As the Pentagon Funnels Soldiers, Missiles and Millions of Dollars Into Gulf War Victory Celebrations Nationwide, Many Critics Wonder Whether the Parades Are a . . . : Pat on the Back or a Slap in the Face?

Right now, somewhere on an American byway, a tractor-trailer carrying a Patriot missile system is rollin’, rollin’, rollin’ toward Main Street USA for a victory parade celebrating the end of the Persian Gulf War.

Much like popular prom dates, six of these 20,000-pound stars of Operation Desert Storm have been booked since March--and will be through July. As the troops who operate these Scudbusters revel in the adulation of Main Street, you can almost hear the theme music from the 1960s television classic “Rawhide” and see “them big wheels turnin’, rollin’, rollin’, rollin’. . . . Keep them dogies movin’.”

These days, America is gripped by parade mania, flush with such all-American trappings as fireworks, hot dogs, big-screen televisions and Uncle Sams on stilts. For twice as long as there was a Gulf War, there have been parades--hundreds, maybe even thousands of displays celebrating the 500,000 U.S. troops who won a quick and easy victory, crushing Saddam Hussein’s armies and liberating Kuwait.

“Our thinking in organizing a New York parade was a simple, straightforward reflection of the man in the street,” says Michael Duval, one the key planners. “It’s time to say to the troops ‘Thank you’ and to be proud of ourselves.”

Every American city, it seems, is tasting victory with these parades: Cloud Croft, Tex.; Ogden, Utah; Ft. Hamilton, N.Y.; Roswell, N. Mex.; Seattle; Oklahoma City; Dayton, Ohio, and on and on. . . .

Yet few regions have expended as much shoe leather as has Southern California.

In March as the first troops were arriving home, Laguna Beach quickly converted its annual Patriot’s Day Parade into a celebration of the Gulf War victory. A week later, organizers of Mission Viejo’s annual St. Patrick’s Day parade were able to fit 25 Gulf vets onto a flatbed truck even as more units were returning to the nearby El Toro Marine Corps Air Station.

Before April was through, Disneyland had scheduled 20 honor-the-troops parades down its Main Street, Fountain Valley had paraded 45 local organizations through a regional park, and Oceanside had staged a parade at the doorstep of Camp Pendleton, drawing 80,000 to watch.

In May, mammoth parades threaded through Irvine (drawing 200,000 spectators), San Diego (250,000), and Hollywood (500,000 to 1 million).

And the end is not yet in sight. Another parade is scheduled in San Clemente for July 8. “All we’re doing for training is parade practice,” cracked one Camp Pendleton Marine.

But the revelry also has caused many Americans to cringe at what they argue is a tasteless celebration of a war that resulted in tens of thousands of deaths and in some of the worst ecological devastation ever. In the final days before what are expected to be the nation’s two largest parades, in Washington Saturday and in New York next Monday, these critics seem to speaking at a higher and higher volume.

Jonathan Schell, a political commentator, wrote in his syndicated newspaper column recently that the Washington parade, which the crowd will be able to view on Constitution Avenue as well as on two giant TV screens on the Mall, may provide a victory that has yet to be achieved, with the goals for which the war was fought rapidly receding.

“Secretary of State James A. Baker III’s peace initiative in the Middle East has all but expired,” wrote Schell. “The new world order is a dim, ragged hope. . . . With the parade, then, the war, which always had as much to do with purging demons from the American soul (of losing the Vietnam War) as with any concrete objective, may have arrived at its true destination: The war machine, lifted clear of the messy Mideastern theater in which it was fought, is arriving in Washington, where, on giant TV screens, the nation can watch itself watching itself admiring itself.”

In Washington, the word is that the parade will be the “ultimate” military event: neat formations of men and women in full dress uniforms high-stepping before an array of military brass and political big shots, including Commander-in-Chief George Bush.

To this display, New Yorkers sarcastically hoot. Their parade will be bigger and better, they say, with 25,000 marchers, including 4,400 “heroes and she-roes,” as Mayor David Dinkins called the troops. It will also feature New York’s way of showing affection: The celebrants on Broadway’s “canyon of heroes” will have 10,000 pounds of ticker tape dumped on them from atop skyscrapers.

In fact, what began as a subtle competition between New York and Washington about which parade was more important has escalated so intensely in recent days that one Pentagon official noted: “The two parades have a serious case of parade envy.”

The Pentagon, on the other hand, has been low-keying its participation in all this.

Wary of looking like squanderers or appearing self-aggrandizing, military officials say they are simply “assisting” the private groups putting on the extravaganzas--although they are shelling out $5 million to $7 million for the New York and Washington events alone.

“Every single request came from a community and was not solicited,” says Pentagon spokesman Dan Kalinger. “We wouldn’t think it proper to instigate a round of self-congratulation.”

The Pentagon has received about 500 requests for soldiers and equipment, he says, and the queries are still rollin’, rollin’, rollin’ into Kalinger’s office.

It also seems that every town wants larger-than-life Gen. H. Norman Schwarzkopf to play the grandmaster. Schwarzkopf gets 10 to 12 requests each day to lead parades or to be on the reviewing stand. One request came from a North Carolina burg, pop. 49, but most of the 1,500 such invitations he has received so far came from bigger towns, according to a spokesman in the eight-person office set up in Tampa, Fla., to respond to invitations. (Workers in an office down the hall respond to his fan mail.)

Nationally, the parade schedule has been crowded--so crowded that one soldier in Houston commented that the troops are a bit tired of being on parade alert.

“The first few they’ve been happy about,” Sgt. 1st Class Maurice Finsterwald told the Houston Post during a parade over Memorial Day weekend, “but after a while it’s becoming more of a job than a celebration. A lot of parades are on the weekends, and the soldiers are looking forward to having time off.”

But soldiers are what the parades are almost all about. For as important as the Patriots and tanks are, the nation’s parade meisters don’t just want equipment. They want troops--lots of them, starched, arched and marching 120 steps a minute in formation and in a halo of honor.

“Equipment does not become the rationale behind the parade,” says Kalinger. “Equipment is there so the public can see what, say, a Patriot missile looks like or how fast an F-16 can fly over. But it’s the men and women who matter.”

Mark Crispin Miller, a media professor at Johns Hopkins University who is studying war as a “spectacle,” says America’s obsession with these “ecstatic mass welcomes” reflects a population “desperate for a lift.” Miller says people who attend these “wild celebrations” rarely can express the rationale behind the war or what the United States won in it.

“Aside from this victory, there’s not that much to be happy about these days,” he says. “People are acutely aware of the (declining) quality of life in the cities. The nation has been depressed for some time.”

This week, millions are expected to watch the 8,800 soldiers who will swarm over the East Coast to participate in the Washington and New York events. Every state and every element of the Desert Storm forces should be represented at the parade, picnic and fireworks Saturday in Washington, while New York’s spectacular promises to be more of a regional event.

The Washington parade will display the kind of military firepower that in the last two decades was seen only in the Soviet Union on May Day--or in Eastern Bloc countries during an invasion by the Soviet Union.

Eighty-one planes will be in the Washington flyover, along with 31 pieces of equipment in the parade and dozens of trucks, planes, bombs and missiles in the static display on the Mall. (In fact, unsuspecting citizens may be spooked if they stroll through the Capitol area in the wee hours Thursday and Friday, when the heavy equipment will roll through empty streets to the Mall.)

To manage, coordinate and arrange the two big East Coast parades, the Pentagon set up a Joint Task Force Victory office. Some even say they think of the 220 military officers holed up in a federal office building--operating the phones and analyzing the computer printouts and flow charts--as Part II of the Gulf War.

“What we’re doing in putting these two parades together is the same planning process used to go to war,” says Col. Jim Weiskopf, a spokesman for the task force. “We’ve all learned and studied these things at different military schools. This is at least a positive way to put them into practice.”

In addition to the millions spent on the Washington and New York parades, Defense Department money is being showered on smaller events, although Pentagon officials say there is no way to calculate how much. The military services, for example, are each picking up part of the tab for hauling Patriots to selected hamlets nationwide. City and state police are also pitching in millions of dollars.

But the vast majority of the costs are being paid by the usual suspect: corporate America, which is getting plenty of advertising mileage out of the celebrations. Coca-Cola, Pepsi, AT&T; and Comsat are among those sponsoring the events. (Some companies, such as Coca-Cola, are giving to New York and Washington, the way corporate donors often do to Republicans and Democrats.)

Harry N. Walters, a former head of the Veterans Administration who volunteered to go hat in hand to raise $5 million for the Washington event, says the people caterwauling about the parades are a bunch of sourpusses. Especially the budget crunchers, he adds, who seem to yank a tank a day from the lineup for the parade, citing Pentagon cutbacks.

“The Pentagon is spending .00011% of its budget on this,” barks Walters, a West Pointer who was born on the Fourth of July. “They belch at the Pentagon and spend that much!”

Walters was delighted when he became president of the foundation, a coalition of 20 veterans groups, running Washington’s homecoming activities, but he has no patience for the critics.

When asked about the most biting criticism of the celebrations--that they are rife with commercial overtones--Walters gets tight-lipped, staring down his interviewer the way that his daughter says he he acts when he is trying to keep from exploding.

“That question leads me to believe that there is something wrong with the free-enterprise system,” says Walters, now the chief executive of a private company in New York. “I’m the last one who is going to say there is something wrong with commercialism.”

But the biggest gripe of the critics--the Washington columnists, Pentagon number-crunchers and those who see no reason to celebrate the Kuwaitis’ freedom to imprison citizens for wearing Saddam Hussein T-shirts--is that the parades are a colossal waste of time and taxpayer money.

In a Memorial Day sermon, one Lutheran minister preached to his suburban Maryland congregation that celebrating the machinery of war was immoral. The cartoon “Doonesbury” even got into the act, making fun of the Hollywood parade that drew 1 million people a few weekends ago. Artist Garry Trudeau showed surfers watching a tank and saying, “Bitchin’ dune buggy, dude!” A soldier atop the tank waved to the surfers while he talked to his friend on a portable phone: “Ray? Gotta go, buddy! We’ll do lunch when you get back!”

While America has a strong tradition of postwar victory parades--except after Vietnam, a war in which the United States was not victorious--there has never been this many.

“The war and the parades are immensely appealing to people for many reasons,” says Miller, the media professor. “The war demonstrated our national competence and that despite the crumbling bridges and S&L; crisis, all the machines worked perfectly in a fantasy of perfect efficacy.”

But for all the pooh-poohing, there also seems to be an equal rush to defend the outpouring of patriotism. Particularly on talk radio, the real heartbeat of America, there has been plenty of backlash against the backlashers.

One radio host in Southern California, in a conversation with a caller, blamed the left-wingers in the media for stirring up trouble again. The host and the caller agreed that if it weren’t for such “ancillary” issues as the plight of the Kurds, the media would not be distracted from the true meaning of victory because “America has waited a long time for this.”

And as long as there is the call of a wild celebration along Main Street USA, it appears there will be a parade.

“Eventually, we’re gonna wear it out, wear out our welcome,” says Jimmy Adams, a spokesman for the rollin’, rollin’, rollin’ teams of Scudbusters from Ft. Bliss, Tex. “But for now, if they want us there and we can afford to go, we certainly want the American people to see what they paid for, and we want their thanks.”