Iraq war in focus: Home-front Journal
Small town, smaller pocket of resistance

By Ron C. Judd
Seattle Times staff columnist

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WATERVILLE, Douglas County — By the time that Saddam statue did a face plant in Baghdad, the hearts-and-minds battle was all but over on the edge of Washington wheat country, most of which lined up in war-support formation long ago.

But small pockets of resistance remain. One of them is seated in a front booth at 103 W. Locust St., and he's just getting warmed up.

"You'd have to be a mental midget, an absolute moron, to believe Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction that threatened us," blurts Ray Kope, restaurant owner, Korea and Vietnam veteran and, by his own admission, a man living on borrowed time.

The entire premise for the war, he says, is a "fantasy" — engineered to "satisfy the sadistic appetite of the American people."

We interrupt what he calls his war "spewing" — a completely nonrepresentative, but nonetheless fascinating, public-opinion sampling — to explain the borrowed-time part.

About 10 years ago, Kope, who long ago helped fly chemicals such as Agent Orange into Vietnam, then fly bodies of U.S. soldiers back home, was pulling out of the Waterville airport in his kit-built, single-engine airplane when the engine conked out. His shiny aluminum pride-and-joy flopped some 300 feet to the ground like a shotgunned quail. Kope's spine was shattered. Head split open. Body shrunk by three inches. Worst wounds she'd ever seen on a live person, said the nurse.

"I should be dead," Kope admits.

Had they been within earshot this day, lots of people in quiet, isolated, conservative Waterville probably would agree.

It's easy to stereotype, but in our recent travels around the state, support for the war and the U.S. troops fighting it has been particularly evident in rural communities like this one. Opposition, if it's there, is rarely expressed.

A quaint, brick-building, wheat-farming town on a plateau northeast of Wenatchee, Waterville, population 1,175, is notable mainly for twin barns along U.S. 2 painted with old-time ads for "Dr. Pierce's tonic." The other claim to fame for the home of the Waterville Shockers: It was closest to the bull's-eye for two meteorites now on display at the Douglas County Museum down the street.

It is one of the last places on the planet you would expect to stop for lunch and get fed an earful, from an aging vet raising his own young grandson, about brain-dead Americans supporting a war led by a president whose own election "reeked of fascism."

But such are the threads, we keep discovering, of the wonderfully messy fabric of America.

Resume spew.

Vietnam started with a lie. Ditto Iraq, Kope insists.

The lie?

That the U.S. was ever threatened by Vietnam. Or Korea. Or Iraq.

"How?" he asks, waiting a long time for an answer while customers savor his wife Judy's scrumptious corned-beef sandwich, made with her own fresh French bread. "How? How could they be a threat to us?"

He hears reports that a majority of Americans believe Iraq had a role in the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. Proof positive, he declares, that a majority of Americans can't think and change channels at the same time.

"There's more evidence that Florida was training terrorists than Iraq," Kope says, referring to flight-training schools used by hijackers. "Maybe we should attack the whole state of Florida. It makes just as much sense."

Although one of his three businesses in town bears a sign supporting a Libertarian candidate in a long-ago election, Kope says he's not a political partisan, and lives on a completely different planet from peace protestors.

"I'm a realist," he says.

He is chain-drinking java and speaking in a low, steady voice in his cafe, Kopey's (he added the "y" because it's his nickname), where Christmas garland still hangs from the ceiling over his head.

A Kansas City native, Kope moved his business to Waterville more than 25 years ago from Spanaway. He wears Dickie's coveralls, a Mack truck hat, hiking boots and a lapel pin that says: "We support our troops." His 10-year-old grandson, David, comes by to kid the old man about something, and Kope flips it right back — but nearly melts in a smile.

A waitress, without asking, serves everybody a piece of birthday cake honoring Kope's 70th. Waterville residents — mostly wheat farmers who express quiet support for the war — file by outside as Kope's single birthday candle burns down to the frosting.

He starts spewing about TV reports that surrendering Iraqi troops were found to be equipped with chemical-warfare suits.

"Why would the Iraqis have gas masks? Figure it out," he says, referring to what he calls America's own shameful record of chemical dumping in Vietnam. "They know about our track record. Of course, we don't like to talk about that."

Judy Kope, nuking a slice of pie in the microwave, winces and shoots the old man a dirty look. She lowers her voice to a whisper and winks: "I think he spent too much time in Vietnam."

Ray Kope thinks so, too. But middle America, he believes, might have a different view of the war if it had spent some time there itself.

He has learned to view with ample skepticism wartime statements emanating from buildings in Washington, D.C.

In the early '60s, "President Kennedy — and I liked him — came out at one point and said there had only been seven people killed in Vietnam. Well, I'd (already) brought nine back, and I'd been bringing them two or three years before. I thought, gee, I must be the only one. Am I fighting this war by myself?"

The lesson: History does not always agree with first impressions. And framing one's perceptions of war in a TV screen — embedded journalists notwithstanding — can create its own fog of war, one that belies the carnage.

He refuses to watch most of the wall-to-wall coverage, turning instead to the Internet for news. It makes a difference. Much of the world watched, ad nauseam, Saddam's statue tumble this week, saw the Iraqis dance on his figurative head and heard pundits debating whether the ends justified this war's means.

Ray Kope, veteran, heard and read about the same event, and thought this:

"They're celebrating because they're expected to celebrate."

If you'd been occasionally bombed for a decade, lived through even more intensive bombing for weeks, and suddenly saw it all coming to an end, you'd be happy, too, he figures.

"I'll guaran-goddam-tee you you'd be out dancing a jig."

Kope knows he's a tiny voice in a tinier place, a little town on the edge of a bluff where the wind blows hard enough to shake the wrought-iron light posts — and drown out the spewings of an aging vet with metal rods in his back. Doesn't care.

Many of his own comrades would probably disown him. Up the road, at a highway rest stop, two other Vietnam-era vets, David Severance and Tom Baskin, are manning the coffee booth for Marine Corps League 806 of Wenatchee. American and Marine Corps flags fly behind them. Show tunes waft from a portable stereo.

Severance, a retired Seattle cop and occasional Father Christmas in Leavenworth, wears a "Freedom Is Not Free" button and red beret. He starts talking about rescued Pvt. Jessica Lynch, and when he says the words "stayed at her post," he has to stop. A tear forms in the corner of one eye.

He and Baskin couldn't be prouder of U.S. troops, all of whom, they note, are volunteers.

"They're warriors," Severance says. "They have warrior spirits."

It is a jarring — and uniquely American — juxtaposition. Equal and opposite reactions, from the same page of the map book, to a war that will live in us long after the troops come home.

Ron C. Judd: 206-464-8280 or rjudd@seattletimes.com

Harley Soltes: 206-464-8145 or hsoltes@seattletimes.com