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In the South, a historically bellicose region, a traveler sees a random yellow ribbon tied on a mailbox. Church suppers are putting together toilet kits to send to the soldiers in the gulf. Mothers with children serving in the Middle East are still sympathetic celebrities in the neighborhoods. And yet, as a conservative civil engineer in Atlanta remarked wearily last week, "every time I turn around, we seem to be going to some damned war or another. It just doesn't seem to stop."
In the Minneapolis suburb of Apple Valley, a middle school teacher startled his students with a warning about the Desert Shield pen pals to whom they had been writing since September. "You need to prepare yourselves," Todd Beach told the class, "because there is a possibility that the people you are writing to might die."
Many articulate opinions were still being expressed in favor of the war effort. Gerald R. Thompson of Chesterfield, Mo., wrote in a letter to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch: "The crisis in the gulf is driven by economic realities, not just political ideals. Black gold, or Texas tea, is worth shedding American lives for because oil is the blood that flows through the veins of the American economy. Without economic freedom, our political freedom is in serious trouble. The two go hand in hand."
But new hairline fractures have begun to appear in American opinion. Some of the divisions are generational. Those with memories of earlier wars seem warier than the young about new military adventures. Vietnam veterans are especially cautious about a new war. Says Richard Zierdt of Circle Pines, Minn., who served as an Air Force sergeant in Vietnam: "Veterans are the least willing to create new veterans. War is never really inevitable until you fire the first shot. But I think our current policies are taking us that way."
Polls suggest that young Americans are sometimes more eager for battle, or anyway less wary. A 20-year-old seaman aboard the U.S.S. Wisconsin in the gulf wrote to his family, "I am glad I am the only one of my generation in our family to volunteer to serve his country. Hopefully I will make a triumphant return to Norfolk with a bunch of medals pinned to my uniform. It looks like the combat service ribbon is a shoo-in."
One of the noisiest Vietnam poltergeists, of course, is the draft. Since the Iraqi invasion in August, Army recruiting has fallen off considerably. Many of those opposed to American military action fear that a gulf war would revive conscription. "If they come after my son," an Orlando mother vows, using language from another era, "I am going to send him to Canada."
On the op-ed page of the New York Times last week, an independent television producer named Adam Wolman published an ambivalent soliloquy about himself and the draft: "I know none of us has the luxury of clinging to pacifism in this world; I know it's not right to reap the joys of living here (or anywhere) without earning my keep . . . But I just can't see myself over there with a gun. I can't see myself running away either. But believe me, I'm thinking about it."