{ the calling}


from that thing! It’s dangerous!” Noah Weaver, here with his grand-


parents, is scared. “I felt like I was going to suffocate,” he says later. “And the sad thing,” adds his grand-


father, Paul Weaver, “is that it was totally unnecessary. The city didn’t need to let it happen like that. They weren’t doing their jobs, and I think it was de- liberate. They wanted to deter people from going to the rally.” The Weavers will encounter another Metro jam later in the day, at Arlington Cemetery.


Maybe they’ll be flying Beck in a helicopter. That’d


be really wild to see him just drop down to the stage on a rope.”


“ “There were police at the entry with


assault weapons,” Noah says. “And I set down a bag on the side-


walk, and they didn’t say anything,” his granddad says. “I could have been a ter- rorist setting off a bomb.” Now, at Foggy Bottom, an African


American Metro worker comes along and fiddles with one broken escalator. It lurches into motion. The crowd erupts with delight. The Metro guy grins. And then the lieutenant colonel


glides skyward. When he hits street level, there are two peppy young green- shirted volunteer marshals standing at the mouth of the escalator. Henthorn high-fives them both, simultaneously.


A


t the rally, my seatmate, Dale Unroe, unfurls an immense blue flag reading “Don’t Give up the Ship.” It’s a replica of a banner flown by a victori-


ous Naval commodore, Oliver Hazard Perry, on Lake Erie during the War of 1812, and Unroe is in patriotic pique. “Maybe they’ll be flying Beck in a heli- copter,” he speculates gleefully. “That’d be really wild to see him just drop down to the stage on a rope.” There is no helicopter and no rope,


however, and the rally itself is rather anticlimactic for the Ohioans. By the time they reach the Mall, at 9:30, it is so swarmed they’re relegated to a spot amid trees, with no view of the stage or the giant video screens. Beck’s open- ing prayer comes over the loudspeakers pretty well, but for much of the next three hours, it sounds as if the voices have been dunked underwater. A woman named Kathryn Koehler


is especially peeved. A retired Ohio State immunology instructor, Koehler is white-haired and chirpy. As she waits out the rally in a lawn chair, she says: “I can’t hear a word they’re saying. This is kind of bad, isn’t it? And if we have to go back in the heat of that Metro, I’ll die. We won’t do this every weekend, now will we?” Henthorn busies himself by walk-


ing the perimeter of the entire crowd, roughly three miles, in search of por- table toilets to which he can direct his charges. The toilets are precious few, with excruciatingly long queues, and when Henthorn comes back, he de- claims, “Whoever planned this thing was no logistician.” He stands and lis- tens to the amplified murk for a few minutes, but soon his knees and his feet are killing him. We retreat from the crowd and sit


down under a tree, where Henthorn tells me that when he was an airplane mechanic in An Khe, Vietnam, in 1966, he was exposed to Agent Orange for four months. “I was sprayed every day,” he says. His joints have ached ever since. The Department of Veterans Af-


fairs does not recognize Agent Orange as a cause of Henthorn’s joint pain, he says, adding that VA still gave him an 80 percent disability rating. “I accept that,” he says. “But when you’re really hurting,” I


ask, “does your patriotism ever wane?” Henthorn purses his lips, regarding


14 The WashingTon PosT Magazine | OctOber 24, 2010


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