TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/012891/0128998.000

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                                                          THE GULF WAR, Page 34

THE HOME FRONT

A First Thick Shock Of War


After five months of anxious waiting, Americans respond to the
unfolding battle with pride and anger, protests and prayers

By NANCY GIBBS -- Reported by Ann Blackman/Rock Falls, Michael
Riley/Washington and Don Winbush/Atlanta


    This was a war with a long fuse. Rarely in the nation's
history have so many people had so much time to make up their
mind, with so little success. Yet when the moment of decision
came, people were left at the mercy of events. America became
a vast audience, its disbelief suspended unwillingly. For many,
the raw nerves of the restless days before war gave way to
relief when the waiting was over, bright hope that it might all
end quickly and, finally, a steeled recognition that nothing
so fateful could ever be easy.

    The coming of war brought a scrapbook of gestures, like
snapshots tucked into history. It was a week of yellow ribbons,
blood donations, hastily drawn wills. Two frat boys at Oklahoma
State kept vigil in a tree house to support the troops in the
gulf. A disabled Vietnam veteran paid the Arkansas Flag and
Banner Co. $45 to make him an Iraqi flag so that he could burn
it. In Boulder, Army Reservist Christopher Minney married his
sweetheart Melonie Walter on Wednesday, as soon as he heard
that he would have to report for duty the following day.

    That first thick shock of war brought more hymns than
marches, as though the nation had matured enough to know that
battle isn't the way it looks in the movies -- or even in the
strangely antiseptic images of the air war flickering across
television screens. Among those Americans who supported the
President's actions -- a solid majority, according to most
polls -- there was little gloating or shiny jingoism. Sure,
there were exceptions: at Ohio State 100 people marched through
Columbus chanting, "Mess with the best; die like the rest."
Meanwhile, opponents took to the streets by the thousands,
bearing signs splashed with anger: NO BODIES FOR BARRELS and
KINDER, GENTLER WAR and THERE IS NO BOOT CAMP FOR WIDOWS. But
by and large, even word of the first night's victories was
greeted by a graceful restraint and deep sensitivity to the
suspense felt by families of soldiers. Until it was over, there
would be few celebrations.

    When the week began, the suspense was all consuming. The
nation, its houses strung together with phone wires and
broadcast beams, had become the vast town common that the
inventors of democracy once envisioned. Debate over war and
peace unrolled in coffee shops and classrooms, in the streets
and during dinner and on the factory floor. Everyone had
something to say about the gulf, but few people knew what to
think.

    Only fear was consensual. Radio talk shows were deluged with
speculation about targets for terrorism. Would the Super Bowl
be canceled? Could the reservoirs be poisoned? Is Disney World
a target, or the Alaska pipeline, or the New York Stock
Exchange, where officials outlawed all fast-food deliveries on
security grounds? Business travelers who had planned trips
overseas put them on hold; vacationers too decided to wait and
see.

    Deeply ambivalent and suddenly frightened, many Americans
sought comfort in religion. Last week produced a surprising
portrait of the nation's faith, a tableau of people praying
hard, slipping into chapels for special services during lunch
breaks, joining candlelight vigils, seeking moral certainty.
On Monday night in Washington, one day before the deadline,
parishioners gathered at St. Columba's Episcopal Church. The
congregation had been praying especially for one parishioner:
Secretary of State Jim Baker. But this night there was a
profound sense of despair and futility. "O God the Father,
Creator of Heaven and earth, have mercy upon us," went the
reading from the Book of Common Prayer. "From violence, battle
and murder; and from dying suddenly and unprepared, Good Lord,
deliver us."

    Blocks away, 6,000 people gathered inside the cavernous
National Cathedral, sitting on the floor and packing the aisles
under the vaulting stone buttresses. After the service many
worshipers lighted candles and marched silently through the
streets of the capital. The vigil wound past the Iraqi embassy,
quiet and dark except for a single light, and ended in front
of the White House. Susan Meehan, a Quaker, attended on
crutches. "Up at the cathedral they told us to fling our
prayers to heaven," she said, "so I'm flinging mine --
nonviolently."

    On Tuesday the tension reached its peak. Jewish
congregations around the country began a daylong fast.
Demonstrators in Boston poured red paint on the snow, chanting,
"No blood for oil." In Los Angeles high school students
performed a skit in which American businessmen plucked dollar
bills off the bodies of young people. In Providence a George
Bush doll was burned in an oil drum. While thousands chanted
through the streets, San Francisco's supervisors declared the
city a sanctuary for anyone who chose not to participate in the
war.

    Tuesday marked what would have been the 62nd birthday of
Martin Luther King Jr., and in Atlanta the day echoed with
irony and anger. The coincidence of timing troubled black
leaders, who are acutely aware of the lack of support for war
within the African-American community. Organizers of
commemorative events had invited General Colin Powell, the
first black Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, to be grand
marshal of the celebration, but at the last minute he
declined. He was busy in Washington, he explained. "It's like
planning for Christmas and then having a member of the family
die," observed John Cox, coordinator of events. "You carry on,
but the spirit is not the same."

    Although few people actually expected an attack just after
the Tuesday midnight deadline for war, the nation was awake and
waiting. By nightfall in Washington, in the park across from
the White House, protesters brought bongos and snare drums and
a solitary tom-tom. "Wake up, Bush!" they called. "Don't go to
sleep tonight!" The crowd carried fat red Christmas candles and
battery-powered ones with flames that don't flicker. By 12:30
a.m. Wednesday many of the regular candles had melted into
colored pools of wax on the park's sidewalks. A light sprinkle
of rain had begun, but the bombing had not.

    Nineteen hours later, the countdown was over. On a Red Line
train headed toward the Maryland suburbs, a couple huddled over
a portable TV, the sound turned way down. Then the woman gave
a sudden cry, "We're at war!" Other passengers rushed over,
straining to hear the news, and the woman burst into tears. Her
husband turned to explain, "We have a 22-year-old son in the
gulf." Meanwhile, at the aptly named Hawk 'n Dove, silence fell
over the noisy bar as ABC's Peter Jennings announced that
America was "at war." One sharply dressed couple looked down
from the TV and then at each other and raised glasses in a
quiet toast.

    When the news came, people hurried home to be with their
families. Church bells began tolling in town after town, and
phone lines hummed as friends and families called one another,
the conversations beginning in the middle, the premises
understood. Americans showed a sudden elasticity of attention
span; in bars and pool halls and college common rooms, the
television stayed tuned to the news. For the next several hours
an entire nation watched anchormen, caught in history's ambush,
struggling to tell the story without yet knowing just what it
was. There was no time for anything else. In New York City
during the next 12 hours, only one person was murdered; a
typical night brings at least five dead. Police speculated that
even the killers were watching the news.

    For all the division, the President's message was received
with respect; it was not that Bush had not heard the voices of
protest, only that he did not agree with them. Polls showed
that 4 out of 5 Americans approved of Bush's handling of the
crisis. "I have my troubles with Bush," said John Barber, a
merchant banker in Los Angeles, "but in this instance I feel
for him, on his solitary walk around the White House lawn or
as he calls clergymen to ask for their prayers."

    The suspense now over, people struggled to figure out how
to behave. Crowds and players at the Orlando Arena, gathered
to watch the Magic play the Chicago Bulls, observed a moment
of silence, perhaps conscious that this did not seem to be a
time for games. MTV played peace songs from the '60s, while
KAZY, the hard-rock station in Denver, switched to
round-the-clock news. In Manhattan the colorful crowds of Times
Square spread like paint beneath the illuminated news ticker
above 42nd Street, as bulletins on the attack marched around
the building above their heads, one word at a time.

    Everywhere, the reports could not come fast enough. There
was a national craving for news, despite the saturation
coverage, and frustration at the thinness of reports. "I don't
think it's going as smoothly as it appears to be," said Andy
Ach, a banker in San Francisco. "The news seems so sanitized,
it's hard to get a sense of casualties or destruction." The
next morning the New York Post, hoarse from a week of war cries
(KISS IT GOODBYE! screamed the headline in Wednesday's  paper,
accompanying a photo of Saddam kissing the ground in Baghdad),
contented itself with one black word in thick letters 6 1/2
in. high: WAR! The Wall Street Journal ran a four-column
headline, the largest since Pearl Harbor. The Houston
Chronicle's editorial opinion was typical of that in the South.
Saddam, it said, "asked for the war he has gotten. May his God
forgive him; we won't."

    For the families of soldiers, it was a time to seek and lend
support. The departure of National Guard and Army Reserve units
had hollowed out countless communities across the country.
Camden, Ala., lost one-third of its police force -- two of six
officers. In Rock Falls, Ill., the 181 members of the National
Guard unit had shipped out the weekend before the conflict
began. "So many people used the Guard to supplement their
income but never expected to be called," said Carol Siefken,
a computer supervisor at the local steel mill. "These are
people in their 30s and 40s. Their lives were mapped out. They
never expected to be fighting for their country."

    In a house across the icy Rock River, Laura Weed looked
through her newly assembled wedding album. She was married on
New Year's Eve to Tom Root, a local policeman who was just
called up. "I have no idea of where he is tonight," she said.
"The last thing we talked about was that if he came home with
no arms or legs, that if he was turned into a vegetable by
chemical weapons, he didn't want to be a burden." She looked
at a merry picture of their celebration. "I just married him
three weeks ago," she said. "I want 20 more years."

    Perhaps the deepest suffering fell to the children, and not
only those who had been left behind. Everywhere, the young were
struggling to understand the preoccupation of adults, full of
questions too often left unspoken. Many feared not only for
their safety but also for that of their parents and of children
they did not even know. Zoe Owers, a fifth-grader from Concord,
N.H., had tears in her eyes when she learned that the fighting
had started. "I'm surprised I can't hear anything," she said.
Her mother reassured her that Baghdad was far away. "But I
thought bombs made a lot of noise," Zoe replied.

    By week's end people grasped for the remnants of routine.
Many who had opposed the resort to war found their attitude
shifting once it had begun, particularly after the attack on
Israel. Betsy Loth, who owns two clothing stores in Watertown,
Conn., happily put up peace-rally posters in her stores earlier
in the week. But on Thursday morning she took them down. "It's
not of my choosing, but we're in a full-fledged war. We should
get on with it." Of Bush, she said, "I can't stand the man, but
I think he did enough."

    Images of past encounters in the Middle East -- of
helicopters flaming in the Iranian desert in 1980, of a
smoldering Marine barracks in 1983 -- left many people
wondering if any involvement in that explosive corner of the
world always meant disaster. But by week's end those images
were replaced by footage of Baghdad "lit up like a Christmas
tree," as cool young pilots returning from sorties in the night
described it. For all the ambivalence, anger and fear, the
first week of war assured this country that its military might
was mighty indeed; the decision to use it could only have been
made with a heavy heart, and hopes that the desert sword will
soon be sheathed.