Watching the Pall Give Way to Reality of the Situation
WASHINGTON—I received a phone call from a good friend nearly an hour after President Bush had appeared on television last Wednesday night and officially announced that yes, military strikes in Iraq had begun.
“Happy war!” my buddy shouted sardonically into the phone.
The start of the war and the tension-filled weeks that led up to it ignited a spark: the TVs went on, the protesters got louder and more passionate, the war supporters cheered Bush’s decisive rhetoric as if he were Wyatt Earp setting out to round up outlaws. Passion on all sides of the issue dominated, and the sights and sounds of “shock and awe,” which itself became a national buzz phrase overnight, gave the feeling that the allied attacks on Iraq were full speed ahead, and minor roadblocks weren’t going to deter us from ousting Saddam Hussein with lightning speed.
A Senate press secretary on Capitol Hill sent me a link to a Web site in which internationally recognized symbols, such as a downed telephone wire with sparks around it indicating an electrical danger, were reinterpreted with darkly humored and more literal interpretations relative to destruction in Iraq. “And to think,” my contact wrote along with the link, “they really thought it would be tough.”
But I woke up this morning feeling that the full speed train had slowed, that the initial encouragement and optimism of a war that would end quickly is waning, and the reality of the situation is emerging.
There’s a disconcerting pall in Washington now, the type that has slowly but surely weakened morale and cleared away all of the initial passion to reveal a numb, colder reality that yes, we are living life during wartime.
I haven’t been getting the phone calls this week, the ones that sardonically joke about our strikes in the Middle East and result in verbal high fives about how quickly we’re “kickin a-in Iraq.” No, the phone calls now stick to things like, “Didja hear about that marine helicopter that went down? Man, I really felt for that soldier’s mother on TV” and “So maybe it won’t be so easy, eh?” It’s a strange feeling, not easy to grasp, but one that is stifling morale more every day. Even my girlfriend–who had joined the steadfast ranks of the TV-glued for most of last week–this week could only manage a simple but undeniably wishful, “So, will it be over soon?”
On my way to Capitol Hill almost every day for the past month, I’d seen a man accosting everyone within a ten-foot radius with fiery rhetoric and angry denunciations of President Bush’s foreign policy stance.
On the morning after the President’s speech I walked in the man’s direction to see if he was any more vehement now that war had begun. When I came close enough to hear what he was saying, he suddenly lurched forward and tagged my shoulder with a large, circular “NO BLOOD FOR OIL!” sticker, the type you tend to see on every signpost and subway wall in Washington.
I recoiled in surprise, tore the sticker off and scowled at the man, asking him, “Hey, what are you doing? Get off me!” He relented quickly, touched my shoulder and said amid gritted teeth, “Brother, I’m sorry. I’m just pissed, man!”
Remembering that encounter, I went to the Hill this morning to find the angry stranger and walked next to him again, readying myself for another sticker strike. But he said nothing today, merely looking around Union Station, muttering “peace…peace…” and waving a large sign with the international peace symbol on it. It was clear to me that he, too, feels the pall.
It’s not obvious, but it’s in the air. The Senate press secretary does not have any more humorous Web sites for me, rather, messages about how he “just wanted to move on, already” and was in his office reading war intelligence reports and crafting statements for his boss about the casualties suffered by U.S. soldiers thus far.
Walking around the Capitol produces a similar effect: business is still going “as usual,” but all initial encouragement over the supposed speed of the war has subsided into a sort of emotional limbo. “I don’t know how I feel,” said one press secretary I talked to this morning. “Somebody let the air out of this thing.”
Yeah, reality did.
It’s harder this week, much harder, to smile and to be optimistic. My mood had significantly relaxed after the initial strikes with the notion that we were moving forward, that Saddam Hussein was on the run and that this war would be wrapped up before my semester in Washington is finished at the end of April.
But I’m not so relaxed and not so optimistic today. As reality creeps in and the pall builds, “shock and awe” has become “shucks n’ aww.”
Published in Foster’s Daily Democrat, in New Hampshire.
