By David Montgomery
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, March 18, 2007; D01
Here we go again, another war that most Americans have concluded is a mistake, a president and Congress doing their own things, and we're on this Memorial Bridge again, the media and the protest kids, and some of the protest kids' parents, the riot police and the horses and the stink of fresh manure: Everyone fulfilling destinies that feel like flashbacks.
The last time was 40 years ago. Different war, same complaint. Then, there were hundreds of arrests, cracked heads, tear gas. On this day there will be few arrests, just the repeated police threat of "chemical munitions."
All day, the echoes and ironies give you whiplash. Doug DePalma, 16, who rode a bus from Chicago, looks across to where some counter-demonstrators have draped a forgotten banner.
"That's the South Vietnamese flag," says DePalma. Good at history, that boy. A country that disappeared when the United States quit that war. What if we quit this one?
A lot of the counter-demonstrators are veterans -- of Vietnam and other wars. They're always ready to have this fight again, anytime. But then, a lot of the peace marchers are veterans, too, filling the front rank of the protest column from the Lincoln Memorial to the Pentagon. "Boo! Boo!" shriek the sideline veterans at the marching veterans. "Traitors!"
Bands of brothers in Baghdad, broken apart at home. The veterans for peace, including active-duty men and women, and guys fresh from Iraq in desert camo, one of whom is sobbing, don't seem prepared for veteran-on-veteran trash talk. The marching vets look so much younger and more vulnerable than the ones on the side waving flags. They still have the thousand-yard stare, and a battlefield hauntedness. "Bring our brothers home," is what they say.
Behind the vets come the tatterdemalion battalions of dissent, the students, the Hip Hop Caucus, the radical grannies, the neo-hippies, the anarchists and the socialists, the Code Pink women, the unions, the Morgantown Freethinkers Against Bush War, the Virginia Anti-War Network, and the Black Bloc teen radicals, wearing bandannas and spoiling for a fight.
One of the kids in a black hood and a bandanna takes aim and spits -- not on a soldier or policeman -- but at a Fox News radio man, leaving a gooey gob dripping down the man's microphone.
Last time a file like this marched onto the bridge, with Lincoln's white citadel rising behind, the Pentagon a mile or so down the road, and the great war cemetery in between, was October 1967. Major American involvement in Vietnam was two years old.
The new march, organized by the Act Now to Stop War & End Racism (ANSWER) Coalition, was timed to this week's fourth anniversary of the Iraq war, with conscious homage being paid to that other march 40 years ago.
Robert Lowell, the great Yankee poet, was at the front of the last march, arms linked with Norman Mailer. Both Lowell and Mailer were having visions of the Civil War. Mailer wrote his sprawling masterpiece "The Armies of the Night" about the march, beginning with his drunken rant in the Ambassador Theater on 18th Street NW, his hung-over participation in a draft card protest at the Justice Department, and his arrest for crossing a police line at the Pentagon.
Lowell refined the experience into two brief poems.
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.
The most lasting image from the 1967 march wasn't the violence, or the crowds, but a tight shot of a mop-top blond demonstrator in a turtleneck sweater slipping carnations into the barrels of the rifles held by MPs guarding the Pentagon. It summed up an era.
What image will speak of today to future generations? It is too early to say if this march will be remembered at all.
But some idea of the new generation can be gleaned from a confrontational tableau near the conclusion of the day's action.
The loud recorded funk cry of "War, hunh!, what is it good for?" greets the marchers as the reach the Pentagon. Most of the marchers proceed to the Pentagon's north parking lot where they are permitted to be. But about 150 or 200 members of the Black Bloc rush up a side road that is blocked by police.
The front rank of young protesters carries construction barrels that have been cut and fashioned into shields with handles bolted on the inside. The outsides have been painted with slogans like, "Class War Not Gas War."
Forty years ago, a similar group rushed police wearing motorcycle helmets and shoulder pads. Some were beaten and arrested.
This time, a firecracker of some kind, apparently tossed by a protester, explodes in the air above the police. The protesters squat behind their shields, a few feet from the police clad in their own shields and body armor.
"We kid you not," says an officer in command, ordering the protesters to disperse. "Chemical munitions will be used."
After a few of their number are grabbed and taken away by police, the young protesters decide to hold a vote. "The two options are," says one addressing the group, wearing yellow hat and green bandanna, "Do we stay or should we leave?"
A majority votes to withdraw. "Is everyone cool with that?" asks Green Bandanna.
Yes. So unlike yesteryear, there will be no bloody heads, mass arrests or chemical munitions for the radicals of 2007.
What, then, was the point of this coda to the main, permitted march on the Pentagon.
"I feel when you demonstrate on the government's terms, you're not really protesting, you're part of the allowed dissent," says Green Bandanna, who gives his name as Jasper, 19, a student at George Mason University. ("Can you spell that with a smal 'j'?" he asks. Why? "It's my attempt to be a non-dominant white male.") "We don't want to be part of the allowed dissent."
"Pick up your trash," one of the protesters admonishes, and the polite young anarchists do, leaving only a duct-tape peace sign stuck to the pavement.
Down in the parking lot, there are more speeches and music in the almost-spring weather that is too cold for flowers. It's the subsiding, satisfied-for-now energy of a protest ending.
Here's Lowell, on march's end:
I sat in the sunset
shade of our Bastille, the Pentagon,
nursing leg- and arch-cramps, my cowardly,
foolhardy heart; and heard, alas, more speeches,
though the words took heart now to show how weak
we were, and right.
