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Military personnel patrol St. Charles Street in New Orleans where residents fearful of looters have been shouting to passing Humvees to alert the soldiers to crimes in progress. (By Shannon Stapleton — Reuters)

“We’re having some pretty intense gun battles breaking out around the city,” said Capt. Jeff Winn of the New Orleans police SWAT team. “Armed gangs of from eight to fifteen young men are riding around in pickup trucks, looting and raping,” he said.

Troops Back From Iraq Find Another War Zone In New Orleans, ‘It’s Like Baghdad on a Bad Day’

By Ann Scott Tyson
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, September 6, 2005; A10

NEW ORLEANS—Spec. Frank Atkinson, wearing his tan desert fatigues from his recent deployment in Iraq, alternately drove a Humvee through downtown New Orleans streets littered with debris and putrid garbage and held suspected looters at gunpoint with his M-4 rifle.

“It’s just so much like Iraq, it’s not funny,” said Atkinson, of Woodlawn, Ark., “except for all the water, and they speak English.”

For a year ending this spring, Atkinson’s infantry company of the Arkansas National Guard patrolled Baghdad’s deadly Haifa Street, and scores of its members were awarded Purple Heart medals after fighting insurgents. Those war-zone images and instincts came flooding
back Friday when Atkinson and 300 other Arkansas guardsmen, wearing helmets and full body armor, rolled into the chaos of central New Orleans.

“It’s like Baghdad on a bad day,” said Spec. Brian McKay, 19, of Mount Ida, Ark…