The grainy flicker of exploding bombs lit up television screens across the Harvard campus March 19. News stations broadcast dim green views of downtown Baghdad as it faced the most powerful air force ever to fly in combat.

Like the news from reporters embedded with American and British troops, the reaction of students and professors to the invasion of Iraq was fragmented and often contradictory.

The day after a squadron of American stealth bombers opened the war with a failed decapitation attack against former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, Matthew R. Skomarovsky ’03 spent the morning making last-minute preparations for a student walkout from classes to protest the war. As a leading member of the Harvard Initiative for Peace for Peace and Justice (HIPJ), he helped bring about 1,000 students, professors and others to a midday anti-war rally in Harvard Yard.

Jeffrey C. Munns ’03, a midshipman first-class in the Reserve Officers Training Corps (ROTC) and former president of the Harvard Defense Forum, says the ROTC schedule remained unchanged. He spent the day “probably like most people on campus, watching the television.”

“I know for all of us in the ROTC program, [the war] was very close to us,” says Munns, who was a battalion commander last fall. “People who we knew were over there fighting and involved in the area, in danger.”

For another Harvard military man, Lt. Jake Heller ’99, the second day of the war brought front line action.

According to The New York Times, Heller participated in a successful Navy Seal assault on two Iraqi offshore oil terminals in the Persian Gulf.

“We’re going to change the world tonight,” Heller reportedly told the men under his command. “Let’s do it right.”

United States troops surged across the Kuwaiti border on Friday, March 21, and seized part of the southern Iraqi port town of Umm Qasr.

Declaring that Saddam Hussein had ties to international terrorism and was hiding biological and chemical weapons, President Bush ignored strenuous European objections to military action. He invoked a new doctrine of preemptive strikes against nations that threaten American security.

Despite the war’s popularity in the nation at large, the conflict found strong opposition on campus.

A Crimson poll of 400 students taken March 20—the day after the war began—showed that 56 percent of students were “strongly” or “somewhat” opposed to the war. Thirty-four percent of students said they supported the war. Almost 10 percent remained undecided.

But Harvard’s opposition to the war was not unconditional—slightly more than half of those surveyed who said they were opposed or undecided said they would have supported the war if the United Nations Security Council had explicitly backed U.S. military action. The poll had a margin of error of 4 percent.

Shortly after ground troops entered Iraq, most students left Cambridge for spring break.

When tanned and rested undergraduates returned a week later, American tanks were bearing down on Baghdad, and business continued as usual at a campus where the student opinion on the war remained sharply divided. The fighting, which lasted less than a month, was brief and decisive. But at Harvard, the clarity of America’s military victory has done little to bring together the fractured views of students and professors.