Baghdad, Louisiana.

NATIONAL GUARD TROOPS SIT ON TRUCKS OUTSIDE THE HYATT HOTEL in front of the Superdome. Some soldiers have been in Iraq; others are on their way. The lobby of the Hyatt still smells like a Brooklyn subway station, but the generator is running, and journalists who stayed there before the hurricane hit are squatting on the third floor. The wireless Internet works in the second-floor lobby, and that's where most of them sit, joined by latecomers like me, recently back from Baghdad.

The liberation of New Orleans has begun, a little late and a touch haphazardly. The Army and National Guard, much more laid back than the ones I am used to seeing in the streets of Baghdad, are taking the city street by street as the water recedes. In the lower Ninth Ward, where the water has come down a couple feet in the last few days, a colleague and I find Lloyd, an old man standing on the second floor of an apartment building that lost some of its stairs to the wind or flood. Wearing a bathrobe and flip-flops, he looks disoriented and answers questions slowly. He says he wants to leave. We inform some guard soldiers at a checkpoint nearby. They say they will evacuate him. This is three days after rescue workers in boats told us they were making their final passes through neighborhoods like Lloyd's.

Down the street, a Rottweiler sits obediently on the front porch of a home surrounded by three or four feet of water, waiting for someone to come home.

We bum a couple MREs from some troops staying in a school parking lot. That's the first time I've ever begged the military for an MRE, even after two years in Iraq.

What reminds me most of Baghdad are the troops arriving too late, cordoning off the scene of a disaster rather than preventing it, trying to organize chaos. And somehow the intel still isn't right. Hey, guys, there's a dude named Lloyd back there, blue bathrobe, can't miss him....

Outside the convention center, the last point for evacuations by helicopter to the airport and then to points unknown, the troops are a little more standoffish. Some move us away after we go looking for a dead body some rescue workers have told us is in the area.

The smell of death is present even when bodies can't be seen. Rotting chicken, one of the FEMA people says, smells more like rotting corpses than any other kind of refuse. But I doubt someone has dumped a cooler full of chicken. It is an odor I know from flattened houses in Fallujah. It was the acrid stench that filled lower Manhattan after September 11.

One morning I wake up in the un-air-conditioned heat to the sound of helicopters landing and am momentarily entirely confused about where I am. Chinooks, double-rotated helicopters, beat the sky slowly as they drop off dozens of men, landing and taking off in a field across the street from the home of Malik Rahim, an old friend of my colleague's who has let us crash at his house. A few hundred yards away from where the troops are landing, on the other side of the field, is a dead body. It's been there for more than a week, in the parking lot of the community center, the doors of which are chained. The body, now bloated and covered with maggots, is facing the doors.

Baghdad and New Orleans: the utter destruction of houses, roofs, and walls. Horses grazing on a median strip. The constant flyovers of helicopters, Humvees rolling down the streets. An armed populace. The mayor of Harahan, a mostly white suburb, comes on the radio. He has a dare for the looters: "Don't come in here. All of us are armed."

Downtown, we watch a flatbed truck drive by, a man on the back with an M-16 looking toward upper floor windows and roofs for snipers. The truck is followed by an SUV bearing the name and logo of the private security firm Blackwater.

Flak-jacketed private security contractors are stationed outside the Royal St. Charles Hotel. When I ask if things are getting wild around the area, one of them replies, "Nope. It's pretty Green Zone here."

I ask him if he has ever been to Iraq. He says he hasn't.

In Covington, Louisiana, around sixty refugees are staying in the cafeteria of the Pine View Middle School. Covington suffered heavy wind damage from the storm but not as much flooding as other areas.

Since September 2, members of Veterans for Peace, who had been on their way from the protest outside of George Bush's ranch to Washington, D.C., for the planned anti-war demonstrations there on September 24, have been delivering donated relief supplies to the Gulf Coast. Dennis Kyne is a veteran of the 1991 Iraq war.

"We left Camp Casey and Cindy Sheehan with thousands of pounds of food that was donated there, and we got here and handed it out within hours. That's our mission, to open up the biggest functional supply line to southern Louisiana," Kyne says. "We're not counting on the government to take care of us anymore. They've already proven they won't."

The Red Cross, which is officially in charge of the shelter in the school, supplies only basic medical care, with volunteers helping to cook and provide other services.

"When we first showed up, they were without power and they had some medical needs," says Douglas Soderbergh, who served in Lebanon and in Iraq in 1991. "We hooked them up with power generation. They have a small child here who has cystic fibrosis and requires physical therapy with a small chest bag that pounds his chest and loosens him up. And he has a ventilator. We fed them a hot meal. They had until then been eating MREs or cold food."

Soderbergh says the group was invited to stay at the middle school by local police, but that initially there was some friction with FEMA and Homeland Security officials at the regional level because of the group's advocacy against the war.

"They tried to get us out of here," says Soderbergh. "The volunteers from the Red Cross said, 'If you kick the veterans out, we're leaving too.' That stopped it pretty quick."

Perhaps we really are a nation shell-shocked. It was odd to see an e-mail from a woman I know in Palestine, remarking that medics she knows there considered sending aid to Louisiana: "You know you're in a bad situation when a Palestinian feels bad both for what has happened to you and because no one is helping so many of the victims."

A friend in Iraq sends his regards, with reserved Iraqi optimism: "No one is happy [about] what is going on in America, but it gives a lesson to the Americans. I don't think the Administration [will] understand it."

But maybe we're not shell-shocked; we're shelter-shocked. What Katrina visited upon New Orleans is a taste of what we have delivered in Iraq. I know Iraqis who are in denial about how bad it has gotten in their country. How many of us are in denial about how bad things are here?

An Iraqi colleague once told me: "You do not understand what civilized people we Iraqis are. We have no infrastructure, no security, no jobs. Yet, we keep on living in a civilized way. If Baghdad were an American city, it would be chaos."

As I drive out on Interstate 10, people with their belongings trapped to the tops of their vehicles travel west to Baton Rouge and beyond. On the radio, I hear a story about a Baton Rouge gun shop that has been selling more than 1,000 firearms a day to aid workers, law enforcement, and citizens worried about looting. "It's better than Christmas," the owner says.

Escalation. That's what frightens me.

David Enders, who wrote "Reporters in the Cross Hairs" for our September issue, is the author of "Baghdad Bulletin: Dispatches on the American Occupation."

Illustration by Ray Bartkus