ROANOKE TIMES

                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: SUNDAY, February 10, 1991                   TAG: 9102100058
SECTION: VIRGINIA                    PAGE: A-1   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: DWAYNE YANCEY STAFF WRITER
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Long


RENEWED STANDARD OF PATRIOTISM: EMOTIONS OF FLAG-WAVING RUN DEEP

He was just one guy, but he felt this need to do something and couldn't think of anything else.

So the morning after the war started, Bill Hollifield laid down his barber's clippers and went down to Roanoke's City Market, where the peace activists usually gather, and stood there holding his own, homemade sign stating his support for the troops.

Cars honked. Drivers waved thumbs up. One woman circled the block, stopped, came over and hugged him.

A few days later, she came by his shop to deliver a red, white and blue bow for his window. By then, Hollifield - Mr. Bill to his customers - had been out to Happy's Flea Market to do his own shopping. He came back with a stylized banner showing a wind-swept American flag and the proclamation: "America, Love it or Leave it."

Since then, the door to his Campbell Avenue shop has gotten a good workout. "People just walk in off the street," he says. "They open the door and holler in: `I love your flag.'"

Something is happening here, and it's not just at Mr. Bill's. In this winter of war, America is abloom - with the red, white and blue fluttering from front porches and car antennas, yellow ribbons tied around old oak trees.

Deep within us, something has stirred. Some atavistic tribal instinct to band together in times of danger, perhaps? Or a more recent collective memory of a place, a pain, called Vietnam - and a nation's determined vow not to repeat the past?

Whatever the motives, if it was morning in America under Ronald Reagan, perhaps now it's high noon. The old-fashioned flag-waving patriotism that The Gipper made respectable again during the 1980s seems puny compared to what's been unfurled since the outbreak of war.

Take a look around:

Flag stores have been emptied. "In all the years of Fourth of Julys and Flag Days, I've never seen anything like this," says Dennis Wickes at Sunnyside Awning & Tent Co. in Roanoke. "They've wiped us out."

Old Glory has always evoked strong emotions, but like this? In Rocky Mount, Darlene Dolinger snapped up the last flags at the local Rose's department store, and almost got into a tussle with another customer who tried to take one out of her cart.

Even simple yellow ribbon - first adopted as a national symbol of remembrance during another Mideast crisis a decade ago - is in short supply. Dolinger, who has a son in Saudi Arabia, has cleaned out stores on that, too. "When I bought my yellow ribbon, I bought 25 yards of it, and that was the last they had, and they said they didn't know when they'll be able to get more."

Some people haven't stopped with just tying a discreet bow to their mailbox. In Salem, Barker Realty bought 100 flags and taped them to the firm's "for sale" signs. In Buena Vista, the Dana Corp., an axle manufacturer, hoisted a 30-foot yellow ribbon from its flag pole.

In Rocky Mount, factory worker Jimbo Gue wanted an even more emphatic way to demonstrate his support: "Everybody's got yellow ribbons and American flags and stuff," he says. "I wanted to put out something that would stand out in everybody's mind."

So he painted his pickup truck with pro-war slogans. On one side: "Bless the men and women of Desert Storm." On the other: "Saddam - Mess with the best, die like the rest."

For others, patriotism has become a team effort. Regina Mabe and Pam Elmore organized a "red, white and blue day" for other Advance Auto workers to show the colors. At Radiology Associates, every day the staff wear heart-shaped pins with an American flag.

And every weekend seems to bring a new support-the-troops rally somewhere, with thousands cheering and praying - in otherwise somnolent little towns such as Pulaski, Galax, Marion.

But why? Not, why are people supporting the war, or, at least, the troops called upon to fight it? That seems obvious enough. But why this need - and that's what it seems to be, a need - to let everyone know that they stand with the troops? War isn't a game; the hometown fans can't help their team win by cheering loud enough to drown out the other team's signals.

"It's a group identification," says Bob Denton, who heads Virginia Tech's communications studies department and has done extensive study on political psychology. "To say your prayers privately, in terms of what you can do to help the situation, that's probably all you can do. By a public display, it becomes an emblem, a sense of identification."

In times of threat, "it's one of the most powerful forces in nature, the need for humans to bond like that," adds Virginia Tech sociologist Jack Dudley.

For some, the bonding is a generic nationalism; for others, a more intimate sense of kinship. "We're 100 percent for the boys," says Tim Maxey, a World War II veteran who flies the flag over his garage at Chamblissburg in Bedford County. "We're all for them because we were one of the boys."

Patriotism may be intended as a symbol of national strength and resolve, but it rides upon an unmistakeable undercurrent of helplessness, of knowing that young men and women are fighting, literally, for their lives - of wanting to help somehow, but not being able to.

Of course, these factors would be at work in any war.

Maybe that's why it's the older folks who notice most.

Helen Bradley of Vinton has lived through three wars before the current conflict. "I think this one is different," she says. Not because of the cause, but the homefront response to it.

Certainly there wasn't this kind of reaction to Vietnam; just the opposite. But not even during World War II - the one conflict of the 20th century that Americans universally seem to agree was a just war - was the public display of patriotism this intense, say those who remember "the big one."

Of course, CNN wasn't broadcasting live while the bombs were falling on the Pacific Fleet, either. Television has personalized this war unlike any other. "The support you're seeing now, it's not support of what we're doing; it's support of the troops," Tech communications expert Denton says. "If you talk to people, there's a tremendous amount of guilt. We are still watching our shows; we are still eating well. What sacrifices are we making compared to theirs?"

The intensity this time around also may be a product of the suddenness with which the crisis erupted. One day, Americans were celebrating the end of the Cold War and haggling over how to spend the peace dividend; the next, boom, we were sending the 82nd Airborne to Dhahran and calling up the National Guard. It was a psychological Pearl Harbor. And while the real Pearl Harbor came when the nation was still trying to shake off the Depression, the Persian Gulf war follows a decade of easy living.

"We've been through these incredibly good economic times, and then all of a sudden, not only did the war come up, but there's the threat of a recession," Tech sociologist Dudley says. "Suddenly, everything is very tense, and I think people are responding to that." Flag-waving is a catharsis.

Then, too, consider where else we've just been.

The Reagan years. America walking tall. The '88 presidential campaign and the Pledge of Allegiance. The frenzy in '89 to adopt a constitutional amendment to ban flag-burning. Unabashed patriotism isn't just for the guys at the American Legion. "It's not the stigma it was in previous decades," Denton says.

But for all the feel-good patriotism, perhaps the most pressing reason why people are waving the flag so furiously doesn't feel good at all.

"I think 'Nam is probably what has the people the way they are now," says Gue, the Rocky Mount man with the slogans on his pickup. "What the boys went through when they came home - no ticker-tape parades or nothing for 'em - people don't want to see it happen again."

Vietnam is an ache that still throbs in the national soul, so much that a lot of people - even those who aren't even old enough to remember that war, except through Oliver Stone movies - have taken it upon themselves to make up for the past. If one of the reasons Vietnam turned out the way it did was a lack of support at home, then, by gum, this time people are going to go out of their way to make sure they show plenty of support.

President Bush was right: This won't be another Vietnam, not if the public's support for the troops is any measure.

Consider the example of Rocky Mount, a small town that's responded to the war in a big way: The town flies flags along Main Street every day. The Jaycees have decked the tree in front of the courthouse with yellow ribbons and the names of county residents serving in the gulf. And at Pappy's Grocery, Pappy Routon has posted his own community bulletin board about the war on the soft drink cooler and takes up a weekly collection from customers to send packages to the 50 or so "Franklin County Storm Troopers."

"I think they've learned by the mistakes they made during the Vietnam war," Routon says. "People realize if they had rallied behind the troops like they're doing now, things might have turned out differently. It took 15 to 20 years to realize it but they're realizing it now, and I'm glad to see it."

He's a Vietnam vet.



 by CNB