And especially, could they have mov

And especially, could they have moved more troops faster to New Orleans and other devastated areas?

"I think to a man, we will live with the pain of this experience," said Col. Douglas Mouton, commander of 2,500 Guard engineers. The restoration of order at the convention center, when it came, was "phenomenally quick," Colonel Mouton said. "I think the frustration we all have -- the country has -- is, why couldn't it have been done a lot quicker?"

It was Colonel Mouton who made the decision not to send his soldiers into the crowd at the convention center. A 41-year-old New Orleans architect whose own house was destroyed by the flood, Colonel Mouton defended that decision but said the scenes of anguish that became an international emblem of American failure were particularly painful for local guardsmen.

"These are fellow New Orleanians who are suffering," he said, "people that I go to Mardi Gras parades with."

When the storm hit, 4,000 Louisiana guardsmen were on duty, including 1,250 in New Orleans and surrounding parishes, Guard officials said. By the next day, all 5,700 available Guard members were dispersed around the state, they said.

The senior commander of National Guard troops at the Pentagon, Lt. Gen. H. Steven Blum, said the Iraq deployment did not slow the hurricane response. He said that Louisiana Guard troops were "in the water and on the streets throughout the affected areas rescuing people within four hours of Katrina's passing," and that out-of-state troops arrived as soon as they could be mustered.

But state Guard commanders disagreed. "We would have used them if we'd had them," said Lt. Col. Pete Schneider, a spokesman for the Louisiana Guard. "We've always known in the event of a catastrophic storm in New Orleans that we'd use our resources up pretty fast."

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There is little disagreement that Guard equipment sent to Iraq, particularly hundreds of high-water trucks, fuel trucks and satellite phones, could have helped speed the response. The chairmen of the Senate National Guard caucus, Christopher S. Bond, Republican of Missouri, and Patrick J. Leahy, Democrat of Vermont, said in a Sept. 13 letter to Mr. Bush that the Guard nationally had only 34 percent of its equipment available for use in the United States.

With about 150 high-water trucks available statewide, Guard commanders placed most of them outside the danger zone at bases more than two hours' drive from New Orleans. They risked parking 20 trucks at the low-lying Jackson Barracks so they could be immediately available.

Even though the National Hurricane Center warned that Hurricane Katrina might be catastrophic, they did not consider setting up headquarters elsewhere. In 10 years with the Guard, said Col. Tom Beron, who oversees most of the Guard's trucks and drivers, he had never seen more than a few inches of water on the grounds and none inside the buildings. But by midmorning on Aug. 29, as the flood approached the second floor of an armory where 35 truck mechanics, many of them unable to swim, had found refuge, Colonel Beron decided they needed to get out of that building.

The trucks were useless. "There's not a truck in the U.S. Army arsenal that could get through that water," Colonel Beron said.

After ferrying the mechanics to the three-story headquarters building in a borrowed fishing boat, guardsmen grabbed civilian neighbors as they floated past.

"It was best to have a rope tied to you, because the water would just carry you away," Colonel Curtis said.

The relocation of the Guard command on Aug. 30 to the Superdome from the flooded barracks assured attention to the huge crowd there. But as word arrived the next evening of the ballooning numbers at the convention center, commanders felt they had no soldiers to spare.

By happenstance, there were guardsmen at the convention center: backhoe operators, truck drivers and mechanics who had chosen a huge exhibit hall to stage their heavy equipment.

Of the 222 there, almost none were trained in police work or riot control. Many did not have weapons, said Colonel Mouton, the engineers' commander. "We didn't expect a martial law situation," he said. "We were building levees.