ST. PAUL, Minn. — Barbara Lindstrom was sick and tired of the Iraq war. The small, gray haired woman who runs a lock store on St. Paul’s Snelling Avenue didn’t want to see any more news about the latest American casualties in Iraq. She didn’t want to hear any more about how many billions of tax dollars were being spent month-by-month. And most of all she didn’t want the Army to send her grandson, Willfred, back to Baghdad after his treatment in a military hospital.
Just a few months earlier Barbara Lindstrom was very proud of him going to Iraq. So proud that she placed a color photo of Willfred in her store window. It showed her grandson in his camouflage uniform, proudly displaying a machine gun. Next to the photo, Barbara Lindstrom put a sign saying “Support Our Troops,” a few U.S. flags and two teddy bears dressed in camouflage uniforms. Back then, in March, the 66-year-old grandmother was convinced that sending Willfred and his comrades to Iraq was the right thing to do. “They should have gone much earlier to give Saddam no time to hide his weapons,” she said. But by July, Barbara Lindstrom had changed her mind.
The turning point came when her grandson was attacked by an Iraqi civilian who nearly cut off two of Willfred’s fingers with a knife. In return, Willfred shot the Iraqi dead. After this incident, he couldn’t sleep at night, suffered from nightmares and lost his appetite. “Now there is only one thing left that I want,” said Barbara Lindstrom. “Bring our boys back home as soon as possible.”
Officially, the U.S. government declared the war to be over in May. But for a lot of Americans it seemed not over at all. Almost everybody seemed to have a neighbor, a friend, a family member who was serving in Iraq or at least knew someone who had a relative there. More than 150 U.S. soldiers were killed in the 4 months after the war started, more than in the 1991 Gulf war. The Iraq mission divided the nation more than someone with a foreigner’s point of view might have thought. For example, in my country, Germany, the public display of pro- and anti-war sentiments almost completely disappeared. But many citizens in the U.S. continued to show very explicitly where they stood. While walking through the streets in the Twin Cities of St. Paul and Minneapolis, a visitor could hardly go more than one block without encountering large signs in front yards and windows expressing opinions on Iraq. Whether they said “Liberate Iraq” or “God Bless Our Troops” or “War Is Not The Answer” or “Peace,” all the signs bore witness to how this war continued to occupy the minds of many Americans.
“I don’t know a single person who still supports this war,” said Heidi Erdrich. The young literature professor knelt in front of her little detached house in St. Paul’s university area, pulling weeds between the stairs. “Wage Peace” said the big sign in her front yard. Heidi and her husband, John Burke, planted it in the ground when the war started. They bought it for $5 from a local peace group, just as tens of thousands of other people in St. Paul and Minneapolis did. After the war was officially finished, a lot of their neighbors took down their anti-war signs, Heidi Erdrich said. “But the war isn’t over yet,” exclaimed Burke, sitting down next to his wife. “So we will keep our sign until it is really over and the U.S. Army is replaced by international troops.”
Burke, who wore a large peace sign on his T-shirt, said that the number of people opposing the Iraq mission was growing constantly. He felt the latest opinion polls confirmed his view. According to a CNN-Time poll in mid July, only 55 percent of Americans approved of the way President Bush was handling Iraq. A few months earlier, other polls counted support for the president to be nearly 80 percent. The constantly rising number of dead U.S. soldiers seemed especially to weaken the support for Bush’s position. By late summer, an ABC-Washington Post poll reported that for the first time more than half the people interviewed found the number of U.S. casualties to be unacceptable.
Evidence of conflicting opinions sprouted up everywhere
A crack in public opinion ran right through U.S. society, it seemed, and sometimes even right through a front yard. “Our lawn sign expresses our own ambiguity about the issue,” said Mariana Shulstad, a retired lawyer in Minneapolis. The sign that she and her husband, Craig, put up in their front yard said “Peace” in large letters. But above that, in smaller letters, it said “Support Our Troops.” The sign was a compromise — between the two Shulstads and the neighbors with whom they share the garden.
“We were opposed to the war from the very beginning because there was not enough evidence for the weapons of mass destruction,” said Shulstad. Just before the U.S. government started the war, she and Craig stuck a sign in their yard proclaiming “Say No to War in Iraq.” A few weeks later, after returning from a vacation, they found another sign — “Support Our Troops” — put on top of theirs by their neighbors. “They were convinced there was enough evidence to go to war,” Shulstad said. “And since we didn’t want to appear like we didn’t support our troops we just accepted the second sign, even though I disagree with the government’s position.” After the war was officially declared over, the Shulstads replaced the anti-war sign with a peace sign. The pro-troops sign remained.
In the eyes of George Kronschnabel, people like Craig and Mariana Shulstad, Heidi Erdrich and John Burke were a small, radical minority. “God Bless Our Troops,” said a sign in his front yard on St. Paul’s Summit Avenue. Next to the sign a U.S. flag waved in the wind. Kronschnabel bought the sign for $5 from a former U.S. colonel. The retired soldier was tired of all the anti-war signs that popped up in his neighborhood, so he designed his own sign in red, white and blue. After receiving a lot of requests for the sign from neighbors, he started mass producing them and sold about 10,000. After the end of the official war, a lot of troop-supporters removed their signs. Kronschnabel didn’t because he thought the mission was not yet over, either in Iraq or at home.
“War is always bad, but someone had to stop Saddam,” he said. His support for Bush was not weakened by the lack of evidence for any weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. “That country is big enough to hide those things,” he said. “I am convinced that sooner or later we will find them.” His neighbors with the peace signs in their front yards annoyed Kronschnabel. “Those peaceniks just don’t have anything better to do than go to their vigils. If it wasn’t about the war it would be about something else,” he fumed.
Meanwhile, Barbara Lindstrom in her lock-shop found her own way of ending the war. In late July, when the television news channels repeatedly broadcast pictures of the first Minnesota casualty in Iraq, she simply decided to switch to something else. Instead of CNN and Fox News, the small TV set in the corner of her shop showed cartoons all day.
Notebook
By Lars von Törne, WPI '03