In Oklahoma, a Patriotic Silence

By Jonathan Weisman
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, August 19, 2007

HUGO, Okla. R ep. Dan Boren (D-Okla.) was settling into his chair in the snug broadcast booth at K95.5 Country as the station's Jo Ann Matthews sing-songed her way through the subjects she wanted him to touch on.

There was the bridge collapse in Minneapolis. Of course, talk about federal livestock assistance, she went on.

"And I know the war is a big issue on everybody's mind, but," she said haltingly, her sweetly twanged voice tailing off to silence. Then, "I'm real impressed with the work you're doing on cancer," she finished.

If lawmakers in most parts of the country are being accosted with questions about the September showdown on Iraq, here, in the sleepy southeastern corner of Oklahoma, the war is the subject that almost cannot be discussed. The McAlester Army Ammunition Plant in Boren's district supplies virtually all of the war's munitions. The hamlets and small towns, such as Antlers and Hugo, Miami and Nowata, have sent their sons and daughters to fight. About 3,200 Oklahomans are deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan; 18,428 have served since the wars began, from a state of 3 1/2 million. Most of the parents of those warriors split their tickets and voted for President Bush as they voted for Boren.

And the voters' ambivalence on a conflict that has taken so many lives may go a long way toward explaining Boren's own tortured ambiguity. For other lawmakers still unsure about their stand on the war, August has been about sweating, with protesters in their offices and attack ads on their televisions. For Boren, one of the dwindling few Democrats opposing binding timelines for troop withdrawals, it has been a reprieve from the mounting pressure that he seemed to shrug off in Washington, only to own up to in Hugo.

"I'll tell you, the pressure that people receive from their political parties," he said, sighing and shaking his head. "The speaker appoints which committees I serve on. If I want to get money for Highway 3, if I want to keep furthering my career so I can be more effective for my district, there's all these pressures that go with it.

"And it's like any job," he went on, "you want people to like you. And I'll tell you, that last week, I took a lot of votes against my leadership, and you sit there, and nobody wants to talk to you. It stinks. It's like being back in the schoolyard."

As he chats with his constituents, tapes spots for the radio and holds town hall meetings, the 34-year-old conservative Democrat is quick to slip into criticism of the war.

"We have tried a preemptive strike," he said at a meeting in Hugo, parrying a pointed question on Iran from a retired major, Aubrey Jackson. "We tried that in Iraq, and you saw how successful a preemptive strike could be."

But that criticism has not changed his votes, which have been consistently with the president. For now, that seems to be just fine with the voters here, who pride themselves on suffering in silence. The day that Bush hailed "Mission Accomplished" aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln, the town of Antlers was holding the biggest funeral anybody could remember to bury one of its own, a recent high school graduate who died in those "major combat operations" that supposedly just ended. And it has gone on from there. At least 15 of Boren's constituents have died in the war.

"The United States is all about fighting for this country. There is no question about that here," Matthews, of the radio station, said emphatically. "We understand you fight. You send your sons to war and, I guess now, your daughters. But you've got this dream out there, and after so many years, there's not even a light at the end of the tunnel. I hate talking about it.

"I hate sounding, you know, like I'm unpatriotic, like I'm against the president."

At more than a dozen town hall meetings in the past two weeks, Boren has heard the subject of Iraq come up voluntarily only once, in Atoka. In Hugo, Jackson did growl, almost under his breath, "Some of us spent our lives cleaning up political and diplomatic messes," after Boren spoke of diplomacy in Iran. But that was as close as the crowd came to the war without prompting.

And it's not as if Boren doesn't try. With the Iraq war's commanding general, David H. Petraeus, set to deliver a progress report by mid-September, Boren implored the crowd that packed the old train depot and Harvey House restaurant to give him advice. He has flirted with legislation, introduced in the Senate, that would mandate a change of mission in Iraq, away from combat toward counterterrorism and training of Iraqi forces, without mandating troop withdrawals. Just before recess, he voted for a measure requiring that troops be granted home leaves at least as long as their last deployments, a measure similar to earlier proposals he called "micromanaging."

But he knows that his leadership will push him for far more: language -- tied to continued war funding -- that would set a deadline for the withdrawal of U.S. combat forces.

"I would like to hear from you all, specifically," he practically begged, his white cotton shirt still neatly pressed, his khakis and BlackBerry a bit out of place amid the battered blue jeans of the ranchers and the ponytails of the quiet Choctaws. "I want to hear your opinions."

That prompted John Bancroft, 60, to chime in on behalf of Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr. (D-Del.) and his plan to partition Iraq into three largely autonomous zones -- Shiite, Sunni and Kurdish.

"These people are never going to get along together," Bancroft said. "We're never going to solve the military problem until we solve the political problem."

But in his shorts, high socks and almost fashionably unshaven face, the substitute middle school teacher and founder of something called the ARS Poetica Institute was admittedly an outlier in Hugo. The next questioner asked Boren whom he was supporting in the presidential race -- answer: at the moment, nobody, certainly not Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.) -- and Iraq never came back up.

That is not to say Eastern Oklahoma doesn't care. The hurt here seems deep, as does the frustration. Brad Wells, a grizzled rancher who looks well beyond his 46 years, railed against the conduct of the war but out of Boren's earshot. "One hundred twenty-five, 150,000 troops aren't going to bring peace to that country," he fumed, and now there aren't the troops needed to confront a nuclear Iran or, heaven forbid, an ascendant China.

But, he added: "We have to stay there. We have to do it right. . . . If they pull the troops out of Iraq, they might as well give the world to China."

So why didn't he speak up at the meeting?

"I don't want to embarrass him," Wells said with a shrug. "I believe he's a good man."

"You know, I came here because I wanted to thank Dan Boren," confided Sharon Ridenour, owner of Hugo's City Body Shop and Wrecker Service, and a Democrat who voted for Bush. "He's standing behind the president and standing behind the veterans."

Boren's independence sits well with the ticket-splitters of his district who defy pigeonholes and revel in their own iconoclasm. Bush took 59 percent of the vote in 2004; Boren, 73 percent two years later. In nearby Fort Towson, on June 23, 1865, the final treaty ending the Civil War was signed by Brig. Gen. Stand Waite, the last Confederate officer to lay down his arms. Conservative by nature, Hugo is, oddly enough, the winter quarters of three of the country's largest circuses.

The town was named after the French novelist Victor Hugo, a stretch, it would seem, for a hamlet without a Starbucks. And its residents cheered as Boren bragged about raising the minimum wage and trying to mandate insurance coverage for colon cancer screening, then cheered again when he vowed never to endorse Clinton for president.

As he spoke of the pressure his positions have generated from his caucus, his wife, Andrea, demure and slim though just weeks from delivering their first child, watched sympathetically. They then walked hand in hand to their Chevy Equinox and climbed in for the two-hour ride back to Muskogee -- and the wait for September.