Today’s Veteran Is No Automatic Cold Warrior : Protest: If hostilities erupt in the gulf, vets are likely to be more prominent in the domestic opposition than at the outset of any previous U.S. war.

On a cold December night, in the forgiving stillness of southwestern Minnesota, the past tingles like an old wound for the 350 men and women who have gathered in the high school auditorium.

From houses down the street and farms an hour away, they have come to a town meeting called by Sen.-elect Paul Wellstone to air their feelings about the threat of war in the Persian Gulf. But it is the fetid memory of Vietnam that fills the throat of James Sanden and Lloyd Ricker and Jim Hubley when they take their turns to speak.

For each of these Vietnam veterans, and the others who follow them to the microphone, the gulf crisis has made the old war vivid again. Vietnam lingers in the room, as boundless and inscrutable as fog, awaiting, after all these years, someone to extract its meaning in time to prevent its recurrence.

Each man tries.

To Sanden, the lesson is skepticism: He has heard President Bush’s promise that a war with Iraq would not be a long one, like Vietnam, and he remembers the promises of Robert M. McNamara and Lyndon B. Johnson. “Every politician promises a short war before they begin,” he says.

To Ricker, it is unity behind the President and the imperative to stand firm behind the troops when the order to fight has been given: “I’m all for these public meetings, but let’s not downgrade our President or our government.”

To Hubley, it is shared sacrifice: The best way to avoid war in the gulf, he tells Wellstone, “would be to bring back the draft. Everybody’s got to pay the price . . . . If we do that, the movers and shakers will start moving and shaking and we won’t go in . . . . “

This diversity of opinion is at once unsurprising and remarkable. Unsurprising because the 15 years since the last Americans fled from the embassy roof in Saigon have yielded no final answers to the questions that trailed behind them. And yet these discordant voices are remarkable, too, for they signal that if hostilities erupt in the gulf, military veterans are likely to be more prominent in the domestic opposition than at the outset of any previous U.S. war.

“There is a degree of dissent from veterans now that eclipses anything that you’ve seen in the past,” said Robert Dallek, a professor of history at the UCLA who has studied foreign-policy decision-making.

Protest from veterans on national-security questions is not unprecedented. Disillusioned World War I vets joined the unlikely alliance of pacifists, progressives and nativists in the 1930s’ isolationist movement.

But veterans have more typically served as a critical buttress for prevailing national-security policy: In the early stages of the Vietnam War, for example, the handful of World War II and Korean veterans who spoke out against the buildup were dwarfed by the veterans’ organizations supporting it. It was not until the soldiers from Vietnam themselves began to return home through the late 1960s that veterans meaningfully enlisted in the anti-war movement.

That legacy of dissent has added a new dimension to the current debate over the gulf. Already, Vietnam veterans have moved into the front ranks of those questioning the President’s policy.

This is most visible in the political arena, where the President’s most prominent Democratic critics include several Vietnam veterans: Sen. Albert Gore of Tennessee, Sen. John F. Kerry of Massachusetts and Sen. Bob Kerrey of Nebraska, a Congressional Medal of Honor winner.

Kerrey, the earliest and perhaps most vocal Senate opponent of military escalation in the gulf, is skeptical of the Administration’s assertions and assurances precisely because of his experience in Vietnam. “President Bush doesn’t have a memory of having gone to a war where your politicians lied to you,” he says. “I have a memory of having gone to a war where the politicians lied.”

Striking as such sentiments are, the impact of Vietnam veterans may be more profound on local debates, such as those in Marshall, than in Congress, where only a few dozen members served in Southeast Asia. In Marshall, the room seemed to focus more sharply whenever a speaker announced he was a Vietnam veteran.

Even traditional veterans’ groups such as the Veterans of Foreign Wars of the United States have been affected. Today, nearly one-third of the VFW’s members are Vietnam veterans, and their presence has unsettled even this pillar of support for the Pentagon.

“There’s a lot more open debate and different points of view within our organization than before Vietnam because now we have groups of veterans . . . that have had totally different experiences,” says Larry W. Rivers, executive director of the VFW’s Washington office and a Vietnam veteran.

All this dissension operates within limits: The VFW has endorsed Bush’s moves to this point, and it’s difficult to imagine the group opposing offensive action should the President pursue it.

But the group has also pointedly questioned whether the Department of Veterans’ Affairs is prepared to care for a new generation of veterans and Rivers hears from many members that same “fuzzy, deep in the gut” uncertainty about the true stakes in the gulf that polls find among other Americans.

It’s that ambivalence and hesitancy, more than stridency, that marks the real impact of Vietnam and its veterans on the gulf debate. Though the striking development, by historical standards, is the number of Vietnam veterans publicly opposing the President, many others support him. Historically, veterans have been more hawkish than the general public, and the limited polling that has measured veteran sentiment on the gulf crisis has found that pattern holding--even among younger, Vietnam-era vets.

And the President has behind him several Vietnam veterans in Congress. Yet even such supporters as Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) recognize that the long shadow of the war in the jungle falls over the confrontation in the desert. For all the debate about Vietnam’s tangled meaning, one strand emerges clearly: Vietnam has raised the threshold Presidents must cross to bring the nation to war.

That’s not only because, as McCain puts it, “The American people correctly believe they were lied to by the political and military leadership (about Vietnam) and don’t want that to happen again.” More fundamentally, Vietnam has irrevocably eroded Americans’ willingness to let their government alone decide what interests are worth defending with blood.

The uncharacteristic voices of dissent from veterans on the gulf carry a reminder that Vietnam taught that lesson perhaps most keenly to the men who fought there. “What Vietnam veterans have realized,” said Vietnam vet Hubley as the crowd filed out of the meeting in Marshall, “is that it’s OK not to always go along.” That awareness is already changing the way the United States goes to war.