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by Greg Frost

BOSTON, (Reuters)-Peace vigils and rallies against war in Iraq are taking place out in U.S. towns and cities, drawing hundreds of thousands of participants.

Student strikes are disrupting college campuses, where old protest anthems like "We Shall Overcome" mix with the tinny sound of speeches belted out over load hailers.

The scene may resemble the Vietnam-era U.S. student movement. But scratch the surface and it soon becomes clear that this peace push is strikingly different from that of the 1960s when it was a movement of the young, of university students and of those on the political left.

Participants in current anti-war protests cut across the spectrum of ages, races and backgrounds and include many who would consider themselves mainstream Americans. They are joining more predictable crowds of college students, environmentalists, socialists, anarchists and other activists.

John Llewellyn, a 45-year-old computer industry worker from Knoxville, Tennessee, is among the tens of thousands of people who turned up at a recent anti-war protest in Boston - the city's biggest demonstration in at least 30 years.

A former "long-time Republican," Llewellyn said he had never protested against anything in his life and admitted he did not fit the mould of an anti-war activist, but said President George W. Bush's policies had gone too far.

"It's gotten to the point that it's scary," said Llewellyn, who was visiting Boston with his family. Although turnout at anti-war rallies has been strong, polls show that most Americans support the war in Iraq.

Still, many of Llewellyn's fellow protesters said the war has stirred something within them that had lain dormant for decades and, in some cases, their entire lives.

"This is the first time I have ever done something like this," said 66-year-old Jung Ming Wu of Acton, Massachusetts, as he gathered with thousands of other protesters gathered in a park in Boston. "It's very emotional."

Victoria Carter a 46-year-old actuary, said her appearance at the Boston rally was her first since taking part in an anti-apartheid protest decades ago.

"I usually trust the government, but this time it's different," said Carter, who lives in the Boston area.

Eli Pariser, the international campaigns director of MoveOn.org (http://moveon.org), an online political network that claims more than 1.3 million U.S. members and another 700,000 around the world, said many of those involved are not "the usual suspects." "They're ordinary folks who often have never been politically involved before and consider themselves patriots," said Pariser, who is based in New York.

"But they feel so alarmed by the direction the country is going and possible consequences of war that they feel like they have to get involved."

The participation of many middle of the road Americans is no accident. Some anti-war groups have consciously reached out to the mainstream by avoiding some of the more strident rhetoric and confrontational tactics of recent left-wing campaigns such as the anti-globalisation protests at the Seattle World Trade Organisation talks four years ago.

Some anti-war strategists have strived to cast their cause as a patriotic one that loyal Americans can embrace as part of the country's moral conscience.

Technology also aids their cause.

Armed with e-mails and the power of the Internet, anti-war activists organise protests in hours, not the days or weeks it took their predecessors. One of their tactics before the war began involved bombarding the White House and Congress with electronic mail and faxes in a bid to block telephone lines.

Joseph Gerson, a 56-year-old Boston-based pacifist, marvels at the speed at which rallies are put together, and he envies the breadth of information available to protesters online.

"I spent a big part of the Vietnam War era organising anti-war protests in Arizona. We were pretty isolated.

There was a right-wing monopoly newspaper, and we were dependent on what outside speakers would bring in or what we got in the mail. That was slow," said Gerson, a former classmate of Bill Clinton at Georgetown University in the 1960s. Gerson said he is stunned by how quickly the anti-war movement has grown, noting that it took years to reach a critical mass of people opposed to the conflict in Vietnam.

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