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“A lot of us older guys underestimated the young generation of police officers,” he says, “but let me tell you, what these guys did here these last two weeks was extraordinary, and I would stand by any of them, any day.”

About an hour later, as I’m getting ready to leave, a squad car pulls into the parking lot. Two young officers step out, one clutching the hand-drawn Fort Apache sign that up until a few minutes ago hung over the entrance to the First District’s headquarters.

“How’d you get that?” I ask, laughing.

“We snuck right in there, crawled under the Duty Officer’s desk, and cut it free,” one of the guys says, laughing. “Who’s the real Fort Apache now, motherfucker?”

“I DON’T THINK I could ever come in and look at this place the same,” Captain Casey Geist says. “I’ll never come here for a football game.”

We’re in the Superdome. It’s empty now, except for a few dozen cleaners in white hazmat suits scraping the grime off the seats and floor. It’s noisy. Miniature tractors pick up the mounds of garbage piled on the Astroturf field. Here and there you find a child’s football, abandoned wheelchairs, rotting food half eaten by evacuees. Some twenty thousand people took refuge in the Superdome, told to come by the city’s mayor, who called it a shelter of last resort. He’d hoped that help would arrive from the state or federal government within two days. It didn’t. Hope is not a plan.

Captain Geist is with the Eighty-second Airborne. He’s been to Baghdad, but says that this is much worse. He’s heard a lot of the rumors about what happened inside the Superdome, and he’s not sure which of them are true. He seems to believe any of them is possible.

“People were here, they were doing drugs. People were having sex out on the floor, shooting up,” he says, recounting the various stories he’s heard. “It seemed like just madness, uncontrollable madness.”

At the Superdome, however, there was at least some order. They had medical attention, stockpiles of food and water, and police and National Guard. When the levees failed, however, and the electricity with it, the Superdome started to bake. The mayor had warned people to bring their own food, and some did, but as the floodwaters spread, more people began arriving.

“They started defecating all over the place,” Captain Geist says, shaking his head. “You know you can go to one corner, and everyone can go to the bathroom in one spot, but, I mean, people would drop their pants in the middle of the field and just go.”

We like to think we are so advanced. We like to imagine we have protection from our own dark impulses. The truth is, it doesn’t take much for all of that to be stripped away. Desperate people sometimes do terrible things. New Orleans was no different. The lights go out, the temperatures rise, and very quickly we get in touch with emotions that the cool air keeps at bay. We are all capable of anything. I’ve seen it again and again. Great compassion, terrible carnage—the choice is up to us.

Pretty soon they’ll have finished cleaning up the Superdome, and the debris at the Convention Center will be swept away. It seems that a lot of people want the evidence, the memory, simply to disappear, the slate to be wiped clean. One day there will be football games played in the Superdome once again, and all of us will forget the lessons we’ve learned.

“Mark my words, man,” a cop tells me one day, “it’s all going to be cleaned up and forgotten. It’s all going to be for shit. People are going to cover up things. And you know, these people are poor. No one’s going to speak for them.”

“You really think people will forget?” I ask.

“I’ve had family members tell me, ‘Why don’t you just leave, why don’t you just leave? You didn’t sign up for this.’ But my father was at D-day, and what if he had said ‘Forget it, I’m not doing this. I didn’t sign up for this. There’s too many people dying. There’s too much carnage.’ You just don’t leave. You can’t just forget.”

I TRY NOT to imagine my brother