COLUMN ONE : War Mood: A Nation Divided : How necessary? How long? How bloody? Emotions are deep, and even families are split. There is anger, fear and a sense of helplessness.

The crash of beer cans on the bar splits the morning like an ax. So does John Vigil’s opinion about war.

Thank God nobody has a hangover. Noisily and emphatically, Vigil sorts the Coors with a vengeance. He stacks old cans over here, to be disposed of, new ones over there, to be sold. He sorts his thoughts the same way: with force and precision.

“It makes me feel pretty bad. I just as soon they come to some agreement.”

Does he think it’s worth war?

“Well . . . “ Now the silence is louder than the beer cans.

“I don’t really know why we’re doing it,” he says, finally. “We are there now, and I think we’re gonna go to war, but I’d rather we didn’t.”

There it is--a phenomenon. This is the Cheyenne Club, a drinking and dancing emporium in downtown Cheyenne, a place so tough that a sign cautions cowboys: “Anyone caught fighting in this establishment will be barred permanently.” But the man providing the beer has no taste for war in the Persian Gulf.

It is symptomatic of deep division in this country over the possibility of war. Interviews last week by reporters for the Los Angeles Times in cities, towns and countrysides from Alaska to Florida and California to Massachusetts show that the nation is far from united behind its President and his moves toward war with Iraq.

Indeed, polls show that only a narrow majority of Americans favor immediate use of force: 51% by the reckoning of the latest survey sponsored by the Times Mirror Co., parent company of The Times. A similar poll by the Associated Press last week showed even less support for war: only 44%. The AP survey found half the nation wants to give economic sanctions more time to work.

The Times interviews reveal feelings so deep they bring anger, tears, disagreement within families. Hedged around much of the support for war are doubts, hesitancy and conditions. This could mean that even support, proffered now, might be withdrawn later, especially if war is particularly bloody or long. The interviews reveal ignorance about the gulf crisis, some of it deliberate--to the point of denial. They also reveal fear, a sense of disbelief among some who find it hard to grasp that war might be at hand.

And they reveal a sense of helplessness.

There are, certainly, Americans who favor war--some reflexively.

At the Lone Star Lanes in Texas City, Tex., for instance, William Gaddis, 58, watches as two grandsons struggle with bowling balls nearly half as big as they are.

“Go at it, Bubba,” Gaddis says.

One of the youngsters heaves a ball. Four pins topple.

“Helluva boy!”

Gaddis, a retired refinery worker, leans forward in his chair. He shakes a bony finger. “It’s time to let them people know that we’re tired of their crap,” he declares. “They can’t just go in there and take over a country just as they please. That man over there has had plenty of time to get out of there. Now it is time for us to go in there and put him out. He’s just killing time to collect his troops so he can kick our butts. If we don’t act soon, he may be crazy enough to try to come over here and bomb us.”

Little Bubba runs up to grab a few chips from an open bag of Fritos on the table. “Papa, did you see that?” he asks excitedly, pointing to the fallen pins.

Gaddis’ expression softens. He scoops up his grandson. “We need to protect the future of the little ones,” he says. “It’s like the Korea conflict. I don’t know that we had any real business over there, but we stayed and got the job done. Those boys are protecting freedom, just as my generation did during the Korean War. It’s a part of life--war ain’t pretty, people die.”

Others are fully cognizant of the terrible price to be paid--but they favor war anyway.

George Bushmire, for example, is a big, gentle widower whose hands grew strong mining coal. Now he is 70 and retired. He lives in Thomas, Pa., 15 miles south of Pittsburgh, in the same house that has given him shelter for 40 years. He, too, is grandfatherly, always patient with children.

He knows all about war. He fought in World War II, on Guam, Saipan, Tinian and Iwo Jima. Bushmire was wounded twice, the second time when a Japanese grenade rolled into his tent. It came close to killing him.

“I betcha, if they talk to World War II guys, they are going to say, ‘Go get him out of there,’ ” he says, sitting at his kitchen table, drinking hot coffee in a mug. “There’s no way you can let him go. Even if they settle now and he starts pulling out of there, what’s going to happen later? If we withdraw our troops over there, he’s still going to be as strong, and he is going to get stronger, and we’re going to have trouble with him again. And maybe he’ll be a little bigger next time, because if he gets into nuclear bombs, then we’re in big trouble.”

Does that mean George Bushmire thinks George Bush should go to war?

“I do, yeah.”

He concedes that “a lot of people are going to lose their lives.”

Is it worth it?

“I think so, I think so.”

But the thought brings tears to his eyes.

“The cost in men and equipment is going to be really something. What I saw on just that little island of Iwo Jima. . . . We went in with three divisions of Marines and got slaughtered.” His voice cracks. He pauses for a long while, fiddles with the handle of his coffee cup.

“No, it’s not a pretty picture. A lot of these guys are only in their 20s . . . young fellas. . . . They’re not prepared for it. There’s nobody really prepared for it.”

Still others are opposed to war--without qualification.

Tricia Fyfe, 44, is an emergency room nurse in Anchorage, Alaska. She has four children, ages 6 through 21. Her husband fought in Vietnam. He came home with post traumatic stress syndrome, she says, and died in the crash of his homemade airplane, partly because his task, when he was at Da Nang, was “to do the body bags--monitor the planes bringing them in and out”--and this affected his ability to fly.

“You can’t just do that job and not have that affect you,” she says.

She is shopping at an Anchorage store with her 6-year-old son, Michael, who is scooting a cart up and down an aisle, and her 8-year-old daughter, Kimberly, who is begging her to buy a wall calendar covered with pictures of puppies. She has phoned the office of her congressman, she says, to declare that she is against war in the Persian Gulf.

“We are doing it all over again,” she says. “It’s my generation’s children. I had to suffer through this already. I just don’t believe it. . . . I can’t see that lives are worth it. I am raising four children alone, and now another generation is going to face the same problem. I don’t believe it!

“I voted for President Bush, but I didn’t vote for war. . . .

“What we’re talking about is not just lives right now--the dead that come home right now. We are talking about their families. We are talking about their children. We are talking about the lives of people for the next 25 years. He was in ‘Nam in ’67 and it’s 1991--and I’m still living with the consequences of what the war did.

“I was very much supportive of the war in Vietnam. ‘My husband’s over there; what’s wrong with the rest of you people? Rah, rah, America.’ ”

She laughs softly. “I feel differently now.

“We don’t have to be the world’s policeman. We have 350,000 troops (in Saudi Arabia), and the rest of the world has contributed 300. . . . That’s wrong. That’s wrong. Japan gets the oil. Germany gets the oil. So where are their 200,000? I feel real strong about that. We need to be there, yes, and aggression needs to be stopped, and all that stuff.

“But not at the expense of American lives.”

Her son whines, “Mom, come on. Mom. . . . “

She adds: “This little boy was 2 when his dad died. You think what’s it like! I’m still widowed. I’m not dating. I don’t know how to date. I am trying to raise a son without a father. . . . There are going to be a lot more sons out there without dads--and mothers. That’s the other thing.

“We’ve got mothers (who go to war) now.”

Down the West Coast, in Portland, Ore., James Weihing sits on a park bench overlooking Pioneer Square. He says he is shocked by polls showing any public support for a war.

“I haven’t heard anybody who supports a war. Jesus Christ!”

He spent the Christmas and New Year’s holidays in Minnesota and North Dakota with family. “I didn’t find any support for it there either,” he says. He recalls one man in a Hillboro, N.D., bank complaining out loud:

“ ‘Bush is a dictator . . . getting us into a war without approval.’ ” And the man was a Republican.

Weihing is 64. He wears glasses, a light blue hat and red suspenders over a hefty girth. He lives by himself in an apartment a few blocks away. His evenings and nights are filled with news broadcasts. He pays particular attention to “MacNeil/Lehrer” and to “Nightline.” He says that if war comes, it will be about oil.

“If Kuwait had nothing but carrots, would Iraq be there? Or the U.S.A.?

“Maybe Iraq should get access to the gulf. I don’t know about claims that Kuwait was slant drilling under Iraq. But Kuwait isn’t anything but a monarchy. We’re not defending democracy.”

His advice: “I say to let the sanctions work. This could be a bad, bad war. I served in Korea. I know war. I say use it as a last resort. . . .”

Weihing is adamant.

“My sister-in-law has a son almost of draft age. I don’t want kids killed or maimed.” He clenches his right hand into a fist. “I don’t want to spend blood for oil!”

All this makes Jennifer Roy, 26, of Mission, Kan., equally angry--but at people such as James Weihing. And particularly at anti-war demonstrators.

“They’re lunatics!” she fumes.

She is a financial analyst for US Sprint. Her boyfriend runs a self-service laundry, and she helps with the cleanup at the close of business. She wipes a rag around washers and dryers as she talks.

“My brother’s over there (with the 82nd Airborne). He signed up. He made the commitment, and I’m supporting him. . . . I’m all for Bush. He’s doing a good job, as well as can be expected.” She isn’t pleased by what she calls congressional meddling. “I think we should go to war and take care of that little country (Iraq) and go on our way. . . .

“I don’t think we should wait for sanctions.”

It does not matter to her that neither Kuwait nor Saudi Arabia are democracies. “I’m not concerned with their political affiliation. We’re all standing for the same principles.”

What principles? “I don’t think it’s so much the oil. It’s letting somebody annex what’s not theirs.”

Nor does the specific thought of war bother her.

“It seems like it’s a cycle of life. Who wanted the Vietnam War? It just happened.”

Even family members are at odds with each other.

In New York, Deborah Chew, a 27-year-old Vassar graduate and corporate lawyer, disagrees with her husband, Geoffrey Silargy, a 28-year-old broadcast journalist and aspiring actor from Australia.

They live with their cat, Martini, in a renovated apartment in Brooklyn Heights, a gentrified part of Brooklyn just across the East River from Manhattan. Both liberal in their politics, they usually agree on most issues. But the possibility of war finds them in disagreement on one important point.

“Geoff isn’t the sort of person you think would come out with hawk-like statements,” Chew says of her husband, “but he is of the ‘go in and bomb the crap out of them’ mentality.

“I think that kind of reaction is a sort of knee-jerk emotional thing. People who say it are not thinking about the lives that would be lost. Even if they are Iraqi lives, it’s still lives being lost.”

What’s more, she adds, if we bombed Iraq, “we’d never have good relations with the other (Arab) countries there.”

Next only to such clearly defined differences over war, what seems to be most significant about America’s feelings are the doubts that many--even some who are pro-war--express openly and often. These hedges suggest that some support might not last long if death and destruction become a fixture in newspapers and on television.

In Seattle, for instance, David Anderson, 25, a cook who lives in the suburbs, says: “We just cannot allow (Saddam) Hussein to do what he wants to do.”

But Anderson goes on, quietly and deliberately, as if he wants to make sure he understands what he thinks: “We just got two bullies, and neither one will let down till they get their way.” Saddam Hussein: “He is not a Hitler. He’s not crazy. He wants certain things. . . . He has his reasons.” George Bush: “Sounds like he is trying to force things. He’s overbearing.”

And war protesters: “If that is what they feel they need to do, that’s what they should do. If it carries on for very long, I could see myself doing it.”

In Pacifica, Calif., Mike Jones, 38, sales manager at Ed Cordero Chevrolet, plays with a shiny new penny. Nervously, he flips it--again and again.

“We’ve sort of painted ourselves into a corner on this one because of what we’ve said,” he offers. Jones would prefer quick surgical air strikes against Hussein and his top leaders--because a long, bloody war makes him wonder.

He is not certain how it would affect this nation’s resolve--or his own.

Farther south, in Anaheim, Calif., Jack Britton, 67, manager of the press dining room at Anaheim Stadium, says: “I believe we are going to fight. I believe the whole Middle East is going to fight.” It brings deep anger to his voice. His grandchildren, he frets, “are not going to see the year 2000, not this way.”

He supports serving his country. He was assigned to a ship in the North Atlantic during World War II. But he knows that, for blacks like himself, military service can mean extra burdens. What he remembers most vividly about the 1940s is boarding a bus wearing his Navy uniform--and being told to sit in the back.

Today, too, blacks in the military carry a heavy, if somewhat different, burden. Because the military offers a way out of poverty, they join in extra-large numbers. To Delores Clark, 20, a trainee at a Job Corps center in Kansas City, Mo., those larger enlistments mean more risk for blacks in wartime.

She will serve, if necessary. But as to war, she adds: “I’m not too thrilled.”

As chief of pharmacy services at the Veterans Administration Medical Center in Denver, Gerry Marman, 40, is not one to talk about shirking duty, either. But Marman, too, is hardly enthusiastic about war.

“Every day I am reminded of the casualties of war. That is why these veterans are here. I think young soldiers need to come in and do a tour of the VA, and they need to talk to Vietnam veterans here and on the outside and ask why we were there. Did we do the right thing? Are we doing the right thing now?”

He drinks from a cup of black coffee.

“They’ll missile Israel and, before you know it, we won’t know who is fighting who over there. We really don’t know what the other Arab countries are going to do. Nobody knows which way they’ll be shooting. . . .

“If war does break out and it isn’t over quickly, George Bush will never get reelected.

“The real question will be, could we have avoided this? I think so.”

Across the country, in Miami, Lawrence Rapaport, 51, believes in the necessity of force.

“The only way this is going to be solved is by a war,” he says, during a break for a cigarette at one of two coffee shops he owns.

But he does not like the idea of war.

“I don’t think the United States people are ready to see their young guys and gals come home in body bags for some guy who’s sitting there with a turban. . . . My argument has always been that when Bush’s kids go over to Saudi Arabia and put on a uniform, then I’ll go. Then I’ll be glad to send my son over.”

Up the East Coast, in Asheville, N.C., Ron Barker, 38, is at the bus station, waiting to pick up a group of youngsters. He tilts his metal chair against some lockers.

“George Bush has done a real good job,” he says. “His decisions are very wise.”

But then Barker adds a qualification: “Up to now.”

The Vietnam War, he says, is on everybody’s mind. “It left a very bitter taste in all the American people.

“Everybody is scared to death it will happen again.”

And in Boxford, Mass., about 30 miles north of Boston, Werner Low, 43, a businessman who is shopping at the community store, qualifies his support for George Bush this way:

“I feel the people in this country ought to support the President, whatever he decides to do. (But) if he called to ask me, I’d say, ‘We don’t have any business being there.’ ”

Some Americans admit their ignorance about the gulf crisis.

Leroy King, 49, a driver at a truck stop on U.S. 12 east of Lewiston, Ida., is candid about how little he knows. “I’m not very familiar with it. . . .

“I don’t much read the papers.”

He has a son in the Army at Ft. Sill, Okla., who could be sent to Saudi Arabia any time. He has a cousin with three sons already there. But Leroy King has trouble answering questions about the possibility of war. A television flickers in a corner of the truck stop--it is tuned to a game show.

In fact, some people do not want to know what is going on.

“Because it’s scary,” says Stacy Boggs, 20, who works at an Anchorage day-care center.

Does she talk about it much at home?

“No. It’s a touchy subject at home.” Her brother-in-law might be sent to Saudi Arabia. “You try to avoid it.”

Does she try to pretend it doesn’t exist?

“Yes.”

Others say the possibility of war seems unreal.

“The war? It’s like a movie to me,” says Joan Hira, 33, a bookstore clerk from Ojai, Calif. “You keep watching these pictures on the network every day, and somehow, in the back of your mind, you know it’s real. But since you’re not part of it, there’s very little to believe in.”

This, despite the fact that her brother is in the Army and has been sent to Saudi Arabia.

She recalls seeing Vietnam footage as a child. She would bring her breakfast or her dinner to the television and watch. “Every week the body count would be plastered on the screen--and I would eat my cereal, or something, and it wasn’t real.”

Nonetheless, she has a foreboding: “Why are we so anxious to sacrifice people we love?”

Still others describe a feeling of helplessness.

William Bonsack, a 19-year-old waiter, sits on the floor of the Olive Tree, a bookstore in the French Quarter of New Orleans. He is smoking a cigarette, surrounded by stacks of literary journals. He likes poetry, fiction, literary criticism. His face registers little emotion as he speaks.

It does not appear to be the kind of cool that is de rigueur for those under 20. Instead, Bonsack looks genuinely hopeless, especially when he talks about the inevitability of war. He projects a bottomless sense of weariness and pain.

“If they do go to battle, then the 1960s didn’t teach them a goddamn thing,” he mutters. “It’s a foolish thing that we get into war. I mean in the ‘60s everyone was showing that war is bad. Remember that? And now they are going to do it again. Any boy that has to go out and fight . . . fighting isn’t going to solve anything.

“It’s only going to make matters worse.

“I’m going to get friends of mine sent home bloody, without arms, without legs, some of them dead, who I’ll never get to see again. And to me that is sick. . . . It’s the stupidest thing next to burning the flag.”

He laughs. The laughter sounds empty.

Contributing to this story were Times staffers David Treadwell, Mark Stein, Bernice Hirabayashi, Psyche Pasqual, Kevin Johnson, Edith Stanley, Ann Rovin, Anna M. Virtue, Tracy Shryer, Doug Conner, Amy Harmon, Nina Green and Lianne Hart. Also reporting for The Times were David Hulen, John Laidler, Ted Cilwick, J. Duncan Moore Jr., Rhonda Hillbery, Garry Boulard, Laura Laughlin, Bill Steigerwald, Larry Gus and Stuart Wasserman.