The Nation: Protest: A Week Against the War

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THE Washington march for peace has become a highly ritualized affair —something that an anthropologist might call a "cultic in-gathering," an annual coming together that is part circus, part festival, part political mass meeting. Last week its time came round again, and in balmy spring weather a crowd estimated by police at 200,000 —one of Washington's largest ever —streamed down Pennsylvania Avenue to assemble before the west front of the U.S. Capitol. On the same day, in San Francisco, 125,000 demonstrators formed a six-mile parade down Geary Boulevard into Golden Gate Park; they were led by Bob Silva, a 21-year-old Viet Nam veteran, with medals dangling from his sports shirt, who rode in a wheelchair.

Layer of Despair. The Washington demonstration was the kind that the cops could have brought their children to; at least one policeman did. Unlike 1969, Government buildings were not guarded by visible contingents of troops last week.,The area around Lafayette Square and the White House was not closed off by bumper-to-bumper buses as it was in May 1970. College students, though still the largest single group, seemed proportionately fewer. Teeny-boppers abounded in the crowd. Organized labor took part in greater numbers than before; burly Teamsters acted as marshals around the speakers' platform. In San Francisco as in Washington, the mood of the marchers was discernibly different from the heady optimism of the 1969 Moratorium. Both demonstrations were happily free of violence. But under the spring-picnic good cheer last week was a layer of despair, and a distrust of all the considerable evidence that the Administration is winding down the war. In 1969, said David Ifshin, president of the National Student Association, "we came with the sense that the war might end tomorrow." He added: "That feeling isn't here today. We know it's going to go on and on."

First Objective. Washingtonians had long since become inured to peace demonstrations, but they had never seen anything quite like the week of antiwar guerrilla theater staged by Viet Nam veterans as a prelude to Saturday's march. The sponsors called it Operation Dewey Canyon III, "a limited incursion into the country of Congress," in mocking echo of official U.S. military jargon. They numbered as many as 1,500 veterans, wearing fatigues with the shoulder patches of the 1st Air Cav, the 101st Airborne, the 1st MarDiv, the 25th Infantry, the Big Red One. They wore long hair and beards and medals: Silver Stars, Bronze Stars, Purple Hearts. Some were missing an arm or a leg; some got about in wheelchairs. They carried squirt guns, cap pistols, toy rifles made by Mattel.

The first objective was Arlington National Cemetery. After a brief memorial service outside the gates, a delegation of three gold star mothers and two veterans was formally denied entrance. One vet tried to charge the gates, shouting: "Those are my brothers in there." Another, furious, threw his plastic M-16 at the gates; it shattered into pieces. A later visit was more successful. Some 300 veterans marched to Arlington single file, five yards apart, dropping wreaths on a knoll inside the cemetery. As they knelt for a moment of silence, three memorial rifle shots rang out at a nearby funeral and a bugle sounded taps.