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In early February, the war in Iraq came home to this small railroad town on the Nebraska prairie where farms begin to give way to high plains.
Seven thousand miles away on a Baghdad street, a bomb exploded beside Army Sgt. Randy J. Matheny's armored vehicle, killing the 20-year-old McCook High School graduate and stunning his small hometown.
"It caused us all to reexamine what we were thinking," said Walt Sehnert, who has run a popular bakery on McCook's main street since 1957. "Those of us who were adamant about the war had to stand back and take a deep breath."
Across Nebraska, there has been a lot of reexamination lately.
Although politicians here still score points by poking fun at vegetarians, this deep red state, which has voted for a Democratic presidential candidate only once since Franklin D. Roosevelt, finds itself playing a central role in the congressional war debate.
Nebraska's two U.S. senators cast the critical votes last month to pass a bill that would force President Bush to start withdrawing U.S. troops from Iraq.
And one -- Republican Chuck Hagel -- has become one of the war's most fiery critics. Hagel, who was an infantryman in Vietnam, recently suggested Bush could be impeached for defying the will of the American people.
"It's an odd position for Nebraska," said former GOP congressman John Y. McCollister, who represented the state in the early 1970s and gave Hagel his start in politics as an aide. "I thought most Nebraskans believed that when a country goes to war, that war should be supported and if there are really serious differences, they should be discussed privately."
Even now, anxiety about the war is expressed more often with subdued frustration than strident opposition in Nebraska, whose population is less than half that of Los Angeles.
And peace activists in the state capital of Lincoln still draw only a few hundred people to their demonstrations.
But the votes by Hagel and Democratic Sen. Ben Nelson seem to resonate in a state of tightknit communities where a soldier's death is felt personally and where a tradition of prairie populism still rewards politicians who speak their minds.
"You know, there isn't much here," said McCook Mayor Dennis G. Berry, who is also the principal of the town's junior high school and one of its elementary schools. "We don't have mountains. We don't have beaches. There are no professional sports teams. It's 110 in the summer and below freezing in the winter. But we have each other…. And in a small town, a death impacts everyone.
"Nebraskans like to win, whether it's on the football field or the battlefield," he explained. "But there's this feeling of where is this going, and will this ever end?"
Clustered around a main street that rises gently up a hill away from the railroad depot and a cluster of grain elevators, McCook is like hundreds of small towns eking out an existence on the Great Plains.
But if the grand marquee outside the Fox movie theater and the elegant civic buildings bespeak a time when the town heralded its status as the midpoint on the rail line between Omaha and Denver, McCook still proudly clings to its heritage as a cradle of Nebraska's maverick politics.
A century ago, a young progressive judge in McCook was elected to Congress and became a Nebraska folk hero for taking on his party and some of the nation's most powerful companies.
Like Nebraska's other famous rebel, William Jennings Bryan, Sen. George W. Norris opposed U.S. involvement in the First World War, complaining that big business was stampeding the nation into the conflict.
Then, at the height of the Great Depression, Norris, a Republican, campaigned vigorously for Roosevelt and championed government-subsidized projects to bring electricity to rural America, most famously through the Tennessee Valley Authority.
Today, Norris' modest 1886 home, complete with an unsmoked cigar in his study, is lovingly preserved on McCook's Norris Avenue, just a few blocks uphill from Sehnert's bakery.
And Norris' successors lay claim to his dissident legacy.
Nelson, who also grew up in McCook and served two terms as a popular governor, has consistently bucked his party over
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