Everyday people joined David Morsilli's platoon. They left behind their stay-at-home lives and kids' soccer matches, their warehouse jobs, their executive boardrooms, their post-college angst. They convened in coastal Mississippi's ruined landscape, to restore order where there was only chaos.

Hurricane Katrina had hit Mississippi dead-on. And even Morsilli, who has trained extensively in disaster relief and served as a Peace Corps volunteer in Macedonia, was overwhelmed by the destruction.

"You look and you look. You see huge buildings that are wiped out. Maybe there's a concrete frame, but everything that was inside was just washed right through." Where there were homes and neighborhoods, "there's nothing."

Morsilli, 37, whose parents live in Warwick, signed up for a three-week volunteer stint with the American Red Cross after Hurricane Katrina hit.

Three weeks turned into two months, and a paid job with the Red Cross. After a five-day break spent at home in Rhode Island, Morsilli returned Friday to Mississippi to work on longer-term recovery efforts.

"A lot of people, when they stop seeing the pictures on television, they think it's back to normal. And it's far from that," says Morsilli. "It's so not over yet. The rebuilding effort will take years in southern Mississippi."

The rebuilding effort will also require people trained to stay cool under duress, be quick on their feet, and work with volunteers of every stripe.

"I have always known I wanted to do relief work since I was young," he says. "Now I'm very sure, without a doubt, this is what I should be doing."

THOUGH MORSILLI is clearly uncomfortable with the subject, he says the death of his younger brother, Todd, a 13-year-old tennis champ who was killed by a drunken teenage driver in 1983, sharpened his own focus.

"Having his life robbed from us made me want to realize the most out of mine," says Morsilli. "I don't want to look back [with regrets]. So I think sometimes, certain life experiences give you a perspective."

Morsilli's first job out of college was working as a scheduler and go-to man for then-Gov. Bruce Sundlun, "who never took 'no' for an answer."

"Anytime he needed anything, he would yell out to me. Whether it was tracking down some lawyer friend of his in San Francisco or New York," or getting presidential Cabinet members on the phone, "you had to be as resourceful as possible," he says with a chuckle.

The three years that Morsilli spent in the private sector after that were financially fruitful, "but not as rewarding."

Four years ago, he took disaster relief training with the Red Cross that included mass sheltering operations and mass feeding.

Then he signed up for the Peace Corps. He worked for the mayor of an Albanian village, establishing a citizen information office in a society where informing citizens had not been a priority.

Morsilli returned from the Peace Corps last December; this spring, he took a three-month certificate course at his alma mater, Boston University, called "Managing Disasters and Complex Humanitarian Emergencies."

Lecturers came from national and international relief organizations, "people who had worked for years in the Sudan, or in Indonesia" after the tsunami, relief-worker veterans of wars, droughts, floods and holocausts.

Then, Katrina howled through the Gulf Coast. Morsilli boarded a plane.

HE SPENT two days troubleshooting at Red Cross shelters near Montgomery, Ala., then was was reassigned to Gulfport, Miss.

Managers were in short supply, so he was asked to handle bulk distribution -- getting food, water, toiletries, mops and bleach to ravaged communities, many of them isolated.

"It was myself and one assistant. They gave me 75 trucks and two people per truck, which is 150 people, and they said, 'You have to deploy them to all the areas of southern Mississippi.' They gave me a map."

He divided the map into grids and numbered them 1 to 87, then dispatched one truck to each of the grids. He also asked them to provide feedback.

"There were no cell phones working, so I had no clue" what conditions were in those areas. "And as the drivers came back and gave me feedback from the field, I was able to reallocate resources where they were needed."

He notes that there were "all different types of personalities, and to manage that, you had to be very firm. There's no gray area. It's black and white. 'These are the assignments; please just do the assignments.' "

"It's like, 'David, I can't find this street on the map.' I said, 'If you plan on being out in the field, you have to learn how to read a map. And there you go.' I was always very pleasant . . . if you do it with the right tone, and the right manners," he says, "you can get away with it."

Only one querulous volunteer, who, Morsilli discovered, "was a former state senator," managed to push his buttons.

The volunteer "was upset one day that we didn't have Gatorade. That was the only time I lost it with anybody. I said, 'We're in the middle of a disaster relief situation and you're mad because we don't have Gatorade?' " Morsilli says with a laugh. "I mean, think about it."

MORSILLI PLANS to resume where he left off -- taking charge of six Red Cross shelters near Gulfport, where some 525 people remain. He will probably be there for up to six months.

The people in the shelters "are at a standstill in their life. They're in limbo. There's no normalcy whatsoever. Their children aren't going to school. There are 150 cots spread out in a room. There's no privacy. You have people from all walks of life . . ."

Most people are respectful of each other, "but it only takes the five to ten percent" of those who are not to cause problems. Disruptive clients get ejected. Safety is paramount: if weapons are found, the police are called in.

The stress of shelter management is far greater than handling bulk distribution, he says, "and I mean some days, I feel like I've gotten older on the inside. You just do, and you feel like, 'Wow, that was a rough day.' "

Sometimes, for example, if the truck drivers complained that there weren't enough supplies, "I'd say, 'You have to focus on what you are able to do every day, not what you can't. We have an awful lot of stuff we send out on the trucks every day, and that's really helping these people."

Morsilli would tell them, "Don't take your eye off the ball. Is it perfect? No. But life isn't perfect. It is what it is."

Karen Lee Ziner can be reached at 277-7375, or kziner [at] projo.com