Audio By Carbonatix
Sue Appleberry waits anxiously. The war protest rally will begin in minutes. Never before has she made a speech in public. She feels her stomach tightening as her turn to take the microphone nears.
Her speech had been carefully prepared the night before. But now she has been told there is not enough time to read it. She is told to just say a few words from her heart. She must keep it short.
The crowd numbers probably no more than two hundred. The peace signs are held high as the crowd gathers in front of Appleberry around the monument created from a signal mast recovered from the fabled USS Arizona, sunk by Japanese bombs at Pearl Harbor.
Directly in front of her, a man holds up a sign with the message:
“Kuwait Is Arabic for Vietnam.”
Appleberry holds her breath. She steps quickly in front of the microphone.
“I am terrified,” she says, blurting it out a little too loudly.
“I’m a mother who has two people in the Gulf. I have a daughter and her husband both in the Army.
“He is a tank commander and so he’s expendable.
“My daughter is in army intelligence and behind the lines. But she’s expendable too, because there are no front lines in war anymore.”
Appleberry’s entire working career has been spent as a highly skilled analyst and consultant working in various parts of this country on government missile projects.
She had worked on the project which put the first Americans on the moon.
She also has worked on strictly military projects like the Peacekeeper missiles, which back then were stored underground in silos ready to strike at the Soviet Union when the time came.
That time never came. Neither did the peace dividend we all applauded.
So now Appleberry was speaking out against the war in the Persian Gulf. It was the first time she had ever spoken out against war.
She had not protested during the Vietnam War.
But now Appleberry’s daughter, Dana, and son-in-law, Rudy, are serving with Operation Desert Storm in Saudi Arabia. They have been kept together because of an agreement the army made to keep them posted within fifty miles of each other during their active careers.
“I am appalled,” Appleberry says to the crowd. “We all should be frightened by what’s taking place in the Gulf.”
Appleberry steps back from the microphone to make way for the next speaker as applause rolls over the crowd.
Even though she is finished speaking, she still seems nervous. She is uncertain how her words will be received by the defense industry. She worries whether her daughter and son-in-law will think she did the wrong thing.
To me, Appleberry’s brief speech was the highlight of last weekend’s rally to protest the war held near the Arizona State Capitol.
As rallies go, however, it was no great shakes.
There were no fiery speeches. There were no calls to get out into the streets.
There were just a handful of speakers, and they all spoke briefly. The rally’s organizers made an agreement with police to finish before a rally supporting the war started about a hundred yards to the east. The antiwar speeches followed the general pattern of those in the Sixties when the Vietnam War and Presidents Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon were the targets. This time the targets were President George Bush and the War in the Gulf.
There was Sarge Lintecum, a bearded Vietnam veteran, who wore his shoulder patch from the 101st Airborne and his Purple Heart.
“We want peace, not lies,” Lintecum began. “World peace is not good for McDonnell-Douglas. We are protecting Saudi Arabia, a country which has become the retirement home of Idi Amin.
“They have told us this would be a short war in which there would be saturation bombing that no enemy could survive.
“That’s what they told us soldiers in Vietnam, too. Then we’d move in after the bombing and the enemy would come out of his underground hiding places.”
Lintecum let that thought sink in.
“God protect our ground troops,” he concluded, “from the kinder and gentler president who told us to read his lips because there would be no [new] taxes.”
The rest of the rally was predictable. Unlike the Sixties, there was no call for revolution. Time and again, speakers pointed out that they backed our troops and only wanted them home alive.
There was a speaker representing the homeless, who said the money being spent on the war might better be spent on the poor than on the weapons of destruction.
There was an amusing Korean War veteran who seemed to claim that he alone was responsible for President Johnson’s decision not to run for a second term.
And finally, there was a preacher who led the crowd in singing, “We Shall Overcome.”
Pretty tame. There was nothing said at this meeting that should cause the superpatriots to hyperventilate.
As I watched, I remembered something Saddam Hussein once asked U.S. Ambassador April C. Glaspie:
“Does the United States have the stomach for 10,000 deaths in battle?”
Operation Desert Storm supporters gathered a half-hour later near the giant anchor from the USS Arizona. The crowd was probably five times larger. Its members carried bigger signs, and they had a much better sound system, too.
For this group, Phoenix police blocked off the main street leading to the State Capitol.
The prowar warriors warmed up by singing “America the Beautiful” and “The Star Spangled Banner.”
Lots of American flags waved. The group also boasted the presence of Paul Johnson, the boy mayor whose civic duties will preclude his enlisting.
The message from each one of the war’s supporters was unmistakably clear. We should back our government. Those who disagree with the war should keep their mouths shut.
“My heart breaks because of these protesters,” one speaker said.
“I urge vets like Ron Kovic not to subject our soldiers to protests for doing exactly what he did when he was under oath as a soldier. We don’t need negative feedback.”
Again and again there were exhortations from various speakers to wave the flag and not to spit on it or desecrate it with peace signs.
Enthusiasm was at an exceedingly high level. Some might regard this as a heartwarming display of patriotism. Cynics might describe it as being the same kind of mindless enthusiasm encountered at a high school pep rally.
Time after time, pro-Gulfers waved their flags and chanted: “Support our troops! Support our troops!”
When that chant was finished, they would take up another that went: “USA! USA!”
They did this repeatedly and seemed to gather strength and communal pleasure from all the noise.
Naturally, a few war protesters made their way into harm’s way in the pro-Gulf War crowd. They were quickly identified by police in plainclothes and led off before trouble started.
I telephoned Sue Appleberry the day after her peace-rally appearance.
While at the microphone, she had given out her home telephone number so that anyone who wanted to talk to her about solving the problems in the Persian Gulf could call.
Even at the time, I didn’t think that was a good idea. When I reached her, she admitted she’d already received a few “strange” calls.
Nevertheless, she was in a state of elation. Rudy, her tank-commander son-in-law, had just telephoned from Saudi Arabia.
“He told me he had waited in a very long line to make the call. But he sounded good. He wanted me to know that he and my daughter were both fine.
“I told him how I had made my first speech to stop the war. I told him we wanted to bring them all home before the ground war starts.”
Mrs. Appleberry hesitated.
“Rudy laughed when I told him that,” she said.
“Then he said something else. He told me we’d better hurry up, because it’s all going to happen over there very soon.”
I didn’t start worrying about the progress of the Persian Gulf War against Iraq until they trotted out Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney and General Colin Powell for a press conference on January 23.
General Powell is big and friendly looking, and he speaks with the alertness of a man with a genuine intellectual capacity.
He spoke of all the “tools” our army has in its “tool box” and how he wanted to make certain they all were used in this war.
I suppose this was intended to dampen our fears. Some might have surmised, however, that he was talking down to us.
General Powell also said something that made me shudder.
“Trust me,” he said, in speaking about the war’s progress.
Incredibly, he sounded for an instant just the way Presidents Nixon and Johnson used to sound in their television talks about the war in Vietnam.
Those two words made my heart leap with the sudden shock of recognition. For the first time, I feared that perhaps the Pentagon boys were taking us down that same road again.
I remembered when James Baker, secretary of state, went before the Senate Armed Services Committee in November and promised:
“If war comes in the Gulf, it will be done suddenly, massively, decisively.”
The bombing of Baghdad began on the night of January 16.
The following day at press conferences in both Saudi Arabia and at the Pentagon, we were told how accurate and devastating the bombing of Saddam Hussein and his followers had been. We were shown films of bombs hitting targets.
We were led to believe Iraq no longer possessed a missile capability and that its best infantry had been dealt a lethal blow.
To those unschooled in Pentagon rhetoric, it seemed the war would certainly be over within days.
Now, a week into the war, we are being told it is our fault that we are expecting a short war.
This has been a strange war for the press to cover. There are 800 correspondents in Saudi Arabia to report on the doings. However, they are all penned in by military, who seem determined that no one will see anything of the war except for what it clears first.
Bob Simon of CBS apparently decided to ignore the rules. Simon set off with a camera crew for the Kuwait border in search of some live footage.
It was an admirable effort. Unfortunately, as of press time, Simon has not been heard from. The vehicle in which he and the CBS camera crew were traveling was found, out of gas, near the Kuwait border.
Iraq says it is not holding Simon. I have watched his work from Israel for years. He is an intelligent, hard-charging newshound whose questions always seem to raise the resentment level of the military.
The Peter Arnett story is a case study in how the military mind operates.
On the first night that Baghdad was bombed, Arnett and two other CNN reporters described the bombing exclusively over their telephones from the Al Rashid Hotel.
It was a stunning beat. The following day even Secretary of Defense Cheney lauded their performance.
Now, Arnett is the only American-based reporter still allowed to remain to report from Baghdad. His is the disembodied voice we hear once each day as he speaks while his personal censor looks on.
And when Arnett reports seeing the ruins of nonmilitary targets by the allied forces, he is continually being denounced by the U.S. military as an enemy dupe.
The biggest flap was caused when Arnett reported the deaths of 23 civilians in Al Dour where 23 homes had been destroyed. All during this report, he kept repeating that the information was an Iraqi version of the event.
Nevertheless, Arnett was attacked during the next day’s army briefing for reporting the event.
Another day, Arnett reported seeing what the Iraqis told him was a milk factory that had been heavily damaged by the bombardment.
Again, the military attacked him. One wonders why the military thinks it is necessary to deny these things so vociferously.
Of course we believe the stories of pinpoint bombing, but only up to a point.
You can’t drop thousands of bombs around the clock upon one of the world’s cultural centers without hitting some civilian targets. Baghdad is densely populated and rich in history, some of which is certain now to be lost.
However, as Lenin once said: “You can’t make an omelet without scrambling some eggs.”
“I am terrified,” she says, blurting it out a little too loudly.
“God protect our ground troops from the kinder and gentler president who told us to read his lips because there would be no taxes.”
Some might regard this as a heartwarming display of patriotism or the same kind of mindless enthusiasm encountered at a high school pep rally.
Now, a week into the war, we are being told it is our fault that we are expecting a short war.
One wonders why the military thinks it necessary to deny these things so vociferously.
