The Friday before the "Take a Stand" town-hall meeting that would culminate Louisville's Iraq Summer, Desert Storm veteran Brian Smith spent the first day of his most unusual summer vacation yet, volunteering round-the-clock for the antiwar effort. Smith has been working with Iraq Summer since June, when its three paid staffers hit the ground in Louisville. "I've been in charge of making coffee, making smart-ass remarks and doing guerrilla ops," Smith says. The previous night, that meant joining Louisville natives and Iraq Summer organizers Aniello Alioto and Sara Choate in planting fifty bright red Support the Troops/End the War signs outside a fundraiser where McConnell was speaking on behalf of scandal-plagued Republican Governor Ernie Fletcher.

"We want to be where he is," Smith says. For two long, hot, parched months, that's where Iraq Summer, combining forces with LPAC and other peace groups around the state, has been. They've bird-dogged McConnell's fundraisers. They've organized a stream of rallies and vigils outside McConnell's home. And they've drawn in a new batch of blue-collar and military folks like Smith, who still pinches himself when he looks in the mirror and sees an antiwar protester looking back.

"Initially I supported the war," he says, "more because I felt it was a duty to support the troops because I knew what they were going to be going through. When I saw antiwar protesters here at first, they gave me a little bit of a rise, because I felt that they didn't really understand the issues and would be proven wrong." He laughs. "Now I'm spending all my spare time working with them." Abu Ghraib was a breaking point for Smith. "My only defense of the war to that point had been, 'Well, at least we're the good guys.' After that, I had nothing left. But what really activated me was the surge. I thought after the 2006 elections things would change, but they just steamrollered right over us. So I went from there to the peace rally in Washington in January." A group he met there, Veterans for Peace, later connected him with Iraq Summer. "I would never have believed, a year ago, that I'd be doing anything like this," Smith says.

Nor, for different reasons, did Alioto, who'd been teaching diplomacy and national security classes to youth leaders in Washington, DC, when AAEI's national field director, Kate Snyder, called to ask if he'd return to Kentucky to dog McConnell. "I said no. I didn't want to go work for some peacenik, 'Let's end the war and sing songs' kind of campaign. But she said, 'This is a pro-military, pro-veteran campaign. It's not antiwar; it's anti-reckless war.' Then my ears pricked up."

Alioto found even more grassroots anger back home than he'd imagined. When Iraq Summer canvassed McConnell's neighborhood, "87 percent of the people who answered their doors took an End the War yard sign. I like numbers," he says, chuckling. But Alioto has also found that "there's still a lot of organizations, and a lot of individuals, that are scared to get involved. We get a lot of backdoor help. The hardest part is letting people know that we're not the traditional antiwar movement."

The nontraditional nature of the movement is on vivid display August 28 at the Take a Stand rally. A crowd of nearly 800 packs a Bellarmine University auditorium to hear not only from the expected cast of politicians, including Congressman Yarmuth, but also grassroots warriors like Smith, who leads the Pledge of Allegiance wearing several days' worth of stubble along with his old Army infantry jacket. There's 85-year-old Jean Edwards, a legendary local peace-and-justice activist, and her 15-year-old granddaughter, who asks the question, What would Gandhi do? There's a liberal white Presbyterian minister who went to Mississippi in 1964, during Freedom Summer, followed by an African-American minister who surveys the room and declares, "We are the people that can end this war. It has always been and will always be us--the good people, the common people, the regular people. It will always be incumbent upon us, when we have had enough." There's Bill Londrigan, the state's AFL-CIO chief, echoing that theme: "This is a war of elites fought by the working people of this Commonwealth and this country." And there's Lieut. Col. Andrew Horne, who's pondering an antiwar challenge to McConnell in '08, pacing the stage talking about why he chose to lead his National Guard unit into Iraq--and why he subsequently turned into a national VoteVets spokesman against the war. Horne leads a refrain that will be echoed during the evening's culminating event, a candlelight march to the senator's home: "Hey Mitch, can you hear us? We are the people!"

The marchers are mostly solemn and orderly, sticking to the sidewalks under pink-streaked evening skies as they wind up busy Bardstown Road to the accompaniment of honking horns, then down through McConnell's leafy old neighborhood. Informed that "We're going to McConnell's," one neighbor, standing on his lawn to view the procession, urges the folks: "Blow him up!" A few doors down, a white-haired senior citizen in a blue scooped-neck T-shirt hangs over his side porch bellowing a different opinion: "Damned idiots--you're helping kill 'em!" His plump face is scarlet with fury.

On the sidewalk in front of McConnell's nondescript two-story brick condo waits a thin line of counterprotesters, most of them portly, scruffy, tattooed bikers who've parked their hogs in formation across the way. Some hold signs reading Peace Through Strength and Stand Strong Mitch, while others aim cameras at the protesters in a vain attempt at intimidation. It's impossible not to notice the irony: how much more "mainstream" the war protesters, a mostly middle-class khakis-and-polo-shirt crowd, look than the ragtag defenders of Corporate America's favorite member of Congress. Across the street, the only sign of possible life in the condo is a yellow light glowing through the upstairs windowshades. (McConnell's spokesperson will later say that the senator was in Lexington that night, helming another fundraiser for Fletcher.) When McConnell's defenders finally rumble off, Smith shakes his unruly head of black curls and grins. "They got no staying power," he snorts. "All huff, no tough."

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