At a July NAACP event, LTG H Steven Blum, chief of the National Guard Bureau, recalled rallying the support of adjutants general of 54 states and territories, who quickly provided troops and equipment.
"They kept sending it until [we] said stop," Blum told the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. "Nobody asked how are we being paid [or] how long we're going to be there. That's why I'm proud to be the chief of the National Guard Bureau. I don't think there is a finer organization wearing the uniform of this nation."
Within four hours of the storm, troops were in the water, on the streets and in the air saving lives, and the National Guard would be lauded in congressional hearings as the most organized, well-prepared agency responding to the disaster.
In an operation resembling the Berlin Airlift, 58,000 National Guard Citizen-Soldiers and Airmen poured into the stricken area, more than three times the number of Guard members deployed to any previous natural disaster.
All this while 79,000 Guard were in federal service for the war on terrorism.
Every state in the union and every territory contributed to the National Guard's response to Hurricane Katrina. "There is not a single National Guard entity that did not make a contribution," Blum told congressional investigators. "When you called out the Guard for Katrina, you called out all of America."