by Karen Spears Zacharias

Just around the corner from Jackson Barracks, just off St. Claude Avenue, stands a two-foot high statue of Jesus. His arms are open wide, ready to embrace any and all who are willing. But there’s something terribly amiss with this Jesus.

The yard in which he stands is littered with debris. Blue jeans, a red shirt, and shiny tinsel hang from a tree. A child’s motor scooter is upended on a rooftop. The houses, stores, and churches in the surrounding neighborhood are tilted up on corners, broken in the middle, or bent over double like an aging man with a walker.

And this statue of Jesus has lost its head. It’s gone. All of it. Somewhere in the chaos of Katrina, this Jesus was decapitated.

It’s hard to put your trust in a Jesus, a city, or a country without a head. Looking around now, so long after the water receded, I wonder about clear-headed thinking and leadership.

Last month, President Bush flew into New Orleans, stood on a street in the French Quarter, one of the least damaged neighborhoods, and declared that the city was up and running and ready to embrace tourists.

Try telling that to the folks working at Mother’s, one of New Orleans’ most popular lunch counters. The bone-weary cashier told me that the staff is short-handed and working 12 hours a day, six days a week. “We can’t get nobody else to work,” she said, “cause nobody can find a place to live.”

The folks at Jackson Barracks are also operating with a skeleton crew, down from roughly 200 to a dozen or so. Power is still out to all but one of the Barracks’ 100-year-old structures.

When Katrina struck, roughly 3,500 Louisiana Guard troops were in Iraq and Afghanistan. One of them told me he watched the hurricane news on CNN. It’s worse than anything he saw in Iraq, he said.

Even today, there are no dogs barking. No motors humming. No kids laughing. No horns blaring. No water running. No music of any sort. Graveyards aren’t this quiet.

The silence came when the levees broke, and the city flooded. Lieutenant Colonel Casey Levy remembers it as an “unworldly silence,” at least during the day. At night, he recalls, all he could hear was pitiful wailing from people trapped on their rooftops, and the baleful howling of animals.

There was also the smell of a 40-foot formerly-refrigerated trailer from a sausage factory down the street. It had floated across a chain-link fence and landed right in front of the guard house. It remained there for the next month, full of rotting, rancid meat.

Four months before Katrina, a major at the barracks told me he worried about the levees bursting, especially with so many troops overseas. He wasn’t sure he’d have the manpower to handle it.

He was right.

One hundred high-water vehicles were brought in the day before Katrina struck. A day later they were floating in eight feet of water. When the Industrial Canal levee crumbled, a river of water rushed down St. Claude Avenue toward the barracks. In less than an hour Jackson Barracks was under 10 to 11 feet of water. “We looked like ants running up the stairwells,” Levy said.

Communications systems were down. Vehicles couldn’t move. “We were back to Pony Express,” one officer told me. “We had to rely on horse and pony.”

Or boat and bike. Colonel Levy rescued a bike from the floodwaters, put it in a flat-bottomed boat, floated across the parade field, and through the barracks’ wrought-iron gates. When he reached a levee, he hopped on the bike, delivering messages to National Guard helicopters dropping supplies.

Helplessness joined the water washing over Jackson Barracks. National Guard folks are trained to protect and aid their communities. Levy and others like him, New Orleans natives, couldn’t even check on their own families. “I was stuck out here,” Levy told me, “unable to help them or talk to them for almost three weeks.”

“This was our Iraq,” he added.

Levy believes that his beloved city, as he once knew it, will never be restored. “I can’t explain what it’s like,” he said, “watching your city die.”

Even harderto explain is why our nation’s leaders are so willing to allow that to happen. It appears Jesus isn’t the only public figure who has lost his head in the wake of a national disaster.

Karen Spears Zacharias is author of Hero Mama: A Daughter Remembers the Father She Lost in Viet Nam and the Mother Who Held the Family Together. She can be reached at heromama.org.