Foot soldiers in new peace movement by Pete Hamill, New York Daily News 03-23-2003 At five minutes to noon, they began to walk south on Broadway, the front line made up of activists, clergymen and a few politicians, all with their arms linked. Charlie Rangel was among them, an old foot soldier from the Korean War, walking with the casual confidence of a man who has fought for his country and knows that a war is not a stroll on a beach. He glanced up at Macy's to his right, then to the brilliant clear skies above, and stepped off with the others. It is more than half a century since Rangel was a young man with a rifle in the frozen fields of Korea. His face said that he still remembered. Then all of them were coming: white-haired men and women older than Rangel, children born as the century wound down. Old hippies, middle-class women, men in business suits, students with tears painted on their cheeks, gray-haired professionals, black Americans and Asian-Americans and Arab-Americans. They were stretched in lines of 20 and 25 across Broadway, and when you looked uptown, you could not see the end of them. There was anger in most of them, but that emotion had not yet morphed into the anarchic rage that disfigured so many demonstrations in the '60s. There were thousands of police officers, but no rage was directed at them; the emotions and sympathies of Sept. 11 were gone from the wider world, demolished by inept American diplomacy, but they had not yet been erased on the streets of New York. One sign said: "Don't use our tragedy - 9/11 - for your war." More than a few marchers expressed a bitter sense of futility. One man said to me, "This is a march about failure. We tried to stop [the war] and we failed. Bush won. Stupidity won." A middle-aged woman had another version of the same emotion: "We have to do something . We can't just let this happen without opposing it. We have to be able to tell our children that we tried to stop it." Signs of the times Most expressed themselves with hand-lettered signs, some of them savage in their contempt for George W. Bush, others expressing pity for the victims of the war. There was a bobbing, waving collage of signs: REGIME CHANGE BEGINS AT HOME ACT LIKE IT'S A GLOBE, NOT AN EMPIRE WHO IS THE UNELECTED PRESIDENT WITH THE BOMB? EL MUNDO DICE NO - The world says no. At 32nd St., three people held up portions of Pablo Picasso's anti-war painting "Guernica." At the south end of Greeley Square, where a bronze Horace Greeley broods about human folly, someone held up a sign that said: IMPEACH THE COWBOY. Someone else had a quote from Sen. Prescott Bush, the President's grandfather: TODAY I WEEP FOR MY COUNTRY. Another said simply: WHO'S NEXT? I talked to a man who works for the United Nations, and asked him if the UN was now finished. "No, it's just beginning," he said. "This shows that the UN must be able to carry out the role that the people who founded it wanted it to play." At 27th St., in front of the Broadway Pizza shop and A-1 Footwear and Hair Queen, the marchers slowed. WE MUST FIND A BETTER WAY! read one poster. Someone started singing John Lennon's "All we are saying is give peace a chance" - an echo of old passions, old angers, old sadness. It soon faded. Then the day was noisy with the wordless howl of "yu-yu-yu-yu-yu-yu-yu," and from the past came other images, for this was the sound of the women in Gillo Pontecorvo's movie "The Battle of Algiers," which some young kids in the '60s thought was a training film. Over and over again, in various ways, the marchers made clear that they opposed the war but backed the troops. SUPPORT OUR SOLDIERS, one sign said. BRING THEM HOME. Another hand-drawn sign said, WE OUR TROOPS. Oil, of course, was a steady theme: IT'S ABOUT THE OIL (with a head shot of Vice President Cheney) and READ BETWEEN THE PIPELINES and HOW MANY BODIES PER GALLON? Anger at the media But there was anger at the media, too, claiming that they were being used by the Bush administration as propagandists, and were trivializing the growing anti-war movement. "Watch tonight!" a woman shouted at me. "You'll see a war without any dead bodies in it! And they'll make us out to be naive people who hate America, instead of people who love this country more than Bush does!" At 25th St., the marchers eased left past the Mexican War monument, which commemorates the taking of more than one-third of Mexico's territory at gunpoint (a war opposed by Abraham Lincoln, and condemned by Ulysses S. Grant, who fought in it). The marchers moved along the western side of Madison Square Park, where people sat smoking or eating on the steps of a World War I memorial, and headed down Broadway past the Flatiron Building. On they marched, moving around Union Square, where one marcher held up a photograph of the friendly meeting in 1983 of a smiling Donald Rumsfeld and a grinning Saddam Hussein, in those wonderful days when the Reagan-Bush administration was giving Saddam everything he needed for his vile war with Iran. The poster said: DONALD, I THOUGHT WE WERE FRIENDS. They were passing into the 19th-century city now, the older demonstrators trudging past Cheap Jack's Vintage Clothing and Forbidden Planet and the Strand bookstore, younger kids dancing, and around 11th St., a woman and a girl emerged on a fourth-floor fire escape and began to blow what seemed to be a shofar. First the woman, then the girl. The marchers paused and cheered, and the biblical sound pierced the air, like a signal sent across the millennia. Then they turned toward Washington Square, the official finish line of the march, a block away from the building where all those young women died in the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, past the buildings where Henry James once dined, past the arch designed by Stanford White that has been imprisoned behind a fence for several years because there is no money to repair it. Four young men chanted: "U.S.A! U.S.A!" at the marchers, but there was no trouble. Misguided attack Four hours after leaving Herald Square, the marchers were still coming, filling 30 city blocks in what might have been the largest anti-government march in the city's history. Most dispersed at Washington Square; some did not. And at some point, one (or several) of those who stayed behind attacked police with pepper spray, injuring 11 officers. As I write, the event remains unclear, but several marchers blamed anti-globalization types, those brainless semi-anarchists who roam the country to create havoc at demonstrations. If their stupid (and marginal) actions are the way this day is remembered, that would be inaccurate and self-delusional. Many honorable people support the war, sincerely believing that Saddam must be driven from power by force. But even they must have recognized yesterday that something huge - and ominous for domestic tranquility - was going on here, and it could be dismissed only at our peril. Originally published on March 23, 2003