A walk in the sun on brink of war by Pete Hamill, New York Daily News 03-17-2003 The weekend was brilliant with sun, and crowds filled the New York streets like prisoners suddenly freed on parole. The remorseless cage of a bitter winter seemed behind them. They wore no gloves. Their jackets were open. They walked with a kind of giddy confidence on what might be the last weekend before the war. Many were drawn to the lower tip of Manhattan, where the city began more than 300 years ago. Tourists were everywhere, gazing at the void where the World Trade Center once stood, then moving in lumpy groups down Broadway toward the Battery. Most were Americans, but you heard French spoken, too, and Italian, and Russian. Amused New Yorkers mingled with them, walking dogs, or holding children by the hand. A few glanced up at the cloudless cobalt sky. Most of the tourists exuded a mood of mindless fun, as if the war were a movie that had not yet been released. Across the street from the Cunard Building at 25 Broadway, they clambered over the huge bronze bull created by the Italian sculptor Arturo Di Modica, waving at dozens of digital cameras. Old women and schoolgirls took special delight in posing beside the bull's testicles, as if they had found the mythical minotaur. All laughed out loud, or giggled in an embarrassed way, then moved on. They would carry those frozen images home to places where they could experience the war on television. The New Yorkers understood that they might not have that safe distance. Many moved south from the bull and into Battery Park, where they stood in awe before the reassembled 25-foot- high bronze sphere that once stood in the plaza between the twin towers. The 17-ton sculpture was designed by a German named Fritz Koenig. It is, for now, the only true memorial to Sept. 11 that we have, and one of great tragic power. The ripped and ruined sphere stands for so many things: the great, murderous wound inflicted by the terrorists; the vulnerability of art, and the will of New Yorkers to get up off the floor. Cameras were aimed at its ripped surface, or at the eternal flame that burned before it. One woman placed a rose in the grass. Young lovers held hands and seemed to sigh. Down by the wall of the Battery, vendors were everywhere, hundreds of them, peddling the usual grubby junk: photographs of the World Trade Center, firefighters with flags, postcards, T-shirts. Beyond the railing, out in the harbor, the low smear of Ellis Island could be seen, along with the Statue of Liberty, facing Europe. A television crew was at work, asking tourists if the statue should be returned to France, which had given it to us as a gift in 1886. This was part of the ongoing exercise in American adolescent idiocy that is renaming French fries "freedom fries" while pouring French wine into the gutter. Thoughts of war All over the park, there were also memorials to those who died in old American wars - soldiers, sailors, members of the Air Force and the Coast Guard. Their names were chiseled into stone. Few examined the lists, or paid much heed to the heroic statuary. This was a day for gazing at tranquil waters, or aiming cameras at the images of peace. And yet, it was impossible for a visitor to pass through the necropolis without thinking of all those young men and women who had died for their country long ago. It was impossible to wander among the memorials without imagining their faces, and the mail they once carried from people they loved, and their violent ends in the blood and carnage of battlefields. For no memorial can tell what war is. No memorial can express the fear and the waiting and the anger over the loss of friends. None can describe what brains look like when they are spilled on a road or spattered against a wall. None can describe the horror in a foot soldier's eyes when he looks down at the place where his leg used to be. The survivors write poems or novels to tell us those terrible truths. Everything else is oratory. Off to the left, the Staten Island ferry moved toward its berth. Gulls rose and careened over the water. It was a day of peace, perhaps our last weekend before the war. But rising from the Battery came the image of dog soldiers, of unmapped trails in bad places, of Bill Mauldin's Willie and Joe, of young people being sent off to kill or to die. We are told during every war that this will be the last one. It is never the last one. And here we are again. It was simply impossible on this brilliant morning to do anything but cherish the soldiers. No matter what you think of the wisdom of President Bush, you must cherish those young people and hope they will be safe. It's perfectly, triumphantly American to oppose a war; but part of the deal is to defend the soldiers. There could be great slaughter in this war, in its phase of "shock and awe," in house-to-house fighting in Baghdad, in the possible use of chemical weapons by Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein. Those soldiers are the ones who will carry the memories home. Some memories could be shameful: the deaths of children and women and old men. Meanwhile, safe men in well-defended Washington offices are sneering at "process," about taking time to settle this mess without guns. They want to rumble. Of course. They won't have to be in the rumble. But there along the railing on Saturday were the young women and high school boys with the digital cameras. Some of them might have had relatives in the bivouacs of Kuwait. Some might have had relatives about to surge into the sandy unknown. Those are the people who fight the wars that other men start. On such a day, a New Yorker who has seen enough war to last a lifetime wished for more time, more talk, more inspections, more verification. The wish, he knew, was probably futile. And like so many others, he had to settle for this day, this moment, this afternoon of kids eating ice cream cones and hawkers offering bargains and young girls and old women posing with a giant bull. Originally published on March 16, 2003