TIME: Almanac 1995

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<text id=91TT0212> <link 91TT0375> <link 91TT0314> <link 91TT0125> <title> Jan. 28, 1991: A First Thick Shock Of War </title> <history> TIME--The Weekly Newsmagazine--1991 Highlights The Persian Gulf War:Desert Storm </history> <history> TIME--The Weekly Newsmagazine--1991 Jan. 28, 1991 War In The Gulf </history> <article> <source>Time Magazine</source> <hdr> THE GULF WAR, Page 34 THE HOME FRONT A First Thick Shock Of War </hdr><body> 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. </body></article> </text>