "You cannot hit a Thai national. We've got to get you out of this jail, so I'm going to make some phone calls." He comes back and tells him, "If you wire ten thousand dollars to this account from France, they will let you out on bond." Almost everybody can get together ten thousand dollars if they're locked up in a jail in Thailand or any other country. He calls mama and says, "Mom, I don't have time to explain, you've got to wire money, here's the number," and he goes through the whole number, and ultimately she knows that her son's in prison. She's scared to death, she wires the money. When she wires the money, the door opens, he walks out, and the attorney is there and says, "Don't worry, tomorrow we start to prepare for the trial." He goes, "The trial?" He says, "Yes, we have to prepare for the trial." He says, "Don't worry, I tried a 01:02:00case like this last year and the guy only got three years." He's going, "What! Are you kidding me?" He turns around and goes to his hotel room, he grabs his passport, grabs his bag, packs everything up, goes to the airport, pays an early exit fee, and off he goes. The next day there's a German in a bar. He sees a guy with bad teeth that looks like he got punched three times before. They're rolling it, they're doing it every day, ten thousand dollars a pop. Those kind of stories, when you tell a story like that, see, that could happen to anybody. Those are the kind of things that I told in my briefs, and I weaved those things through my briefings and people would be like, wow. And that's true. Those are real stores. People are like, did that just happen?

Q: That's an amazing one.

ROARK: I have a lot of them. Many of my stories come from Asia because they're 01:03:00amazing what they can do.

Q: Really? It's creative stuff?

ROARK: Yeah, yeah. It's very creative. A German guy is with his wife, and they're in Bangkok looking in a jewelry store. A guy walks up and says, "Guten Tag," and he says, "I speak a little German." They start talking and he tells the German, he says, "Are you going to buy any jewelry?" He goes, "No, I'm not going to buy any jewelry." He said, "Well, that's too bad because I'm from Thailand and I'm going to buy a ring for my wife, and if you were to buy a ring and we bought them both together, it would be cheaper." The German says, "I'm not interested." He said, "It's not a problem--go in, you pick the ring that you want, and when you like the one you want, put it on your wife's finger and take your hat off, and then I'll know that that's the one you want me to buy. I'll buy it for you and we'll exchange the money." He goes, what's the risk, right? He goes in, puts the ring on, takes his hat off, "Oh, four hundred is too much, too much." He walks outside and then he looks in the window, and he can see the 01:04:00Thai in there and he's arguing with the merchandise owner about the price. Then he comes walking out and he's got the two rings in his hand, one for his wife and one for the German's wife. He says, "How much did they tell you?" He said, "They wanted four hundred." He says, "I got it for one fifty," and he goes, "Oh, man!" So he gives him one fifty, puts it on his wife's finger, and life is good and everybody goes off and they're happy. The next day, the German's wife has got her little ring on and she shows it to another jeweler, and he says, "It's nice, but it's brass and it's not real stones." He goes, "What!" He says, "It's not real." "What!" He goes to the tourist police and tells them, "I've been robbed, I've been robbed, this store is selling fake jewelry," because they all say guaranteed and all this stuff. They go to the place and walk in there, the German is there, and he walks in with the police and they look at the guy behind the counter and said, "Did you sell this German a ring?" He says, "No." He goes, "Did he sell you the ring?" "Well, no, another guy bought it for me." That's 01:05:00brilliant, right? They've got a copy for everything in the store. So yeah, bad stuff can happen.

Q: That is wild.

ROARK: We don't think that way. The most clever animal on the planet is a human, and it's also the most dangerous.

END