A New Test of Resolve

By LANCE MORROW

Every nation invents its own style of going to war -- the myths that it plays in its mind when it marches off to fearsome business. In August 1914 an Englishman placed a personal ad in the London Times: "Pauline -- alas, it cannot be. But I will dash into the great venture with all that pride and spirit an ancient race has given me." The man's generation, destined for the trenches at Ypres and the Somme, was almost innocent enough to ship off thinking of Horace's lines: "Dulce et decorum est/ Pro patria mori." Years later, American boys flying to Vietnam sometimes unreeled John Wayne movies in their head. That was the model; that was what a man should look like, act like, when he goes to war.

John Wayne, or possibly John Rambo, was still ghosting around some American imaginations last week. A banner stretched across I-75 in north Georgia -- a route the 101st Airborne traveled from Fort Campbell, Ky. -- gave the troopers a parting thought: GET THEIR GAS AND KICK THEIR ASS. Adrenaline, jingo and doubt mingled with sheer weirdness and a sort of emergency-issue nostalgia, as if Americans were rummaging through old LIFE magazines, dipping back into the lore of World War II to discover the styles of leave taking, of sweethearts' goodbyes. Television-news shows offered small touches of the USO, airing video postcards from soldiers newly arrived in the gulf, grinning and sweating and reassuring Mom. Said a soldier, cheerful and earnest: "We're here fighting for America and our way of life. Airborne!" Will Bob Hope be in Riyadh for Christmas? ("Hey, guys, I wanna tell ya, that gal's veil sure didn't leave much to the imagination!")

War, or the possibility of it, is something that a nation has to talk itself into. America has had little time for that. The weeks since the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait have been strange, almost a sort of hallucination. The usual lazy vacuum of high August abruptly filled with urgent, deadly business and martial noises. August 1990 seemed in a way like August 1914. The President's adamancy in sticking to his Maine vacation (the tense, almost angry flailing at golf balls, the powerboat Fidelity bucking out of harbor, a war getting organized by cellular phone) contributed to an air of the surreal. So did the alien theater of war: the Saudi peninsula's shimmering heat, its lunar landscapes, its customs and culture out of other centuries altogether.

Amid that air of the unreal, Americans edged themselves toward a war psychology. They supported George Bush's decisions to send the troops and call up the reserves. They signaled that they are ready to endure sacrifices to pursue American objectives, even accepting -- for now -- the possibility of higher inflation, higher gas prices and fuel shortages.

Americans initially greet almost any military mission by rallying around the President and the flag. It is almost an involuntary reflex. That was even true of Vietnam. "That's usually the way it is at the beginning of these affairs," Dean Rusk, 81, says with a philosophical wariness. As Secretary of State during the Johnson Administration, Rusk watched the radical turning of ; public opinion against the war in Southeast Asia. "If this ((conflict in the gulf)) drags on," Rusk says, and if there are American casualties, "things may change."

The central question is not whether America has the military strength to win against Saddam Hussein. It surely does. The critical question is whether Americans have the resolve to see the conflict through.

In the high desert of Southern California, 4,000 of the 10,000 Marines at Twenty-nine Palms Marine Corps Air Ground Combat Center were shipping out for the gulf. Two days after the Marines and their families learned of the mobilization, a local wedding chapel performed 30 weddings. Robert Lauffer, editor of the High Desert Star, went to dinner at a local restaurant, the Sizzler, and could hardly get past the crowd waiting to be seated. "At practically every table," he recalls, "there was one young guy with short hair, surrounded by family, friends and an equally young wife or girlfriend." The Marines' wives formed support groups, each centered on a wife who has been through this before. The base newspaper is running an ad offering "family services -- assistance in deployment stress."

Cavalry and armored divisions were shipping out from Fort Hood, Texas. A lawyer in nearby Killeen executed wills and powers of attorney free of charge. A pawnshop announced it was willing to hold items for a year without charge to soldiers going to the gulf. In Memphis a radio station sponsored an "Iraq-no- phobia" gasoline sale in which a service station, its attendants dressed like Arabs, offered gas for 50 cents per gal.

On the day when Air Force Sergeant John Campisi was buried in West Covina, Calif., the townspeople turned out in a relatively rare display of community. Campisi, 31, the father of four children, was killed by a truck on a dark Saudi airfield during the first wave of U.S. deployment. He was the conflict's first casualty. The dead man's mother said she received many calls from other mothers whose sons had just left for Saudi Arabia. "All of them seem to support sending our boys there," she said. "They seem to -- but with worry." West Covina's grief for Sergeant Campisi had about it a touching purity that typified the first stage of popular sentiment toward the crisis.

In a year of amazing fast-forward history, the later stages of American thinking about the gulf crisis have been swift in arriving. Across the U.S. the element of time began to take on profound importance. The window of $ popular support for the American mission in the gulf may prove to be narrow. Says Sheldon Kamenicki, a political scientist at the University of Southern California: "As recently as the late '60s, President Bush might have had a couple of years in which to operate. Now he has only a couple or three months."

A formula: the duration of American resolve is inversely proportional to distance, time and size of deployment. It is easier for a vigorous people to summon resolve when they are under direct physical attack (like London during the blitz) than when their luxuries (big cars and air conditioners, for example) are being assaulted in remote places. National resolve fares badly when the fighting is far away and most of the people are mere spectators, watching from the BarcaLounger. Over time, the dominant passion of the war (as with Vietnam) may become a feeling of futility and guilt.

Americans are not sure whether they have mobilized their forces in order to defend principles of international order or merely to maintain their own access to cheap gasoline. National will is difficult to sustain in a self- indulgent, debt-ridden society that is being asked to grow indignant about being deprived of a source of its indulgence. That is the reason time is critical. Americans have traditionally found it hard to proceed in wars without a clear moral rationale for their mission. As time passes in the gulf, more and more Americans may entertain doubts about the validity of the enterprise.

"It's true that there's a moment of tremendous national consensus now," says Robert Karl Manoff, director of the Center for War, Peace and the News Media at New York University. "But it has been only three weeks in the making. If I have one criticism, it is that the really hard questions start getting asked only after the battle is already under way, not before. Questions like, Whom or what are we defending? The Kuwaitis? The Saudis? Cheap oil? Is George Bush doing more to destabilize the Middle East than Saddam Hussein? Are we prepared for popular Arab sentiment to turn against us if we start fighting Iraq?"

"War," wrote Boston Globe columnist Mike Barnicle last week, "is popular for the first week or month our soldiers are engaged in combat. Right now, the lust to kill Saddam Hussein and many thousands of his soldiers is thick throughout the land. Toss a few hundred funerals into the mix, add 120 women to each state's roster of Gold Star mothers, and popularity wanes. Our culture is rooted in instant gratification, quick rewards at bargain-basement prices. If the cost is heavy, or the road a bit long, recent history shows we would rather take an early exit. The nation wallows in a tidal pool of huge debt, enormous self-pity and incredible selfishness."

Doubts about the mission in the gulf are being voiced at both ends of the political spectrum. On the left, former Attorney General Ramsey Clark and others have formed the Coalition to Stop Intervention in the Middle East. The Nation condemned the venture as "naked imperial intervention." On the right, some American conservatives, including Pat Buchanan and Jeane Kirkpatrick, are discovering the attractions of neo-isolationism.

During the Iranian hostage crisis in the late '70s, CBS anchorman Walter Cronkite ended his report each night by saying, "And that's the way it is," giving the day's date, and adding, "The 247th day ((or whatever)) of captivity for the American hostages." The nation came to be festooned in those days with yellow ribbons (after Tony Orlando's "Tie a yellow ribbon round the old oak tree," which sounded like a roller-rink melody).

Yellow ribbons have again made their appearance around the nation, but the American mood regarding hostages seems to have changed considerably. Americans mostly agree that it would be fatal for the nation to become so transfixed by the plight of hostages that it lost the will to act.

Television news has been restrained and responsible on the subject this time. Correspondents and anchormen did not use the term hostage until Bush did. What will happen, however, as time passes and the families of hostages appear on the morning television shows, displaying photographs, personalizing the tragedy, breaking everyone's heart? It is almost impossible for television to avoid doing what it does best: to dramatize, to symbolize, to administer the anchorman's sympathies and unctions. Wars by definition require a hardness of heart that looks terrible on television. Ulysses Grant would have lost his job in a week if he had had to discuss his methods (industrial warfare: the grinder) with Deborah Norville.

The key to sustaining the American mission in the gulf will be George Bush's leadership and, above all, the way in which he articulates the nation's objectives in the conflict.

Americans may have left the remnants of their Wilsonian idealism years ago, somewhere north of the Mekong Delta. They are certainly no longer driven by a desire to "pay any price, bear any burden," as John Kennedy said, to ensure the liberties of others around the world. In a way, the crisis in the gulf brings together a fortuitously crass coincidence of American idealism and materialism; Americans look to punish the aggressor and protect their energy supplies at the same time.

Yet the nation will not long sustain an enterprise whose only object is to keep Americans in the wasteful, oil-guzzling style to which they have become accustomed. As time passes, the President will keep the support of Americans only by giving them a larger and clearer sense of the purpose of the mission. If the stakes are as large as the world's economic order and the danger that Saddam Hussein, armed with nuclear weapons, might eventually set off a Middle East holocaust, Bush should explain that.

With reporting by Jordan Bonfante/Los Angeles and Don Winbush/Atlanta