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Posted on 10/30/2001 7:47:43 PM PST by Pokey78

Last week, Georgetown University held a job fair. At the booths of the big Wall Street companies and banks, students had little wait. But to talk to a C.I.A. recruiter, the line stretched for over half an hour.

Ed Friedman, 21, a senior studying at the School for Foreign Affairs, was in that line. "Two years ago," he said, "Goldman Sachs was the place to be -- even people in the School for Foreign Affairs lined up there. People were interested in six-figure salaries and they viewed the C.I.A. as not having much of a purpose."

But that was before Sept. 11. "Everyone wants to be part of this, to help," he said.

Despite questions of another quagmire, America is at the moment a weird inside-out image of the Vietnam era. The C.I.A. and R.O.T.C. are chic on elite campuses, where flags hang from dorm rooms. Police have gone from "pigs" to heroes. And many of those who complained about America's escalation in Southeast Asia are now complaining about America's hesitation in Central Asia.

In an odd role reversal, the country is more gung-ho than the administration. And the Pentagon seems more skittish about the mounting number of civilian casualties and more consumed with winning Afghan hearts than the rest of America is.

Back then Walter Cronkite famously wondered what we were doing in Vietnam. Now Tom Brokaw presses Donald Rumsfeld about whether we can ever succeed in Afghanistan unless we put in "a division-size force, seize an airport, make that the base of operations."

Just as some A.C.L.U. lawyers now secretly mutter that they want to seal our borders, and some liberals are easily dismissing their concerns about civil liberties abuses and capital punishment, so many old peaceniks are now hawky, less concerned about which group of beards runs post-Taliban Afghanistan than about aggressively going after the villains.

This is the first war since World War II that is personal. Vietnam was inspired by the domino theory, and dragged on because Lyndon Johnson and Robert McNamara did not want to lose face. Desert Storm was about keeping our gas prices low.

But they brought this war to us, and now it is about protecting ourselves and the way we live.

The terrorists have already turned Halloween into an adult holiday and stolen Christmas. Who wants to open Christmas cards or touch catalogs or go to malls? They have debilitated our confidence, both in our economy and our freedom, and made us jittery about the very breaths we take and food we eat.

President Bush went to the Yankees game with about 1,200 police officers as Dick Cheney headed back underground and John Ashcroft warned us to watch out for every single thing.

But the truth is we can't be alert because we don't know what we're looking for, and most of what we're looking for is invisible, and we don't want to fall into ugly generalizations.

The F.B.I. has gotten over 300,000 tips from Americans trying to be alert, but the agency is still stumped.

Secretary Rumsfeld says agitation for a quicker military pace is due to the American desire for "instant gratification." But that is too glib. Americans are impatient about the war because -- unless we live near a crop duster or nuclear plant or find ourselves on a plane being hijacked -- it is our only avenue for striking back.

Just as Robert McNamara once said we lost Vietnam because the government had never understood the Vietnamese culture, so Rear Adm. John Stufflebeem said yesterday that he had underestimated the tenacity of the Afghan troops because he had not understood that the Taliban "don't see the world the same way we do," or automatically accept American "inevitability."

Admiral Stufflebeem may be the last person in America not to know that Afghanistan is a stubborn and durable and bellicose place, whose history is a long tale of war.

In a speech yesterday, Tony Blair said we must never forget the twin towers and the heroes "and the menace of bin Laden." It makes me worried that he is worried that the horror is already dimming. And it makes me nostalgic for that old "Wanted: dead or alive" certainty.

If ever the United States needed historical memory, it is right now. This is a just war, and not just war.

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