COLUMN ONE : War Foes: A Matter of Family : Unlike during the Vietnam War, anti-war activists are now likely to come from Main Street. The father of a Marine in the gulf is their folk hero.

During the Vietnam War, Bill White flew 136 reconnaissance missions--just a few more than his father-in-law had in World War II. And when his own son and daughter also enlisted, White became the proud patriarch of a third-generation Air Force family.

But last month, after his children were sent to the Middle East as part of the U.S. deployment in the Persian Gulf, White became an unlikely anti-war activist. Over the past few weeks, the Texas attorney has taken a front-and-center position in the nation’s reawakening anti-war movement--coaxing friends to help oppose any U.S. offensive against Iraq and coming to Washington to buttonhole congressmen.

“Vietnam was a meaningless war--it got us nothing, and I don’t want to see the same thing happen again,” says White, who is now a county prosecutor in San Antonio. “I don’t want my kids--or anybody else’s--to come back in a box.”

In vocally opposing any U.S. offensive against Iraq, White has given the anti-war movement a little-noticed, but distinctly different face from the peace movement of old.

Admittedly, many of the visages in the still-fledgling anti-war movement are familiar: Ramsey Clark, the anti-war attorney general of the Lyndon B. Johnson Administration; Daniel Ellsberg, the Nixon-era activist who leaked the Pentagon Papers during the Vietnam War, and Ron Kovic, the Vietnam hero-turned-activist who wrote the autobiographical “Born on the Fourth of July.”

But the makeup of today’s crop of anti-war activists is different: Unlike the Vietnam War era, there are relatively few college students in the group--partly because there no longer is any military draft, and they are not as threatened by today’s call-up. Instead, they have been replaced by several thousand family members of military personnel who are stationed in the Persian Gulf.

“This is a really new, different element--the military families are raising doubts because almost nobody else is,” says Ira Shorr, program director of SANE/FREEZE, a peace group that got its start in the 1950s.

To be sure, with polls showing President Bush enjoying widespread public support for his Persian Gulf deployment policies, the impact of these new anti-war activists has been relatively modest so far.

Many of the incipient grass-roots anti-war groups have been holding teach-ins at college campuses across the country, but the response has been less than spectacular. “There’s been some interest, but not much,” concedes Jim Driscoll, head of Operation Real Security, a Tempe, Ariz.-based anti-war organization.

But advocates insist their numbers--and influence--are beginning to grow.

Every Saturday since late August, several dozen demonstrators have been holding silent vigils in front of the White House--much to the puzzlement of passing tourists. And just outside the Westover Air Force Base in Chicopee, Mass., the main staging area in New England for cargo flights to Saudi Arabia, demonstrators have been staging rallies that the base commander has called “weekly outbursts of lawlessness.”

In late September, representatives of more than 130 grass-roots groups met at New York’s Riverside Church, a bastion of anti-war activity in the 1960s and early ‘70s, and formed a coalition to coordinate the nationwide Oct. 20 demonstrations, which drew several thousand people to rallies in more than a dozen cities around the country.

Appeal to Congress

What people such as White are demanding is a peaceful resolution to the current standoff. They say they don’t want their loved ones to die in what they characterize as an undeclared war for cheap gasoline. And they are calling for Congress to hold a special session after the election to examine U.S. policies in the gulf.

“Now is the time to have an open debate and see where our objectives are,” White asserts. “Let’s support the troops, but question the policy.”

Perhaps the most visible of the new protesters has been Alex Molnar, a University of Wisconsin professor with a 21-year-old son in the Marine Corps. Molnar was vacationing with his wife, Barbara, when Iraq invaded Kuwait. A few days later, an express letter arrived saying their son had been ordered to Saudi Arabia.

Moved by the anger that welled inside him as their son prepared to join the deployment, Molnar wrote a letter to the President, which eventually was published as an Op-Ed column in the New York Times.

“The Reagan-Bush Administration rolled into Washington talking about the magic of a ‘free market’ in oil,” the letter said. “You diluted gas mileage requirements for cars and dismantled federal energy policy. And now you have ordered my son to the Middle East. For what? Cheap gas?” Molnar wrote. “If, as I expect, you eventually order American soldiers to attack Iraq, then it is God who will have to forgive you,” he concluded. “I will not.”

The impact was stunning, turning Molnar into a leader of the anti-war movement virtually overnight.

“It was a helluva piece, and Alex became an instant folk hero,” says Maurice Paprin, president of the Fund for New Priorities, an organization that opposes U.S. action in the gulf. The fund immediately began distributing Molnar’s column all over the country and made it the centerpiece of more than $50,000 worth of national newspaper advertisements.

Within weeks, the ads had brought in enough money to finance the opening of a storefront headquarters for the new Military Families Support Network, made up of relatives of service personnel stationed in the Persian Gulf.

And Molnar himself has received thousands of letters and hundreds of telephone calls--forcing him to buy two additional phone lines, an answering service, a fax machine and a personal computer. The callers, writers and volunteers are “as red-white-and-blue as you can get,” Molnar says. “This is Main Street America,” he exults.

Molnar describes the situation as “very different” from Vietnam War protests.

“We support and love the troops,” he says. “Let nobody claim we don’t. They’d better not dare.”

As might be expected, the military families have been quickly embraced by more veteran peace activists, and groups such as SANE/FREEZE, based in Washington, and the New York-based Fund for New Priorities in America, who say they are heartened by the new movement, small as it may be now.

Among the Oct. 20 demonstrators were many Vietnam War veterans, including Ron Kovic, who spoke in Los Angeles. “These are people who see this as kind of re-living their nightmares--but this time for their little brothers or sons,” said Larry Korb, a former assistant secretary of defense for manpower from 1981-85.

In addition, the movement has drawn support from a hodgepodge of other activist groups, including some environmental groups--which see the Middle East crisis as a rare opportunity to preach the gospel of conservation and renewable energy sources--and civil rights organizations, which are demanding that the government spend less on the military and more for housing, education and other domestic needs.

Ellsberg, for one, is unconcerned by the limited response to the anti-war effort so far. “The turnouts are much larger than at a comparable stage in the Vietnam War,” he says.

The wheelchair-bound Kovic agrees. “People are moving much more quickly on this than in the ‘60s. It comes from a deep understanding of what war is,” he says. “I feel very close to our soldiers there. I know what they are going through, what it means to be homesick, to be in a dangerous situation, to wonder whether you’re going to come home alive--and to wonder whether or not you should be there.”

But some who have watched the reaction of Vietnam veterans to the situation in the Persian Gulf say it’s clear that the U.S. deployment there has reopened some deep psychological scars from the Southeast Asian war--the mixed and often conflicting emotions that have stayed with Vietnam-era GIs through the 1970s and 1980s. Shad Meshad, head of the Los Angeles-based Vietnam Veterans’ Aid Foundation, says some seem almost wistful about Operation Desert Shield, allowing that they might like to go fight in a military action that this time has broad support at home.

“I’ve heard the whole gamut of responses--from demanding a total pullout to wanting to get back into a war that people will feel good about,” he says.

Families Form Core

Still, the strongest component of the new peace movement is the relatives of soldiers now stationed in the Middle East.

“We have a stake in this more than the average citizen,” explains Judy Davenport, 39, a Goose Creek, S.C., woman whose husband is on a U.S. warship in the Persian Gulf area. “We want people to support the troops--no matter what. But we also want a pledge from the President that this will not turn into an offensive action.”

As might be expected, having the military families protesting the deployment has not always gone without criticism. Detractors of the anti-war demonstrators readily remind them that, unlike the case during the Vietnam era, their loved ones freely volunteered for military service. Even if they joined the military to acquire job skills, as today’s recruiting posters promise, surely they knew they could be called upon to go to war.

“It’s a tough thing to say, but that’s the bottom line,” says Robert E. Wallace, a former Vietnam veteran who now is national senior vice commander-in-chief of the Veterans of Foreign Wars.

But Molnar is undeterred by such arguments. “Yes, most of them did enlist to acquire job skills and other opportunities,” he concedes. “But so what? So their lives are worth nothing? So they can be sent anywhere for any cause?”

“The people who are going to protect the troops this time are the families,” Molnar asserts.

And the Fund for New Priorities’ Paprin contends that the participation of the military families makes the anti-war message even stronger. “This is a very different element,” he says. “It’s not just a protest or peace movement coming from an ideological base. It’s a new source of energy.”

To some protesters, such as Texas’ Bill White, the solution is to force Bush to obtain approval from Congress before launching any serious offensive. “It took a declaration of war to send John Kennedy and George Bush to the Pacific,” he says, “and it should take another one to send our children to the Middle East.”

White describes his gradual conversion since the United States responded to the Iraqi invasion: “When Desert Shield began, I was not opposed to it--I’m as offended by what Saddam Hussein did as anyone,” he says. “But it’s now a horse of a different color. It’s turning out to be offensive in character.

“Let’s think this thing through. Now is the time to get the approval of the people. Sooner or later, people will be heard. You can ask them now or you can ask them later.”

Role Still Unclear

For the moment, it’s unclear just how far the new anti-war movement will get--or even whether it will take off as a major force in debate over U.S. policy in the Persian Gulf.

An increasing number of Protestant and Roman Catholic leaders, including the presiding bishop of President Bush’s Episcopalian denomination, have questioned whether the continuing military buildup is wise.

And Bill White and his fellow war protesters are certain that their cause will gain a broader base of adherents as the United States edges closer to war.

Unlike the anti-Vietnam War movement of a generation ago, White says, today’s protesters wholeheartedly support the 210,000 GIs in the gulf. “Then, we started out approving the policy and wound up condemning our troops. Let’s not let that happen again,” he asserts.