Theater of Battle With A Familiar Script

Lovely to lock arms, to march absurdly locked . . .

then to step off like green Union Army recruits

for the first Bull Run, sped by photographers . . . .

"It's a bit of a rite of passage," says Janet DePalma, 50, an archaeologist and Doug's mother, whose husband, Tom, a college history professor, also made the trip. "I was too young to go" in 1967, she says. "I wanted to be there, levitating the Pentagon."

The hippie frivolity and the dope-smoking of 1967 -- when an exorcism and levitation of the five-sided structure were attempted, to the accompaniment of psychedelic music and chants of "Out, demons, out!" -- is missing yesterday.

But Ramsey Clark is back. In 1967, the then-attorney general harrumphed that the draft resisters "face accelerated induction or criminal prosecution."

Times change, Clark has switched sides. Now he is a lead endorser of the ANSWER march, and he makes a speech on the protest platform outside the Pentagon.

In the shadow of those bygone days, today's protesters wonder if they can measure up, if their message will make a difference. In a small part of their minds, despair and frustration dwell.

"The climate is different," says Janet DePalma. "The population is depoliticized."

Fifty thousand people are estimated to have made the 1967 march, when the anti-Vietnam War movement was just gathering steam. Yesterday's march was smaller, in part due to the cold weather, and earlier storms that caused many bus companies in the Northeast to cancel protest charters, and perhaps because of this, too:

Today, "people answer opinion polls" instead of marching, says John Meliska, 28, who rode a bus from the University of Illinois. "That's why I wanted to be here in the street because 40 years ago they were visible and I think they made a difference back then."

For the first time during the month of the 1967 march, a plurality of Americans -- 47 percent -- told Gallup the war was a "mistake." Today, 59 percent say the Iraq war is a mistake. The Vietnam War lasted eight years after the earlier march. Today, 58 percent say they want American troops withdrawn within one year.