"Some say this country's just out looking for a fight - after 9-11, man I'd have to say that's right... Have you forgotten how it felt that day to see your homeland under fire, and your people blown away?"
![]() Supporters in Texas see their soldiers as "standing up for what's right"
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The words of Darryl Worley, whose song "Have You Forgotten?" has became a favourite of right-leaning radio presenters in the USA. These "shock jocks" have been using their shows to rally the nation round the flag, and heap abuse upon anti-war protestors.
One of the presenters, Don Crawford from Austin, Texas, was recently sacked for - his bosses said - going too far.
Mr Crawford was a guest of honour at the "Rally for America" in Austin, where the Darryl Worley song had them cheering in the sunshine outside the red granite Texas State Capitol.
Somewhere between two and three thousand gathered, waving the Stars and Stripes, and holding up banners praising Bush and the troops and lambasting the French.
'Rummy can handle anything'
And what of the alleged bust-up between Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and the nation's finest military brains? No-one was having any of that:
"Rummy can handle anything they throw at him. I love him", said a lady dressed as the Statue of Liberty. "He tells the truth. He tells it like it is and he will not put up with the idiot questions he has to answer from the media. He tells it how it needs to be."
Some had driven hours across this huge state to get to the rally. Many military families were there. Jean Glass has both a son and a nephew in Camp Pendleton, a military base north of San Diego.
"My son's not over there yet," he said, "and I hope he doesn't have to go. But if he does get sent out, it won't be our government's fault. Somebody has to do it. Somebody has to stand up for what's right."
Mistrusting the media
Watching the rally quietly in the middle of the crowd was Michael Ford, a serving US Marine. As a military man, what did he think of the news coming back from the Gulf?
"It's going well. I trust in the people above me and their judgement. If they say its going well then they're not going to lie to us."
The media, Michael added, are misrepresenting public feeling in the United States. "I think the amount of support is actually much higher than the press shows you," he said.
"It's bad that the press generally only shows the anti-war protests and the anti-war statements."
Among supporters of the war this is a widely held feeling - that anti war protestors have hijacked media attention so that, in the US at any rate, an unbalanced picture of public opinion emerges in the papers and over the airwaves.
If the battle for Baghdad is prolonged, the rally war also looks likely to escalate.