On July 4, 1941, in upstate New York, just a few years before the well-known Vietnam veteran Ron Kovic, another man whose life bears many striking similarities to Kovic’s was born. Not the household name that the focus of Tom Cruise’s star-powered Oliver Stone biopic has become, another man has also devoted himself in the years since his experiences as a soldier to waging peace and speaking out against the forces of oppression that govern our world. A man by the name of S. Brian Willson.
Like Kovic, Willson grew up in conservative, white, working class middle America. He describes himself as a good student in his youth who played baseball, attended Baptist church every Sunday, and influenced by the anti-communist sentiments of his father, wanted to be a FBI agent when he grew up.
In 1966, Willson was drafted into the armed forces and joined the Air Force. By this time Willson had already begun to question some of the values of his fundamentalist reactionary upbringing and quickly gained a reputation as a troublemaker during his training stateside. When he was finally deployed to Vietnam, he openly spoke out against the war that he witnessed killing so many innocent civilians.
After being honorably discharged and finishing his law degree, Willson began on his journey as a self-described “recovering white male.” He went on to educate himself about history, nonviolence and the rational economic philosophy of E.F. Schumacher and gradually found himself growing more and more radical.
By the 1980s, Willson was organizing his fellow veterans for action against war and advocating mutual aid and began to organize nonviolent Veterans Peace Action Teams that traveled to Nicaragua. The Peace Action Teams marched through war zones and landmine-strewn roads against the CIA-sponsored contra forces and worked in solidarity with the locals who were victims of the contras’ brutal tactics.
But nearly two decades after his experience in the Vietnam and in the wake of the dangers he faced in Central America, Willson’s life was permanently altered in an instant in the country of his birth. Although he never directly saw combat in the military, and was lucky not to have been too far into harm’s way in Nicaragua, on September 1, 1987*, Brian Willson was to receive his own scars of battle, courtesy of the very government he wore a uniform in service of so many years before.
That summer, Willson and fellow members of the Veterans Peace Action Teams had been waging a campaign of nonviolent protest and civil disobedience against U.S. arms shipments to El Salvador, and planned to blockade a munitions train outside of the Concord Naval Weapons Station in California. They announced their intentions well in advance with the knowledge that their actions would most likely result in arrest, and Willson and two other veterans placed themselves on the train tracks in order to force the train to halt. But unbeknownst to the protestors, the train’s crew was under orders not to stop.
The train did not stop, and two of the protestors managed to scramble to safety out of the way of the passing train. Willson was not so fortunate. He lost both of legs below the knee and suffered severe head trauma, but he survived.
In the twenty years since the incident that cost Willson his legs, he has been more active than ever in the peace movement, speaking out and organizing against U.S. foreign policy, writing, and living his life with the undying tenacity of those who refuse to rest while injustice is being perpetuated around the world. In Willson’s mind he did not merely lose part of his own body on that day, he gained what he calls his “third-world legs,” that put him in direct solidarity with so many other victims of imperialism worldwide.
In 1987, I was only eleven years old but I remember very clearly learning about what happened to S. Brian Willson by chance while watching the news that night. I remember it so well because it was one of the first moments that I actually found myself questioning my country’s government.
Like many boys growing up in middle class American homes in the 80s, I was easily drawn in to the excitement of jingoist Reagan-era Cold War cultural relics like G.I. Joe, Rambo and Red Dawn. I didn’t know anything about the realities of the rest of the world outside of my own other than that the Soviets seemed to “suck” and the U.S. military “kicked ass.” But watching the news as they reported about the carnage of some guy in California’s poor legs, I wondered how anything could possibly be right about rolling a train right over the body of a nonviolent, unarmed protestor like that.
That vision was swiftly swept into the recesses of my memories, and although I never really thought about Willson after that or even learned his name until many years later, the alternative ideal that he represented stuck with me after that. The courage of men like that, willing to stand up against the brute aggression of the world’s most powerful military force, to stand up for poor people around the world who the richer nations consider to be in the way of progress, made a much deeper impression on me than the two-dimensional “heroes” of so many cornball 80s action epics.
To me the true revolutionary spirit of America, the spirit we should be seeking to preserve is best represented by this country’s rebels, people unafraid to go against the tide of public opinion, people willing to stick their neck out for anyone around who is lacking the same liberty that gets paid lip service every year on the 4th. That isn’t to suggest that we should enshrine folk heroes like Willson and Kovic as alternatives to the usual patriotic icons, but rather to perpetuate the idea that what we really need, what really serves humanity best is more of the courage, more of the selflessness that winds up looking so conspicuous among men like those and absent from the rest of us.
So I hope you will allow me the chance to try and tell more stories like that of Willson, speak from my heart and mind about what I feel is wrong, and maybe start a conversation or two. With this blog I hope to add my voice to many others who want to heal, not harm. And with that, I close with more of Willson’s words from his out of print autobiography, On Third World Legs:
Healing requires an honesty, a brutal honesty, and an atonement. It means dealing with having been complicit in marauding a whole nation. It means developing an understanding that the marauding of the earth in the end is the marauding of ourselves, the destruction of our own souls, the destruction of our essence as human beings. It's painful dealing with these issues. To take justice seriously requires major changes in the way we think and feel and experience life. It means saying of other human beings on this planet that we are all equal. "We are not worth more, and they are not worth less.”
*FYI: On September 1, 2007, the Nevada Shakespeare Company will be premiering an original work, On Track, based on the life of S. Brian Willson. The play will be performed at Dell'Arte's Carlo Theatre in Blue Lake, California and the audience will have a chance to participate in a forum with Willson and the cast after the play.
No comments:
Post a Comment