Peace Chaplain

From the Book

RADICAL PEACE: People Refusing War

by William T. Hathaway

RADICAL PEACE is a collection of reports from peace activists in the USA, Europe, Iraq, and Afghanistan. A seminarian contributed this chapter about learning to love her enemies. Because of her activism, she prefers to remain anonymous.

To celebrate Armed Forces Day the military base near my seminary held an open house, a public relations extravaganza to improve their image and boost recruiting. They invited the public in for a marching band parade, a precision flying show, and a sky diving demonstration. They even offered free lemonade and cookies.

A subversive seminarian, namely me, decided to disrupt the festivities and remind people that the military's job is murder. I bought a jump suit and dyed it orange like the uniforms the prisoners in Guantánamo have to wear. I bought two U-shaped bike locks, three diapers, and a pair of old-people's rubber underpants.

All suited up, I had a friend drive me onto the base before people started arriving for the celebration. She dropped me off at the traffic circle just inside the main gate, kissed me on the cheek for good luck, and drove back out the gate. In the center of the traffic circle stood a flagpole flying the Stars and Stripes. I ran to the pole, fastened my foot to it with one bike lock and my neck to it with the other — pretty uncomfortable — and started shouting, "Close Guantánamo! No More Abu Ghraibs! Free the Prisoners!" People gawked as they drove by, some laughing like I was part of the show, some waving, some giving me the finger.

I had an anti-war speech all prepared to give the reporters. I had a bottle of water in one pocket and a bag of trail mix in the other and was wearing the diapers and rubber underpants for toilet emergencies. I was locked on for a long stay.

A couple of minutes later, a van and a truck full of soldiers drove up. The GIs jumped out and surrounded me. They stood at attention facing the traffic, blocking me off from view. The van backed in next to me. I shouted my slogans louder, and they started singing "The Star-Spangled Banner" to drown me out. To people driving in, it must've looked like a patriotic demonstration — soldiers around the flag singing to greet them.

A GI grabbed me from behind. Another wrapped duct tape around my mouth, then continued around my head to cover my eyes, leaving only a little space at the nose for breathing. I thrashed my arms in panic, but they pinned them behind my back, almost strangling me in the process, and taped my wrists together. Helpless and terrified, I got a tiny hint of what life must be like for the prisoners. Nobody said a word to me; the only sound was the national anthem.

One of them jerked the lock that was around my neck, twisting the metal against my throat. I heard the sound of aerosol spray and smelled fumes. They're gassing me, I thought. The metal on my neck got very cold. The bang of a hammer on the lock against the pole sent a shock through me, flashing pain down my spine and up to my inner ears and eyes. Three hammer blows and the lock fell off. They must've frozen it with the spray to make it brittle enough to break. Then they broke the lock on my leg and taped my ankles together.

Before today, I'd had a condescending attitude towards soldiers and was fond of quoting, "Military intelligence is an oxymoron." But I had to admit this was a brilliant counterattack. It was so well prepared, as if they'd been expecting something like this. I had told some fellow students about my plan, and one of them might've tipped off the military. I hate to think that, but it could be. We're living more and more in a society of informers, a proto-police state where the government encourages its citizens to report their neighbors for disloyal activities.

Two GIs picked me up, heaved me into the back of the van, slammed the door, and drove away. Now I got really scared. Where were they taking me? What were they going to do to me? I tried to pray, but my mind was screaming too loud.

After about twenty minutes they stopped. I could hear them whispering in the front seat. They seemed to be arguing — maybe about whether to kill me after they raped me. I'd read if you're about to be raped and you shit your pants, it's good protection — you make yourself too repulsive. I tried but couldn't.

They opened the door, pulled me out, and dropped me on the ground. I heard them unzipping their pants.

Then I felt a stream of warm liquid on my face. I turned away but caught another stream from the other side. They peed all over me, laughing but still not saying anything. Then they kicked dirt on me like a dog would do and drove away.

Maybe it's over, I thought, maybe that was it. I'd never felt worse in my life, totally fouled and degraded. Rage rose in me and turned to nausea; as I vomited, my breakfast came out my nose but clogged there against the tape, almost suffocating me. Finally I blew enough out so I could breathe. My stomach kept spasming; I was quivering all over; my throat and nose burned from acid.

I kept telling myself it could've been worse. Although I was relieved that all they'd done was relieve themselves on me, I still loathed them. I was pretty sure what they did wasn't part of the official plan but a bit of individual initiative.

I tried to pull my hands and feet from the tape but couldn't. I tried to stand up but fell back down. Giving up, I cried and cried, and the tears welled against the tape. Finally I stopped trying anything and just lay there, empty of tears ... of hope ... of thoughts. A wave of pain rolled through me, then out. The havoc of my mind stilled. In the quiet came a yearning for God stronger than anything I'd known before. My whole being reached out for the Lord.

A name rose from deep within me, and I called it out into the silence: Jesus. The name struck the hollow bell of my emptiness and reverberated through me, shimmering, fading, sounding again: Jesus. As the name pulsed within, a wash of comfort flowed over me. Like the balm of Gilead, it suffused inside, calming and steadying me. The presence of Christ increased, becoming a flow of love that encompassed me. My fear vanished, and in its place came a voice: Do you want out of this hell?

Yes!

Do you know the way out?

No.

Love is the way. You have to love even your enemies.

Oh ... that sounds familiar.

Yes, I've said it before. But sometimes we need to be reminded.

Those guys who just peed on me ... I'm supposed to love them.

I never said it was easy ... but that's the way out.

Can You help me love them?

Certainly. You need to understand that their own suffering made them do it. They have so much pain inside, and they think they can get rid of it by pushing it onto someone else. Of course that doesn't work, but it's all they know.

Thank You, I can see how that's true, and I'll work on really understanding it. Then what do I do?

Then you have to forgive them.

I'll try.

Remember I once said: "Forgive them, Father, for they know not what they do."

I still have to say that. Every day.

They're not really your enemies. They're just hurt human beings.

Like me.

Like you and everybody else. That's why I'm here.

I could feel my suffering covering me, but now it was transparent and I could see through it to those two soldiers and sense their suffering too. Theirs was just like mine. My arrogance towards them had the same roots as their aggression towards me. I thought about how they'd probably grown up, all the garbage that had been poured into them by the society and their pain-filled parents. Now they are trapped in fear and self-hatred. When they project that onto someone else and attack her, they feel better for a little while. But then it creeps back over them, worse now.

You're starting to understand. Sometimes great pain can help us see.

By hurting you, the men locked themselves deeper into their own prisons, into hell. That's what sin is.

In my mind I held the image of two GIs I'd never seen and tried to love them. It was hard. I kept hoping Jesus would say something so I could stop. But He didn't. I had to bring love up within me and send it out to them. As I kept trying, I could feel the love of Christ flowing into me, filling me until I was brimming, and then overflowing out to them. It was all same love, just like it was all the same pain. Now the guys looked different, like two hurt children. Children of God.

If they hadn't done that awful thing to you, you wouldn't have learned this, and this is more important.

Now I see You're right. I can always take a shower, but what You showed me will stay with me. Thank you, Lord.

Thank them, too.

Even that? Oh no, it's really not easy, is it?

No, but it's worth it.

As I tried to be grateful to the guys for this lesson, gradually I felt an attitude of gratitude, not just to them but to everything that had happened to me in life because it had all brought me to where I was now, having my first deep communication with Christ. Definitely worth it. Suddenly happy, I laughed into my duct-tape gag.

Now you've got it. Now you're ready to free yourself. You can do it.

I moved my hands back and forth, twisting them against the tape. Before, I had tried with sudden jerks, but now I worked slowly, tugging with one hand and then the other. Gradually the tape gave way, and I was able to pull one hand out. I raised it in the air like a wonder, full of the power of gentleness. The twisting had broken my watchband, though. I freed the other hand from its sticky manacle, then peeled the tape from my head, tearing out clumps of hair as I went, blinking into the sudden light, gulping fresh air.

I was near a dirt road surrounded by brush and trees. Wet, sticky and stinky, I unfettered my feet, stood up, shook my arms and legs to make sure they still worked, and shouted in rage and joy. I'd worn a T-shirt and shorts under the jump suit, so I pulled the filthy thing off and threw it into the bushes.

Jesus, I prayed, You were there all the time, but now I know You better. We're a team. And I'll keep trying to love the people life sends me.

I walked down the road, hoping it was in the right direction. But loving people doesn't mean letting them abuse me. I didn't want these guys to think what they'd done was OK. Then they'd keep doing it.

I considered going to the police. Although I'd never seen their faces, the urine would have their DNA. But how to find them? There were thousands of GIs on the base, and I doubted that the military would be cooperative. Plus if I filed a complaint, my name would go on an official list. As it was now, I didn't know who they were, but they didn't know who I was either, and that would help with a plan that was forming in my mind.

I needed to learn to love all soldiers, to stop thinking of them as enemies and see their divine nature, to realize they do what they do because of their own suffering. If I didn't have any more contact with them, I'd probably slip back into my old attitudes. But if I was a military chaplain and pastored them, I'd be continually reminded of their true worth. I could actively love them.

You can love people and still oppose their behavior. Jesus loved the money-changers while He was driving them from the temple. A parent loves a child but still has to punish it sometimes.

Soldiers are worthy of love, but to really love a violent person means trying to change them, to keep them from harming others and thereby themselves, to save them from their own ignorant acts. Love carries obligation.

As I walked home, I decided to become a chaplain after I'm ordained and work for change. But not in the nice liberal sense of joining the system and trying to make it a little more humane here and there. That ameliorative approach is an appealing idea, but it hasn't worked. It just strengthens the structure by making it function better and reducing the pressure for transformation. I think at this point we need to break the military, the government and the corporations, not improve them.

I know this sounds severe, but if we read US and British history without nationalistic blinders, it's obvious we're continually intruding in other countries to further our own economic interests. American-British foreign policy is an ongoing crime against humanity. At home this is concealed with altruistic rhetoric about saving the world from vile foes, but in the target countries, our aggression and its purposes are very clear. People there are now responding with what we label terrorism, but actually we are the top terrorist armed to the teeth with weapons of mass destruction. The alliance of US and British elites threatens the rest of the world in a whole spectrum of ways.

During World War One, the British persuaded the Arabs to fight on their side by promising them independence. Thousands of Arabs died in battle for the Brits because of this promise of freedom. But after the victory, Britain refused them independence. Instead they installed puppet kings — Faisal in Iraq and Ibn Saud in Saudi Arabia — to rule in their interest.

After World War Two, Britain and the USA pressured the United Nations into confiscating Arab land to form the state of Israel, making the Arabs pay for the crimes of the Germans. In addition to providing a nation for the Jews, Israel would be a forward base for Western economic and military power in the Mideast.

In the early 1950s, the USA and Britain overthrew the government of Iran because it tried to nationalize its oil industry, which was under Western control. We installed the Shah as dictator, and he promptly gave the oil back to us. Then he began a twenty-five year reign of terror against his own people. His secret police jailed, tortured or killed hundreds of thousands of Iranians who opposed him. Since they knew he was kept in power only by American military aid, they began hating the USA. They finally ousted the Shah, but then the CIA started subverting the new government, trying to bring it down. At that point, the Iranians fought back by holding US Embassy officials hostage, which was a mild response, considering what we had done to their country.

In the mid 1950s, Egypt decided to nationalize the Suez Canal and use the income from it to help their people out of poverty. They were willing to pay its British and French owners the full market value for their shares, but Western governments and Israel responded violently, invading and bombing Egypt into submission.

Countries have the right to nationalize their resources as long as they pay a fair compensation, so what Iran and Egypt did was legal. The Western response, though, was illegal aggression in violation of international law and the United Nations charter. It roused in its victims a deep resolve for revenge.

The USA and Britain committed similar atrocities in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Indonesia, and Afghanistan, all years before Muslims turned to terrorism to finally drive us out of their part of the world.

No wonder they hate us. Imagine how we would feel if a foreign country were doing this to us. We'd be fighting back any way we could.

Patriots don't like to be reminded of this history. They claim that any country that had our power would do the same, so it's better we do it than the other ones. But that's moral blindness.

The present and historical fact is that the Anglo-Saxon varieties of imperialism and capitalism are particularly harsh, exploitative and expansionist. They need to be stopped.

This view offends many Americans because we're raised to link our country and God. America is God's country, so naturally He's a patriot. And a patriarch. We're taught this theology in Sunday school, and it stays with us.

Once we overcome our conditioning, we can see that our military exists to defend a cruel economic order with strategies of mass murder. The chaplain's job is to soothe the consciences of the soldiers so they keep doing their job. That might be a fine way for some chaplains to show their love for them, but it wouldn't be right for me. I want to wake up their consciences, to make them see what they're doing and help them quit. I want to bore from within, find soldiers who are discontent and convince them to resist violence.

Of course that will bring down the wrath of the commanders. They may even send me to jail, but that would provide a public platform for exposing the viciousness of the military. Lots of Christians, from St. Paul to Martin Luther King, have gone to jail for their beliefs. I'm not in their league, but I'll serve in the way I can.

_____________

"Peace Chaplain" is the first chapter of RADICAL PEACE: People Refusing War, which presents the experiences of war resisters, deserters, and peace activists in the USA, Europe, Iraq, and Afghanistan. Recently released by Trine Day, it's a journey along diverse paths of nonviolence, the true stories of people working for peace in unconventional, often spiritual ways. Other chapters are posted on a page of the publisher's website athttp://media.trineday.com/radicalpeace.

William T. Hathaway is an adjunct professor of American studies at the University of Oldenburg in Germany. His other books include A WORLD OF HURT (Rinehart Foundation Award), SUMMER SNOW, and CD-RING. A selection of his writing is available at www.peacewriter.org.

The Real War Heroes

From the book, RADICAL PEACE: People Refusing War

by William T. Hathaway

"That must be them." Petra took one hand off the steering wheel and pointed to a group of soldiers about two hundred meters away, standing along our road next to a high chainlink fence topped with barbed wire.

Traffic was light, but Petra said, "I don't want any other cars around." She pulled off the road and stopped. "Get everything ready."

I crawled into the back of the car and opened the rear hatch to give access to the interior and to raise the license plate out of sight. We wore caps and sunglasses to be less recognizable.

When the road was empty, she started driving again. We approached the soldiers, who were walking in the grass, stopping often to pick things off the ground and put them in sacks they were dragging.

"There's Rick." Petra slowed and drove along the shoulder. A man turned his head at the sound of our car crunching gravel, dropped his bag, and ran towards us with a slight limp. While the guards shouted for him to stop, I thrust my arm out, grabbed Rick's hand, and pulled. He lunged forward and dived into the open hatch, banging his leg on the edge. A guard was swearing and groping at the holster on his belt. Rick scrambled in, knocking off his glasses, and Petra floored the gas. Our spinning tires hurled gravel behind us then squealed over the pavement. The car slid halfway across the road before Petra brought it under control, and we sped away.

One guard was waving his pistol at us but not aiming it, and the other was punching buttons on a cell phone. Some of the detention soldiers were clapping and shouting in envious congratulations, others just stood staring.

I closed the hatch as Petra rounded a corner and headed for the autobahn. Rick lay on the floor trembling and gasping, holding his leg in pain. I gripped him on the shoulder to steady him. "Way to go! You're on your way out of the army."

His tension exploded into laughter, then tears. "Thanks, thanks," he spluttered.

"It's not over yet," Petra said.

Rick breathed deeply, scrinched his eyes to block the tears, and clenched his fists. "Not going back."

I tried to calm my own tremors.

Petra drove away from the base through a section of fast-food franchises and striptease bars that bordered it. Rick put his glasses back on; bent at the bow, they sat crookedly on his nose. We put up the rear seat so we could sit without attracting attention, then waited at the stoplight by the autobahn entrance for thirty seconds that seemed like ten minutes, surrounded by other cars full of American soldiers and German civilians, none of whom noticed us. Finally Petra roared up the onramp. German autobahns have no speed limits, and soon the Volkswagen was going flat out at 160 kilometers per hour.

From a small suitcase I pulled out civilian clothes for Rick, and he started stripping off his uniform. "Last time I'll ever wear this thing."

As he took off his shirt, I got a whiff of the sour stench of fear, which I knew well from my own time in the military. He stuffed the fatigues into a trash bag, then put on corduroy pants and a cotton sweater. Now he looked like a young German, but with the buzz cut hair, almost like a neo-Nazi. I set my cap on his head.

At the first rest stop we pulled in and parked beside a van. I gave him the suitcase and a wallet with a thousand euros in it. We shook hands, then hugged. I clapped him on the back. He got out of the car and kissed Petra on the cheek, crying again as he thanked us. With a combination of a glare and a grin, he pushed the bag with his uniform into a garbage can. I got into the front seat of the VW; Rick got into the back of the van, giving us a V sign. The van pulled away, headed for Sweden, where Rick would apply for asylum.

Petra re-entered the autobahn, much slower now because she too was crying, quietly, on a resolute face. "He's out of the war," she said in her throaty German accent. "No one's going to kill him, and he's not going to kill anybody." She took the next exit, then wended back over country roads towards her home. "Now I'm exhausted."

"Me too, all of a sudden," I said. "This one was hairy. We broke more laws than usual."

"Good. Such laws need to be broken. I'll make us some coffee."

Petra had been the first of our group to meet with Rick. She worked in Caritas, the German Catholic social agency, and a priest had brought him to her office. Rick was absent without leave, AWOL, from the army, determined not to go back, but didn't know what to do. He'd heard from another soldier that the Catholic Church sometimes helped, so he went there.

The priest was in too public a position to personally do much, but he introduced him to Petra because she was active in Pax Christi, the Catholic peace movement. The priest and the social worker had a tacit "don't ask, don't tell" agreement about her counseling work with soldiers. She didn't volunteer information, and he didn't pry.

Petra had various approaches to freeing soldiers. She could help them apply for conscientious objector status, but these days CO applications were usually turned down by the military. She had a degree in clinical psychology and was skilled at teaching GIs how to get psychological discharges, to act the right amount of crazy and handle the trick questions the military shrinks would throw at them. But now those too were usually denied. The military needed bodies — didn't care if they were crazy.

If neither of these methods worked, and if the soldiers were desperate to get out, she would help them desert, a drastic step because it risked years in prison for them and major hassles for her.

Petra has never been arrested, but based on experiences of others in our group, she could expect to be charged with accessory to military desertion and with aiding and abetting a fugitive. The court process would be a severe drain on the energy and finances of both her and our group, but it was unlikely that she'd actually go to prison. With public opinion already so opposed to this war, the German government wouldn't want to risk the protests. But she'd probably get a year on probation, lose her job, and have trouble finding another one.

Why did she take the risk? Petra's grandfather had been an SS trooper, the kind of Christian who unquestioningly supports authority. His children reacted by becoming atheists. Petra became the kind of Christian who opposed authority, including the church hierarchy. She felt stopping war was more important than her personal security.

When she met Rick, she was impressed by his sincerity and also his desperation. He told her he'd got married after high school to a co-worker at a restaurant, an illegal immigrant from El Salvador who was a few years older. They wanted to have children but couldn't raise them on minimum wage. He wanted to become an electrical engineer but couldn't afford college. The army's offer of tuition aid and electronics training was better than life at Pizza Hut, so he enlisted in 2001.

The plan was that she'd work in the towns where he was stationed. After his four-year hitch, he'd go to college while she continued to work, and after college when he had a good job, they'd have kids. Eight years seemed like a long time to get started in life, but by then he'd have a real career.

After 9-11, the army needed infantry troops more than electronic specialists, so they took away his needle-nosed pliers, gave him an M-16, and flew him to Afghanistan. First they made him excavate corpses from the collapsed caves of Tora Bora, full of the reek of rotting meat, hoping to find bin Laden's. Then they sent him on night ambush missions along the Pakistan border: staring out from a machine gun bunker with goggles that made everything glow green and yellow, shooting anything that moved after dark, shipping the bodies out in the morning on the supply helicopter, still hoping to find bin Laden. Finally he was assigned to round up men from the villages around Kandahar and send them to interrogation camps. But there weren't many men in the villages. They were either dead or in the mountains, and the army didn't have enough troops to comb the mountains.

After eight months his wife divorced him.

In one of the villages an old woman walked by them with her goat. The goat wore a pack basket. The woman reached down, patted the goat, and blew them all up.

Rick woke up lying in a helicopter surrounded by dead and wounded friends. He felt he'd become one of his ambush victims being shipped out. The army would be disappointed to find out he wasn't bin Laden.

It turned out later the woman was the mother of two sons who had been killed by the Americans.

With shrapnel wounds, a fractured leg, and a twisted spine, Rick was evacuated to the US hospital in Landstuhl, Germany, where after five months of treatment he was pronounced fit for active duty and given orders for Iraq. By then he'd heard about Iraq from other patients. He panicked, went AWOL, then met Petra.

She helped him clarify his options. He could apply for conscientious objector status or a psychological discharge, but with orders into a combat zone, his chances of success were nil. But if he deserted, there was a good chance that Sweden would accept his application for asylum.

Rick told Petra later that what finally settled his decision to desert was learning that in Sweden the state helps pay college expenses. You don't have to join the military and kill people just to get an education.

But before our group could make arrangements, Rick got arrested for AWOL and assigned to the detention barracks. If they'd known he was planning to desert, they would've locked him in the stockade, but simple AWOL has become too widespread for that. He was busted down two ranks and assigned to sixty days hard labor, at the end of which he'd be sent to Iraq still under detention.

After visiting him in the detention barracks, Petra told us he seemed like a man on death row. His psychological condition was deteriorating so rapidly that she was afraid he would kill himself rather than go back to war. He begged her to try to get him out.

The current work detail for the detention soldiers was twelve hours a day of picking up trash along the fence at the boundary of the base. They'd finished inside the base and had just started working on the outside, a group of ten detainees with two guards.

Petra and I wouldn't have risked the snatch inside the base, but we were pretty sure the guards wouldn't fire their pistols outside the base for fear of "collateral damage." Shooting the local population is bad for public relations.

I alerted our sanctuary network in Germany and Sweden and arranged the logistics to get Rick into a new life.

Since I'm a US citizen, if I got arrested for helping soldiers desert, I'd be sent back to the homeland for trial and probably to prison. It's worth the risk to me, though.

I do this work because my past is similar to Petra's grandfather's. I was in the Special Forces in Panama and Vietnam. I'd joined the Green Berets to write a book about war. During our search and destroy operations, I kept telling myself, "I'm just here gathering material for a novel." But our deeds have consequences that affect us and others regardless of why we do them. I'm still dealing with the repercussions from my involvement, and my work in the military resistance movement is a way of atoning for it.

I've met many veterans who never saw combat but still feel a burden of guilt. Just being part of an invading force and abusing another country pollutes the soul. Under the hyperbole, there's some truth in Kurt Tucholsky's statement, "All soldiers are murderers." The military exists to kill people, and everyone in it contributes to that. Even as civilians, we finance it.

Having got medals for combat, I know that the real heroes are the people like Rick who refuse to go, who stand up to the military and say no. If they're caught, the government punishes them viciously because they're such a threat to its power. Deserters and refusers are choosing peace at great danger to themselves. I wish I'd been that morally aware and that brave.

When this book is published, I'll have to stop actively participating in desertions and will have to break off direct contact with our group. Once I go public, my e-mails and phone calls will probably be routed through Langley, Virginia, and that would endanger our whole operation.

Ironically enough, when I left the Special Forces, the CIA offered me a job. If I had accepted it, I could now be that G-13 civil servant who is perusing the messages of dissidents, trying to find ways to neutralize us. The road not taken.

Now living in Germany, I can see how important it is to resist such things in their early stages. In the 1930s many Germans were afraid to oppose their government as it became increasingly vicious, hoping it wouldn't get too bad, hoping they'd be spared, hoping it would end soon, but then bitterly regretted their passivity after it was too late.

Better to go down resisting. Better yet to change it while we still can. It's clear now that Obama isn't really going to change things, so we have to do it ourselves.

"The Real War Heroes" is the first chapter of RADICAL PEACE: People Refusing War, which presents the experiences of war resisters, deserters, and peace activists in the USA, Europe, Iraq, and Afghanistan. Recently released by Trine Day, it's a journey along diverse paths of nonviolence, the true stories of people working for peace in unconventional, often spiritual ways. Other chapters are posted on a page of the publisher's website athttp://media.trineday.com/radicalpeace.

William T. Hathaway is an adjunct professor of American studies at the University of Oldenburg in Germany. His other books include A WORLD OF HURT (Rinehart Foundation Award), SUMMER SNOW, and CD-RING. A selection of his writing is available at www.peacewriter.org.