America: Stunned, Saddened and Now Ready for Revenge

Sales of American flags skyrocketed. Donors overwhelmed blood banks. And all across the land, in sleepy Farm Belt barber shops and jangling Las Vegas casinos, at military recruitment stations and reopened shopping malls, Americans talked angrily Wednesday of retaliation, brutal and swift.

Many people described how their emotions had evolved over the last 24 hours. The initial shock and fear brought on by incomprehensible televised imagery--hijacked airliners plunging into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon ablaze--had given way to hard rage and a hunger for vengeance.

Still others expressed a lingering sadness, not only for the wholesale loss of innocent lives, but also for a loss of national innocence: The United States, they said, or at least their sense of it, had been fundamentally altered by the atrocities of Tuesday morning.

“See those high towers?” asked 22-year-old Esmerelda Vasquez Wednesday, standing in line at a blood bank on the eastern edge of Houston. “I used to think they were pretty. Now I look at them and see targets. If I go in them, I’m a target. I’m staying away from downtown for a while.”

Many Americans seemed compelled to respond to the terrorist attacks in some concrete way. Wal-Mart reported that sales of American flags increased by more than tenfold. College football teams made plans to decorate their helmets with American flag decals. At least some military recruiting stations were experiencing what one officer described as a “patriotic swell” of potential enlistees. And long lines formed at blood banks from New York to Bakersfield, a response that prompted the American Red Cross to ask would-be donors to hold off for now.

In various media polls since the attacks, respondents have expressed by whopping margins their support for a military response--a sentiment that was repeated again and again in interviews Wednesday across the United States.

In Fulton, Mo., barber Robert Fleming said vengeance was a common theme in his customers’ conversations: “Most everybody is willing to put a bullet in someone’s head once they find the person who did it.”

“I’m angry,” fumed Joan Renshaw, a grandmother in suburban Atlanta. “I’m hoping we wipe these people out, and if we need to, wipe out the country that is hosting [them]. Just get rid of them all. The thing is we just need to stop all this. If we make a statement and bomb that country to smithereens, it might scare a lot of the other terrorists off.”

Amber Hagenback, who sells yo-yos and sun visors from a cart outside Las Vegas casinos, said she had encountered some New Yorkers right after the attack shuffling along the sidewalk with “blank faces. We hugged. I had to show them some love.”

On Wednesday, though, the 25-year-old made clear that tender mercies would not extend to the perpetrators--or to any country that might have sheltered them.

“I’d like to see an angry resolve,” she said, “to end this terrorism, quickly and forcefully. We shouldn’t lollygag and delay. Justice should not take precedence over vengeance.

“We ought to warn the country that we’re going to bomb them, so the innocent people can get out--because we’re above killing innocents--then we should turn their country into a glowing desert.”

Some people seemed almost surprised by the jingoistic sentiments they heard coming from their mouths. Damon Wyckoff, by night a guitarist in a Sacramento rock band called Forever Goldrush, said the attacks had left him “freaked out” at first. A day later, though, at his job behind a coffee house counter, the shaggy-haired 26-year-old sounded almost Pattonesque.

“It’s weird,” he said, “but for the first time I guess I really feel like an American. And I can suddenly identify with all those teenagers back during World War II who said, ‘Hell yeah, I’ll fight for my country.’

“I think a lot of young people like me, who are usually more concerned with having green hair and reading weird poetry, are all of a sudden put in a position where they need to think about things that may seem uncool to them. Like fighting back. Like how we’re all Americans and we’ve been attacked.”

Amid all the red-hot reactions, however, were the occasional voices of caution, who warned against indiscriminate response and said they hoped understandable rage would not give rise to a cycle of endless violence.

“When I spoke to the congregation this morning,” said Rabbi Alan Freehling of the University Synagogue in Brentwood, “I told them one of the profound gifts we have from God is to think and act rationally. And when we don’t, we are ignoring that blessing.”

Freehling participated in a Wednesday afternoon meeting with community and religious leaders and law enforcement officials.

“Those who spoke from the Muslim community spoke with great fear and anxiety,” he said. They are feeling besieged. They are reporting hate calls, hate feelings. There are some really sick people who are acting in a most inappropriate way.

“The point of the matter is that you don’t blame an entire people for the misdeeds of some. It just doesn’t make sense.”

In Atlanta, Winston Bell, a 64-year-old street worker for the city, took a break outside the Hard Rock Cafe, peering through the window at a television set bringing more images of smoking ruins in New York.

“I feel terribly about this,” he said. “I can’t remember anything that compared to this.” Nonetheless, he went on, “I don’t know if retaliation will do any good or not. I’m a widower, and my kids came over and we sat around the table last night. We said the only thing we can do is turn to God and pray.”

‘The Bubble’s Been Burst’

Many Americans confessed to severe cases of the jitters, and there was a growing sense that the events of Tuesday would change everyday lives, in ways both subtle and large.

“The whole world is different today, I think,” said Earl Lawson, a 58-year-old insurance adjuster who attended a memorial service at the Western Washington Fairground in Puyallup, Wash. “We are no safer than anybody else. We just thought we were. I guess.”

Hugh O’Gorman, a Los Angeles actor and filmmaker, said pretty much the same thing between bites of a hamburger at a Universal Studios CityWalk cafe: “The bubble’s been burst. We need to be aware we’re not this isolated country protected by two oceans.”

Organic herb grower Kathleen Frawley, dismantling her stall at the farmers market in downtown Sacramento, described the usually festive market as a case of “mutual depression. It’s like a layer of dust settled all over everybody. There’s a huge loss of security.”

The 35-year-old Frawley, who raises herbs, vegetables, turkeys, sheep and pigs on her 14-acre “Sweet Courage Herb Farm” in rural south Sacramento County, said she fears that Americans will move too drastically to tighten security.

“We’re a free country and that comes with a price,” she said. “I would rather be vulnerable and free than oppressed and safe. We can’t let a few nuts take away the fabric of being American.”

Nonetheless, many people said that their commonplace routines now would be reexamined, measured for risk. Some spoke with trepidation about flying again, traveling abroad, going to packed baseball parks. Landmark structures were seen in a more ominous light--not as proud icons, but as potential bull’s-eyes.

Diane Lawson, a Seattle waitress, brought a bag lunch Wednesday to a bench near the Space Needle. She was one of a number of people enjoying the noonday sunshine beneath the landmark structure--identified as a potential terrorist target two years ago during the millennium celebrations.

“I’m not afraid to be here,” she said. “You can’t live in fear.”

And yet, she went on, “this really brings home the fact that we are all sitting ducks all the time. It wasn’t so long ago that we thought the Space Needle had been a terrorist target. I think we all thought the mayor overreacted then, shutting down the millennium party, but now I think he did the right thing.”

Conversely, after the attacks on New York and the Pentagon residents of small, rural towns took new comfort in their isolation and civic anonymity.

“At times like this,” said 21-year-old Nina Zielstorf, pushing her infant son in a stroller through What Cheer, Iowa, (pop. 700), “I’m glad we live out here. I don’t think they even know we’re on the map.”

*

Contributing were Times staff writers Sue Fox, Peter H. King, Greg Krikorian, Dan Morain, Stephanie Simon, Nancy Vogel and researchers Lianne Hart, Edith Stanley, Anna M. Virtue and Lynn Marshall.