<span>The nerve center, such as it is, for the protest is the Crawford Peace House, a ramshackle affair in the middle of the town. The house has a kind of hippie dorm room feel, with overstuffed couches and white boards offering rides to stranded protesters. Since the beginning of last week, as Cindy Sheehan's protest made the media and blog rounds, people have been traveling here, mostly from around Texas, but many from further out. Cars are parked on the side of the road for blocks in all direction. Under a massive canopy tent, donated by an Italian company, food and drinks are piled haphazardly, volunteers mill about, and signs declare the presence of various semi-organized groups: Code Pink, Gold Star Families for Peace, Veterans Against the War. There's a lot of vets here, many who served in Vietnam but others whose unlined faces and high-and-tight haircuts suggest more recent service. There's also a lot of folks who don’t fit the professional protester mold (though you can find those here, too). Two women from Dallas admit they don’t know why they came -- they drove in on the spur of the moment, bringing a backseat full of food for lunch and dinner. Other volunteers are weeding the stone "labyrinth" out back (the vaguely Zen-like garden is a favorite with the young kids). One woman came in from Indiana; she saw Sheehan on television earlier that week and, as she put it, "I told my husband, 'That's it, I'm going.'" A charter bus from San Diego is due in any day now.
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There's a lot of stuff flowing into the Peace House. In addition to the aforementioned tent and the volunteer kitchen corps, an anonymous donor sent roughly sixteen pounds of Godiva chocolate, perhaps $500 worth. Cindy, who admits she's not much of a chocolate person, nibbled on a box and distributed the rest to those at the House. Sixteen pounds of high-end chocolate goes a long way.

Of greater importance are the financial donations made to the Peace House. The organization's bank account was virtually empty on Monday; by Saturday, reportedly $80,000 had come in, mostly over the Internet. It's a pittance compared to the two million just raised by the President at the Broken Spoke ranch the other night, but it's more than enough to keep the protests going for now.

Cindy Sheehan is at the Peace House right now, an imposing presence. Since Sheehan is taller than virtually anyone else there, people are drawn to her like metal filings to a magnet, offering their wishes, their hopes, their praise. She smiles at a dozen disposable cameras. Ricardo, a graying vet who served as a "tunnel rat" in Vietnam, presents her with a rosary. Sheehan speaks briefly with him, then moves on.

Is Sheehan a grieving mother who happens to be a war protester, or a war protester who happens to be a grieving mother? For those gathered in Crawford, the question is of no import, while for those elsewhere, the distinction is critical. Amongst other things, a letter on the Internet attributed to Sheehan talks about an Israeli conspiracy to invade Iraq; Sheehan denies the letter is hers and there seems to be no evidence linking her to it. Sheehan has been lionized by Maureen Dowd and vilified by Michelle Malkin, but the true situation seems to lie in the middle: Sheehan's grief and her opposition to the war are real and heartfelt, but that doesn't make her positions absolutely right.

Volunteers run shuttles from town center to the protest site. They pass two mild counterprotests -- a couple of bikers whose signs counsel the President to "stay the course," and a mobile diorama displaying the Liberty Bell flanked by two massive tablets inscribed with, unsurprisingly, the Ten Commandments. (Many of the local ranches also have pro-Bush signs at their gates.) Then it's a long drive on a two lane country road caged in greenery, bright with the rain that had come through earlier that day. Police and state troopers are using the Broken Spoke ranch as a staging area, and police cruisers passed us two at a time. (Some people present earlier alleged that counterprotesters were also using the ranch as a parking area, though we were unable to confirm that.) 

The first thing you notice as you approach the protest site is the long sweep of crosses, stars of David and Muslim crescents, each marked with the name of a fallen soldier or Marine. Only five hundred were up on Saturday, but five hundred crosses stretch a long way down the road. The impact of that memorial was sudden and shocking; like the Vietnam and Oklahoma City memorials, or the excavation pit that was Ground Zero, it has power beyond what words convey, and beyond the political point it was intended to make. (On Monday night, a pickup truck ran over the crosses, apparently deliberately.)

The protest site itself sits on the intersection of two roads and a turnaround, marked by a pickup truck and a bedsheet proclaiming "Welcome to Camp Casey" (after Sheehan's son). It's not exceptionally large, but up to a few hundred people have parked their vehicles and set up chairs, tents, and awnings. It's not an organized protest by any means, though many anti-Bush signs lay propped against the fenceposts. In fact, the only people waving signs were the counterprotesters across the street, whose numbers dwindled throughout the day. The four counterprotesters leaned halfheartedly on their SUV; with the protest consisting now of small groups of people sitting around discussing politics, there wasn't much interest in sparking conflict. When a small group of protesters went over to talk with them, the conversation looked more warm than heated.

The real conflicts had occurred earlier, when counterprotesters drove or were bussed in en masse. One bus was filled with neatly-dressed counterprotesters from an evangelical church. As the protesters broke into a chorus of "God Bless America," the counterprotesters began chanting, "We don’t care!" One protester, a Vietnam vet who had flown medevacs from combat zones, became increasingly agitated as a group of counterprotesters singled him out for abuse. One of the omnipresent helicopters chose to do a low overflight at that moment, and the man broke down weeping.

After the Bush motorcade sped by, automatic weapons aimed out the windows, and the evangelicals left, one woman said, "I hope [the counterprotesters] are Raptured -- we don't want them around anymore."

In fact, the church-organized counterprotest was virtually the only religious group on display, save a priest and a pastor who came out from Dallas to join the protest. Amongst the protesters, animus against evangelicals, even from those protesters who self-identified as Christians, was high.

The coordinators at the Peace House, trying to live up to the name, asked shuttle drivers to help out ill-prepared counterprotesters. But even these simple gestures -- bottles of water, rides to their cars -- were fraught with partisanship. One driver found a middle-aged group walking three miles back to their cars and offered to give them a ride; as one man gratefully accepted, his wife yanked on his sleeve, hissing, "Don’t you take anything from these people!" (For my part, neither my support for the invasion nor my vocal admiration of Paul Wolfowitz got brickbats thrown at my head.)

By the afternoon, most of the counterprotesters were gone and the parachute media had flown back out, leaving a few local camera teams, Air America, and a tent filled with kids from an Orange County weekly. One guy from CNN International took a break in a camp chair, chatting with other journalists; Gary Page, a former Green Party and Democratic candidate for Congress, was helping a co-worker hand out Air America and anti-Bush bumper stickers. Jim Wilson, an amateur filmmaker who for the past year has documented veterans who oppose the invasion of Iraq, lets his dog, Bones, lounge in the shade. Sheehan and the other Gold Star Families for Peace members had hunkered down for a semi-private meeting with pro-war Gold Star families, another conversation between the two sides that appeared friendly enough.

So what to make of all this? Not even the most optimistic protester thought their actions could change the course of the war, or even convince the President to meet with Sheehan. (Though I suspect the Secret Service would have preferred to shut down the entire protest as the motorcade came by, so the White House is by no means ignoring the protest.) Instead, the protesters seem to be using this to galvanize themselves and others, turning this sleepy town and its one famous resident into the focal point of liberalism in a powerfully conservative state. Virtually every protester spoke about how politically isolated and helpless they felt, and how Sheehan's quixotic quest gave them, often unexpectedly, something to focus on, a cause to follow.

The real question is, what happens next? Some declared their willingness to make Crawford the headquarters of anti-Bush protest. Others had made up their mind to follow Sheehan to Washington when Bush leaves Crawford at the end of August. And others are looking ahead to a protest scheduled for the end of September in D.C., which they hope to make as large as Martin Luther King, Jr.'s march to the Lincoln Monument. Whether all this energy -- or, as one long-haired Vietnam vet put it excitedly, "positive vibes" -- outlasts August will tell if it is more than mad blood.