Hurricane Katrina has truly flipped the world on its side. It turned vacation spots into uninhabitable war zones and made war zones look relatively safe.

Case in point: A couple of weeks ago, as Katrina was literally in the midst of ripping apart the Mississippi and Louisiana Gulf Coast, I was speaking by telephone to my brother, Todd, who was riding out the storm 30 minutes north of New Orleans.

We talked about lots of things, but mostly the storm's fury and the damage he could already see on his property.

At one point, Todd said something that struck me as unusual.

"This weekend, I think Matthew is safer in Iraq than he would be if he were home," Todd said, referring to his son, my nephew.

It was a stunning statement, said almost matter-of-factly.

But more true words had never been spoken.

Before being called up in the National Guard, Matthew had recently joined the fire department in Waveland, Miss., one of the area's hit hard by the storm.

By many accounts, much of the sleepy town has been scoured away by the powerful storm.

Matthew would almost certainly have had to work during the storm. And I've heard that fire department had been engulfed by the storm surge and that firefighters had to climb to the roof and hold on for dear life until the winds calmed.

Fortunately, I suppose, Matthew was "safely" thousands of miles away, camped in the Iraqi desert.

As difficult as it is to imagine a place worse than a war zone, Katrina's destruction proves such a place can exist.

Matthew and thousands of other Mississippi and Louisiana National Guard soldiers had to watch and worry about their homes, their families and their friends without much direct contact, at least not at first.

Soldiers almost certainly poured over images seen on TV and Internet broadcasts, each image scrutinized for familiar places, familiar faces.

What a horrible position in which to be: Sitting in a desert, thousands of miles from the people you love, not knowing if they are OK or not.

Suddenly, the people for whom many, many prayers had been sent and for whom many nights had passed without sleep, were changed. The children, as it were, had become the parents.

The people in the middle of a war found themselves worrying about the peace back home.

The world truly flipped that day. Hopefully, soon everything will be righted again.

Kevin Cooper is publisher of The Ironton Tribune. He can be reached at (740) 532-1441, ext. 12 or by e-mail to kevin.cooper@irontontribune.com.