By Daniel Hartill,Staff Writer
The Great State of Maine Air Show featuring the Blue Angels continues today in Brunswick.

BRUNSWICK – As tens of thousands of people gathered Saturday to watch the Navy’s Blue Angels fly, hundreds marched, drummed and protested outside, objecting to the war in Iraq and the display of weaponry in the sky.

“Nobody can tell me the real cause of this war,” said Dexter Kamilewicz, who marched to Brunswick Naval Air Station’s main gate carrying one of several banners listing the names of U.S. soldiers who have died in the war.

He marched with his wife, Gretchen. Together, the Orr’s Island couple hoped their son, Ben, a soldier in Iraq with the Vermont National Guard, would join no such list.

Their fear lasts “every single hour of every single day,” the father said.

About 250 people, members Peace Action Maine and other groups, made the milelong trek from downtown Brunswick to the base.

Behind a banging drum and a giant puppet of a dove, they carried signs calling for President Bush’s impeachment, the end to the Iraq war and their opposition to the two-day air show’s consumption of fuel by the Blue Angels.

Many wore stickers with the slogan, “Real angels don’t drop bombs.”

First-time protester Pamela Mount of Arrowsic waited just outside the main gate carrying a sign with her own sarcastic message: “War is fun. Sign up now.”

Mount said she is sickened by the Blue Angels’ mission: to encourage people to join the Navy.

“They entrance the adolescent minds into thinking it’s glamorous,” Mount said.

Nearby, protesters erected a 9-foot-feet-tall “Recruitment Roulette” wheel. The wooden wheel included stops as varied as “come home a war hero” to “lose a body part.”

Saturday’s rally was led, in part, by Kathy Kelly of the peace group Voices in the Wilderness.

A regular visitor to Iraq who boasts of breaking U.S. travel sanctions 26 times, Kelly said Saturday’s protest was unchanged by the recent decision to close the local base.

“We should convert every base to peacetime work,” she said.

Inside the base – behind signs reading “no protesting allowed” – the air show seemed to proceed without problems.

An accurate spectator count will still be days away, said John James, spokesman for the Brunswick base.

However, crowds seemed as large as ever, he said. Past air shows have drawn as many as 125,000 people in a single day.

Spectators waited up to an hour to purchase hamburgers and twice as long to board a displayed P-3 Orion, the primary aircraft based at Brunswick.

The planes are scheduled to be moved to Florida’s Jacksonville Naval Air Station beginning as early as 2007.

The local base may again play host to an air show that year, James said.

This might also be the last.

“Maybe that’s why so many people are here,” James said, watching the thousands peer into the sky.

The interest may lie with the Angels.

Even before the six-plane team screeched into the sky Saturday afternoon, accompanied by the soundtrack to the movie, “Top Gun,” the pilots exuded a rock-star bravado.

One gave the OK sign to his teammates, sitting in formation on the runway, their engines revving, and the crowd over the cockpit microphone.

“We’re locked, cocked and ready to rock,” he said.

And thousands cheered.

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