With a huge rush, 1000 demonstrators streaked across the North Parking Lot, where speeches were still going on. With three Vietcong flags in the lead, they raced up to a line of 20 soldiers and U.S. marshals and stopped. Then they strung themselves out over 300 yards, standing there jaw-to-jaw with the troops.

It was like capture-the-flag. In small groups, the demonstrators rushed out across the line. Soldiers stopped them. The demonstrators went limp, and marshals dragged them off to paddy wagons around the corner.

"Cowaaaaards!"

There was a lot of frustration. One pretty blonde girl, who identified herself as Gretchen Begen of New York City, ran over the line yelling, "Come on, come on," to the crowd. But nobody came. She flopped down in the grass and marshals carted her away on a stretcher. Another girl, with magnificent eyes ringed in green and black paint and wearing an Indiana sweatshirt, got carted away, too. She was mad at the people she left behind sitting in the grass. She sat up in her stretcher and screamed, "Cowaaards!" When we asked for her name she just glared at us. We felt useless.

Under a bush, at the feet of a rifle-toting MP's, a cluster of ten young people were puffing marijuana. They were grinning. Nearby, a woman with stringy black hair was reading poetry aloud and eating a thickly-buttered bagel.

The Washington Post reported Monday: "Three antiwar demonstrators were arrested for picking flowers in Lafayette Park [across from the White House] and several others were injured in an ensuing foray with police at dawn yesterday...[Police] said more than a dozen flowers had been plucked and then tossed to the ground. Picking flowers is a violaiton of Park Service regulations."

Meanwhile, at the main entrance, 500 demonstrators flew at the huge doors. Some got inside the Pentagon and were immediately arrested. MP's and marshals responded toughly. Demonstrators were hauled up and tossed away. Scores were arrested.

At another entrance Dr. Spock, Dellinger, writer Dwight Macdonald, M.I.T.'s Noam Chomsky, poet Robert Lowell '37, Mrs. Dagmar Wilson of Women's Strike for Peace, comedian Dick Gregory and about 20 other notables were being hemmed in by soldiers as they sat arguing about the war in a one-sided conversation with the troops. The troops kicked and shoved them, and they were scared. Finally, after holding Spock and friends captive for over an hour, the soldiers moved back. Dellinger and several others were arrested.

Around dinnertime, the tear gas went off. A Pentagon spokesman went on television to deny that the soldiers had fired it. He suggested the demonstrators set off the grenades themselves. But scores of eyewitnesses, many of them newsmen, have said that they saw the troops fire the tear gas. Who had the gas masks anyway?

Screaming Babies

And behind the beetle-faced canvas and plastic masks, paratroopers, it is rumored, cried when they saw women carrying off screaming babies, 15-year-old boys vomiting on the side of the road, and girls clutching scarves to their faces so they wouldn't gag on the sandy air.

Two young women, who had bought $100 box seats to a U.N. Concert at Constitution Hall, were denied admission by federal agents Saturday night, The Washington Post reported. The reason: they had brought with them an anti-war cartoon--embracing men of many nations--which they wanted cellist Pablo Casals to autograph, one of them said. The problem: their box adjoined that of Secretary of State Dean Rusk. And the dove cartoon was interpreted as a possible threat by Rusk's protectors.

The gas masks formed a phalanx and marched straight down the road at us, rifles slanting ready. It was a terrible feeling, knowing that they were your people, and that maybe with money and an education they could be in your place and that maybe without them you could be in theirs.

One Negro demonstrator was screaming hysterically at a Negro soldier: "How can you do this to us? Don't you realize you're fighting for Wall Street? How can you do it?" The Negro soldier spoke to his sergeant, then was replaced at his station.

The Rev. Martin Luther King, conspicuous by his absence, telegramed Mobilization leaders: "You who are protesting with your bodies...are the creative spirit that will end the war."

Later Saturday night, two soldiers were seen to drop their rifles, take off their ammunition belts and disappear into the crowd. One was later seen being led away by MP guards.

They were, perhaps, repelled by the horrible violence that was going on around them, violence in which they were participating. Rifle butts smashed on girls' heads. One bald man was crunched so hard you could hear his skull crack.

One Harvard student, who described himself as an "apolitical hippie," sat outside the Mall Entrance in the cold night until 6 a.m. Sunday. Late Sunday afternoon, he was speaking in a hoarse crackle, his hands still frozen-pink. He was a changed man politically: "You get there and you see someone get his head split open for nothing. You can't leave. You've got to sit there, to do something. That's when you become committed."

In the fourth paragraph of a long Associated Press dispatch on the weekend's events, it was learned: "The demonstration had the official blessing of the North Vietnamese government."

What was so different about the siege of the Pentagon? Here there was real resistance, a fierce kind of underdog, "guerillish" power kept the demonstrators going. Maybe they found out what it was like to be Vietcong. But more significantly, maybe they found out what it is like to be American in a country of a different kind of American. That is a hard thing. But inside, as one Harvard demonstrator said, "it makes you feel unbelievably clean." Said another: "Demonstrations will never be the same. We've turned the Pentagon upside down. Things will never be the same again." Something was beginning