Baghdad, Louisiana.

• Author: Enders, David
• Position: Analysis report

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...