Vietnam Nurse: In a jaunty pink beret and a white "Stop the War" T-shirt ("My daughter made this for me!"), Peggy Akers is carrying a colorful hand-lettered sign that says, "Another Veteran for Peace." She's 58, cheery, has flown in from Portland, Maine and is marching in the Code Pink contingent with her daughter and sister. She's active in Veterans for Peace and promptly tells me, "I was a nurse in Vietnam." If I want to get a sense of her sentiments about her Vietnam experience, she suggests, I should check out the Commondreams website which has posted a poem of hers on the subject, Dear America. ("I hear a helicopter coming in -- I smell the burning of human flesh. It's Thomas, America, the young Black kid from Atlanta, my patient, burned by an exploding gas tank... And Pham. He was only eight, America, and you sprayed him with napalm and his skin fell off in my hands and he screamed as I tried to comfort him... America, we have sent another generation of children to see life through an M-16 and death through the darkness of a body bag.")

"I just feel it's so important for people like myself to speak out about what I saw and did in Vietnam. I'm part of the conscience of this country. If people like myself don't speak about what war does, it'll never end. The images of war are not being shown to Americans. Not really. No one here knows what it's like to see a young soldier, eighteen or nineteen years old, in a body bag, or an Iraqi mother who has lost her son. If Americans really saw that, this couldn't go on.

"If it wasn't for people marching like today, if they hadn't done that during Vietnam, that Wall [the Vietnam Wall honoring America's war dead] would be wrapped around this city ten times over.

"You know," she says with excitement, "we met so many people coming in who had never marched before. From Utah, from the Midwest, from everywhere. I think we should bring our troops home and instead send in a Peace Corps -- plumbers, electricians, carpenters -- to help rebuilt that country; whatever the Iraqi people want from us, not what we want from them."

Republican for Impeachment: Approaching the rally, we notice Cathy Hickling, a financial consultant from Maryland, standing on the curb in a bright red T-shirt holding a "Republicans for impeachment" sign on a pole and can't resist a stop. "My odyssey," she says, "simply is: I've been a registered Republican for in excess of thirty years and I think the Party's been hijacked by the policies of George Bush! I think a president should be smarter than I am.

"This is my first demonstration. I felt strongly enough to come. What I hope will happen is that the Democrats and Republicans with a mindset similar to mine get people to change their minds about the direction this country is taking. Remember, Clinton was impeached for a lot less. I saw a sign that said, ‘Clinton lied, no one died,' and that just about sums it up.

"This is an antiwar protest, but I'm not here to support the idea that we should be leaving Iraq immediately. Now that we're there, we need to finish the job, but it's folly to think that the people who got us there can get us out."

"Right on!" says a woman who happens to be standing next to her.

And after just a moment's hesitation, she says it too: "Right on."

Sign of the Times: As we head into the rally, I run into Susan, a social worker from the New York area, and ask her to stop so I can copy down her sign. Its front says: "What if they gave a war and nobody came?" The back reads: "What if they had a hurricane and nobody came because... They were all at War!!" She insists I get front and back in the right order. "See, the front is that old Sixties slogan and on the back it's been adapted to the present. A teacher I work with made it. She's more artistic than I am. I was absolutely infuriated after the hurricane. All our resources were at war. There was nothing to help our people here. I was infuriated and, after thinking about it, wanted to be here with this."

The Man from Alabama: He's white-haired, wears a striped oxford shirt, and carries an "Alabama has lost too many young people to this war" sign. He's with a small group of fellow Alabamans. When I introduce myself and mention the Tomdispatch website, he responds, "Do I know it! I send it to my lists, maybe 100 people. I can't believe I'm actually meeting you here." He introduces himself as Wythe ("Get Wythe it!") Holt. I ask -- as I do of many people -- "What do you do in real life?"

"Protest," he says definitively. And then he chuckles. "But in the business world, I'm a retired professor of law at the University of Alabama. What I really do now is work for democracy, which means protesting, which is, of course, what democracy's all about. Even those nitwits who are protesting on the other side are exercising their democratic rights.

"Alabama has lost a lot of children to this war. It's making its mark on the state. The Tuscaloosa News is beginning to come out and question what's going on. So the truth is filtering through to Alabama. There are, at this moment, big demonstrations in Birmingham and in a little while we're going to be in communication with our colleagues there. We belong to Tuscaloosa People for Peace. We meet 2 or 3 times a month for discussions. We read books together. We go to protests.

"I was against Vietnam in 1971. Then, we had two busloads of people driving up here. Now we have one SUV.

"I agree with Jefferson that unless you're vigilant, you're not going to have liberty. And this country is slowly losing its liberties. But we're making liberty here today. Unfortunately, we don't make enough of it in Alabama, but we try.

"As for Iraq, I say get out now. Leave Iraq to the Iraqis. Bring our young people home this minute. All that equipment that could have been used in New Orleans and Galveston and Houston. If we want democracy in Iraq, we should encourage it, not impose it. I saw a sign earlier that said, ‘Read between the pipelines,' but it's deeper than oil. Oil just happens to be the greedy object of the moment. The real struggle is between those of us who want to speak up for ourselves and want to have a government we have a part in, and those who have other goals, which are mostly selfish and greedy, and are interested in imposing their wills on others."

Mother Lion: She's holding up a hand-scribbled sign which reads, "Not with my sons." She's Robbie from New York. "I'm a writer and a mom. I have three sons. One is almost 19, one's almost 18. I wrote this sign. I mean it. You know, the mother lion. I feel so outraged. It's the outrage of mothers -- and fathers too -- to see children sacrificed for these lies. We have to start getting angry and that's why I'm here.

"I thought of this sign when I was home and identifying with those mothers who had lost their sons. Seeing all of these banners here representing each child who has been killed, that is just so graphic. You stop thinking of the war as being fought by another group of people. I feel this outrage, this energy. Like Cindy Sheehan said, we have to get back to our humanity, and so we mothers have to begin to be teachers. We've lost our way."

College Students: Samantha Combs and Andrea Solazzo are weaving happily through the crowd, wearing matching tie-dyed T-shirts, pink and blue. Samantha's says, "Peace Takes Time, Not Lives!" They're startled to be stopped, embarrassed at the thought of being interviewed. Extremely charming, a little giggly, they're both 18, from Ecker College in St. Petersburg, Florida and they've spent 19 hours on the Alliance for Concerned Individuals' bus to get here. ("It's a campus group that focuses on everything that deals with human rights," Samantha tells me.)

Why are they at the demonstration? The responses are brief and to the point. Samantha: "So much money's being spent in Iraq, when it should be spent here."

Andrea: "My cousin went to Afghanistan and then Iraq. He's been trying to go to college for years and he keeps getting called up! I don't think Iraq's worth his life."

And then they exclaim in unison, "Our group's leaving," and with another round of embarrassed giggles they bound off.

School Teacher: Sadida Athaullah is a social studies teacher in metropolitan Baltimore. She's wearing a blue "March on Washington/End the Iraq War" T-shirt and a light blue headscarf. She's quiet-spoken and thoughtful. "This is my first time at such a demonstration. I'm a naturalized American of 25 years, originally from India. I gave up my heritage to be an American because I admired American values, and I don't like what this country is turning into. When the war first began, I didn't really take an active part against it. I thought it would be a quick action, over in weeks, not months, and not turning into this big, long disaster, which makes no sense to me. I don't think the Iraqis are going to drink the oil in their country. They're going to have to sell it on the open market and we could buy it like anyone else."

Father and Daughter: As we leave the rally grounds, in a milling mass of humanity and pour out onto 15th Street, the sound level beginning to rise, I notice Frank Medina in a reddish baseball cap, and on his shoulders, his young daughter in a pink shirt and bright yellow dress. As I ask for his name, she leans over and shouts out with delight: "Claire Elizabeth Medina!" He's a lawyer with the Securities and Exchange Commission. "I was at the demonstration before the war," he tells me. "And now, this is just an appalling circumstance. That's why I'm back. It's an appalling war and it needs to end immediately. There needs to be a coherent plan to turn the country back over to the Iraqis, with definite dates for the return of American troops. What can't be done is to continue to justify the war there by the sacrifices that have already been made. It's like saying that, when you've lost everything at the casino, you're going to double-down. At some point, you need to cut your losses.