My two cents.

I was involved in a relief operation with the 82d a while back. We deployed and were mainly patrolling areas to stop looting and to protect the relief supplies. We also had attached engineers to clear rubble, and a lot of guys who did unloading of relief supplies.

What got me was this - When the natives figured that the weapons had no ammo, they got their weapons and stole some of ours... we were quickly issued ammo.

Second thing - I heard more "Where have you been, what took you so long to get here?" than I heard "Thank you for coming to help". About the 100th time I heard this, I answered "I was at home, in my house, drinking a beer, sitting in my air conditioning, looking at the storm track on TV and was so freaking happy I was not stupid enough to live here." Sorta shut that clown right up.

Oh, did I mention this was Hurricane Andrew, and I was in Florida? And the infrastructure there is one hell of a lot better than the almost non-existant infrastructure in Haiti. You can only do the best you can with what you have. People scream and cry about how long things take. One reason I reckon most of the people on this board could easily wait out 72/96 hours without outside help.