War Splits Town Into 3 Factions : Opinion: In one Minnesota community, there are some who, while initially opposed to the policy, are unsure whether dissent has a place now that troops are in the field.

By RONALD BROWNSTEIN

Jan. 28, 1991 12 AM PT

TIMES POLITICAL WRITER

BEMIDJI, Minn. — War news now cascades from every radio and television in Jack and Judy Johnson’s home on the outskirts of this small northern Minnesota town.

In the living room, piles of newspaper clippings have accumulated like the snowdrifts outside the window, encroaching on the sprawl of magazines and books about the Middle East, all vying for space with photos of their daughters, Tracy, an Air Force nurse stationed in Ohio, and Julie, a lieutenant in Air Force intelligence, who was deployed to Saudi Arabia just days after Iraq overran Kuwait.

War has fixated Jack and Judy Johnson, as it has millions of Americans, and war has divided them. The divisions illuminate uncertainties and apprehensions that persist in this community despite the American flags that newly fly along the main streets to honor the troops, snapping in the winter wind as briskly as fresh hope.

National public opinion polls show the war splitting Americans into two uneven camps, with about four-fifths of the public supporting President Bush’s decision to strike Iraq and about one-fifth dissenting.

But conversations in this quiet, rural community of 11,000, situated about 250 miles northwest of Minneapolis, show not two but three distinct groups: a clear majority of supporters, like Jack Johnson; a relatively small number of outright opponents, and a volatile minority who, like Judy Johnson, opposed the drift toward war and still yearn for a peaceful solution, but are unsure whether dissent has any place now that troops are in the field.

As the struggle with Iraq continues, the battle for public opinion--so far won decisively by the Bush Administration--will be fought in towns like this, communities that traditionally frown on passionate outbursts and instinctively defer to the commander-in-chief.

To a large extent, the struggle may hinge on people like Judy Johnson and precisely on whether the fighting validates their hopes or their fears.

Although only a few dozen local men and women have been sent to the front, the war has penetrated Bemidji life as insistently as the numbing January cold. High school classes and Sunday sermons have been given over to it. One man joined a peace group that has journeyed to Baghdad in the hope of somehow stopping the fighting. Army reservist Tom Robertson, a Bemidji State University senior, has been called in by the military to fill out a will--in case he is summoned to fight. “It’s looking a little scary right now,” he says.

Above all, the war has become the touchstone of conversation, with CNN’s relentless bombardment of evanescent developments becoming the new background noise at almost any gathering.

At either pole of opinion, views are expressed with great certainty.

At the university, where a small group of students has participated in three protest marches over the past few weeks, the talk is of double standards and hypocrisy, the U.S. invasion of Panama, the failure to stand up for Lithuania.

From the other side, Jack Johnson, a soft-spoken 55-year-old former Air Force pilot with a gentle manner and opinions as firm as his handshake, sees no choice for the United States but to fight until Saddam Hussein is eliminated as a threat.

“I’ve got a daughter over there,” he told a small group that gathered to discuss the war at the First Presbyterian Church last Thursday night, “but my feeling is if we don’t take care of it now, our grandchildren will have to take care of it. We have to stop him sooner or later.”

But for Judy Johnson, and others who share her unresolved anxiety about the war, the choices are no longer so clear.

Until the outbreak of war, Johnson, a 49-year-old native Minnesotan whose thoughts tumble out in unfinished fragments of emotion, had no doubts about her course. Though she had voted for George Bush in 1988 and silently supported her husband when he flew in Vietnam, stopping the Gulf War that threatened her daughter became a “consuming” passion.

Long before the first snows, she dispatched a blizzard of handwritten letters to Defense Secretary Dick Cheney and Secretary of State James A. Baker III, to Barbara Bush, and senators and representatives she remembered from the Iran-Contra congressional hearings she watched on C-SPAN a few years ago.

“You name them,” she says, “and I’ve written to them.”

She buttonholed friends, acquaintances, strangers: people who walked into the family’s downtown Laundromat found themselves unfurling opinions as they folded their clothes. When newly-elected Democratic Sen. Paul Wellstone held a town meeting on the war, she drove 140 miles through the December night to Moorhead to add her voice in opposition--only to be surprised when her youngest daughter, Beth, a senior at a nearby college, rose to declare her belief that Saddam Hussein had to be stopped, and sooner rather than later.

In the last days before the House and Senate authorized the war, Judy Johnson bombarded Washington with telephone calls, asking anyone she could reach to give economic sanctions more time. But now that the war she resisted for months has erupted, Judy Johnson has not so much rallied to the flag as surrendered to it.

In casual conversations around town, she still wonders why the allied forces could not seek a cease-fire through the United Nations to begin negotiations with Iraq. But with U.S. troops under fire, and her family so firmly committed to the cause on which the United States has embarked, Judy has sheathed her pen, and put the phone back in the cradle.

“I feel like I’ll have to suffer through it now,” she says, sounding as though she’s trying to convince herself. “The die is cast.”

That sentiment, now common among those who had been skeptical of war with Iraq, represents a surprisingly powerful legacy from Vietnam. With memories of embittered Vietnam veterans still stinging, people of all ideologies here are enormously reluctant to do anything that could cause the troops abroad to doubt their support at home. For all the talk among protesters of supporting the troops while opposing the policy, even those unhappy with the decision to fight seem uncertain exactly what that means.

“Our people are there and it creates this chaos in me,” says Joan Bernstrom, a first-grade teacher. “To not support them now that they’re there doesn’t seem right, but I don’t think they should be there. It’s a dilemma.”

Bloody ground fighting may tip the intricate emotional balance that has silenced Bernstrom and Johnson and others like them here and elsewhere. But for now they are backing Bush--and learning to live with the ache of ambivalence.