BATON ROUGE, La. —— The stories were forthcoming even if, often, the names were not. But those people caught up in the chaos following Hurricane Katrina —— the massive, but not massive enough relief effort to aid survivors of the nation's worst natural disaster —— all tell harrowing tales of survival, horror and despair.

Told not to talk

Late Saturday night, a young, exhausted paramedic from San Francisco staggered into a triage center set up at Louisiana State University's Field House athletic stadium, after a long day providing emergency medicine in New Orleans as part of a medical response team from the Bay Area.

"I wish we could talk," he said, blaming orders he had received not to talk to reporters. "The press hasn't been telling the whole story. It's like Mogadishu in there."

The paramedic said that earlier in the week, he and his team had had to abandon 20 people on the streets of New Orleans, IVs still in their arms, after coming under hostile fire.

Terror in the Superdome

Just off the campus of Louisiana State University, students danced, dined and drank at popular hangouts like a normal Friday night. But across the street, a profoundly unusual event was unfolding beneath the athletic stadium's floodlights.

Hundreds of volunteers from Louisiana State University's student body mingled with emergency medical personnel from throughout the country on a campus transformed. Stadium lights illuminated a packed stadium —— not for Saturday afternoon LSU Tigers football, but a stream of refugees from New Orleans and their caretakers.

"They ain't never gonna get me in no dome again," said one heavyset African American woman, sitting and smoking a cigarette outside the triage center.

She and her ailing mother had survived a horrifying few days at the Louisiana Superdome; recounting their ordeal still left this woman shaking.

Asked what she had seen, she fired back: "What didn't I see?!"

She said they were in trash, feces and "filth up to their knees" on the single level of Superdome seating that was open to more than 35,000 refugees. She said she had witnessed rapes and murders in the Superdome. Her 68-year-old mother had her wheelchair stolen out from under her, she said, and her oxygen tanks stolen as well.

"I have no job, I have nothing to go back to," she said. "I can't support my mother. I work two jobs just to keep her in medicine."

"They really f—-d us over," she said. "They didn't prepare us for this at all."

Awaiting rescue at Charity Hospital

Next to her sat a pony-tailed white man in a wheelchair, his right foot wrapped in bandages. Asked for his name, he said in a quiet voice, "Just write 'a 54-year-old man who had his whole life turned upside down in one night.' "

The U.S. Coast Guard veteran had just heard that his former boss had decided to shutter his chandelier-making business, leaving him jobless as well as homeless.

The night before Hurricane Katrina struck, he was a patient at Charity Hospital in New Orleans, where he underwent a toe amputation; what was supposed to be an overnight stay extended for three more nights filled with "anxiety, frustration and hunger."

The hospital lost power and water Monday morning. The toeless man and other patients subsisted on water and crackers as helicopters swooped right outside his window and gunshots echoed outside. He had his first chest pains since having triple-bypass surgery 1 1/2 years ago.

He and other patients were ferried out Thursday on aluminum flatboats whose bottoms scraped the roofs of cars stranded underwater in downtown New Orleans.

Sights no one should see

In the dark hours of Sunday morning, hundreds of exhausted cops, deputies and state troopers slept on cots in a converted auditorium at the Baton Rouge Department of Public Safety headquarters.

But some couldn't sleep. A Louisiana state trooper found himself sitting opposite a reporter in front of a wide-screen TV broadcasting Saturday's melange of relief and rage among the stranded and escaping residents of New Orleans.

"You didn't want to be there, trust me," he said quietly. "Nobody should see what I saw. Nobody should see dead babies lying on the ground."

Contact staff writer Denis Devine at (760) 740-5415 or ddevine@nctimes.com.