S. Brian Willson lives his life with the kind of intensity that makes some people uncomfortable. His is an intense commitment that makes some people feel guilty, the kind that would cause a lesser person to call him a kook and a more sincere and honest person to wonder, Where does he get that? and, Why don't I have that kind of commitment in my life?
The answers lie within each of us, Brian would say, and this 46-year-old Vietnam veteran has searched long and hard for his own. Born on the fourth of July, Brian embodied everything in his early life that such a patriotic birthdate would suggest. But somewhere along the way, Brian started asking questions, and the realities of his own experience -- most notably his participation in the Vietnam War -- imparted some very disturbing answers, as well as a lot of new questions.
But recently Brian's commitment -- and its cost -- have mostly inspired people, thousands of people all around the world. The way Brian sees it, though, he's nobody special. He just happens to be the one the train ran over, the one who survived being run over by a train.
It was last September 1 at the Concord Naval Weapons Station in Concord, California. The Concord installation is the starting point for the shipment of millions of dollars worth of bombs to Central America, and groups called the Nuremberg Actions and Veterans Peace Action Teams had decided to fast, vigil, and sit on the tracks for 40 days. They hoped to stop, or a least delay, the trains carrying bombs.
September 1 -- the anniversary of the beginning of the Veterans Fast for Life, in which Brian and three other veterans had fasted for 47 days -- was their first day. The Navy munitions train moved down the track toward the five people on the tracks and did not stop.
Four people were able to jump off the tracks, but Brian didn't make it. The train struck him and dragged him 25 feet, severing his right leg, badly mangling his left, and severely injuring his skull. Brian's 14-year-old stepson, Gabriel, was yelling, "You killed my dad! You killed my dad!" Holley Rauen, Brian's wife of 11 days and a licensed midwife, saved his life by using her skirt to stop the flow of blood from his severed and mangled legs.
Brian doesn't remember anything after that, but friends tell him he was in surgery for nine hours. Holley had to authorize doctors to amputate his left leg. In addition to losing both his legs, Brian also lost all feeling in his skull (as well as part of his skull bone) and in his lower lip. But this isn't so bad, compared to what could have happened. "They don't know why my head didn't get knocked off," Brian says.
Brian has two artificial legs now, which he walks on quite nimbly with the aid of a couple of canes. He also dances. During Brian's most recent fast on the steps of the U.S. Capitol, prior to the latest congressional vote on contra aid, some people saw Brian dancing and asked him about it. "Well," he said, quoting Emma Goldman and completely ignoring the practical nature of the question, "If I can't dance in it, it's not my revolution."
Brian is also a diehard St. Louis Cardinals baseball fan who almost always has a Cardinals baseball cap on his head (and a copy of Martin Luther King Jr.'s speech on the Vietnam War in his pocket). He considered it a special blessing that his team was playing in the World Series when he got out of the hospital. The Cardinals, along with movies by Abbott and Costello, Laurel and Hardy, and the Marx brothers, have been major elements of his quick recovery.
But Brian doesn't rest much. His latest goals include the establishment of a "citizens peace force" in Nicaragua, which would be something like the Peace Corps, he says, and an "institute for the practice of nonviolence."
A congressional hearing into the events at Concord held last fall proved little more than a whitewash of the Navy's actions. But classified reports recently made public indicate that the train crew had been ordered not to stop the train. It is unclear who issued the order and why. Meanwhile, the three-person train crew has sued Brian for causing them to suffer post-traumatic stress disorder.
Brian and Holley have filed their own lawsuit against the Navy and the train crew, charging them with driving the train at the demonstrators, with no intent of stopping, in order "to discourage and intimidate them" from exercising their constitutional rights of free speech and due process.
I interviewed Brian on January 28 in Washington, D.C.
-- Vicki Kemper
Vicki Kemper: I'm especially interested in what has brought you here for a second fast on the steps of the U.S. Capitol. And by that I don't mean why you're here fasting, but the personal journey that has brought you to this place in your life.
What are the events and forces that have taken you from Vietnam and a very conservative background to the Veterans Fast for Life and then to Nicaragua and the Concord Naval Weapons Station and back to the Capitol steps?
Brian Willson: The first time in my life that I asked any questions at all was when I was at a conservative Baptist college. And my questions were really only related to the nature of Christianity. I had decided I wanted to become a minister, so I wanted a Christian education before I went to seminary. All of a sudden, almost without warning, I was asking questions about the church and the rules I had been raised to believe were part of Christianity.
I started asking the second level of questions when I was in law school in '65 and '66. I was getting a master's degree in corrections and a law degree, and I became very interested in criminal law. So I lived in this jail for 10 months. I decided that jail was counterproductive to helping people who commit crimes get straightened out.
And then I was drafted in '66, out of law school. I was in the Air Force for four years, and I went to Vietnam in '69. During the training at an Army base before arriving in Vietnam, something else happened in me. Part of the training was to bayonet these dummies and shout, "Kill! Kill!" and I found myself unable to do that. I had never thought about it before. It never occurred to me that I might find that offensive.
I was 27 when I went to Vietnam. There I was, exposed to attacks and being very aware of the bombing missions and how many people were being killed. I became incredibly aware of what I now think of as the American lie.
It wasn't just the lie about the war, it was a lie about much of what I had been taught about life. It all seemed suspect. The whole notion of how one lives their life in this country. I was questioning the whole system. I had a major transforming experience.
For many years after Vietnam, I was relatively successful in following a fairly normal professional life. But I was very restless, and I never lost a sense that something was fundamentally wrong in my country. But I just put it aside.
From 1970 on, I was steadily employed in some fashion, either in a private business or with an agency or organization that enabled me to work at something that I really believed in and that was somewhat harmonious to my own evolution. I was a consultant on prison issues to the Cincinnati, Ohio city council, and later a dairy farmer for two years in upstate New York. For two years I was a legislative aid on prison issues for a state senator of Massachusetts, and then I was vice president of my own dairy company, manufacturing all-natural dairy products. After that I was director of a Vietnam veterans outreach center for two years.
Then around '81 I began having some vivid memories of Vietnam. And I think there were two factors contributing to that. One was a beginning awareness of U.S. policy in El Salvador and Nicaragua. Then I witnessed a fight that really brought it all back.
I wasn't particularly a Rambo, but I had plenty of retaliation in me. So I started going to veterans rap groups to get out my rage, and then I started with some other vets something called Veterans Education Project. We started going into high schools, talking with students about war and peace. I started going to rallies speaking out against the war in Central America. But I wasn't a member of any peace group; I was just a vet coming out.
I also had become very intellectually curious about nonviolence -- to find an alternative way of talking about peace other than through the just war theory. I couldn't see how we could get anywhere with military solutions.
So I was looking for an alternative, which I discovered initially in Tolstoy. That led me to Gandhi, who had been motivated by Tolstoy and Thoreau. And Gandhi led me to King and A.J. Muste.
And then in the '80s, I began to feel complicit. I had felt complicit from Vietnam, but in some ways I had worked through that. But I was feeling this constant responsibility, "Oh my God, I'm a citizen of this country. And even though I don't agree with the policies of my government, how do I take responsibility for policies that are done in my name?"
I started thinking about how we could begin to express ourselves as citizens in more clear and demonstrative ways, and Gandhi and King have given me clues. I guess it was to withdraw consent, to commit civil disobedience. I've never even been arrested for doing civil disobedience.
All this didn't start meaning much to me until about four years ago. I started thinking a lot more, and I concluded, "I need to withdraw my consent from the government. And I want to do it in ways that are very meaningful to me."
I'm not much of a bandwagon joiner. I really have to think things through. I'm a very conservative person. It takes me a long time before I feel clear that I'm at a place that's right for me.
I also realized that we have a code of law [the Nuremberg Principles], established after World War II, that pertains to individual responsibility. The ultimate enforcer of the violation of international law is the citizen of each country. I realized working at the veterans outreach center that the Vietnam experience was very profound because the war was a policy of this country and not a policy of individual veterans.
How could we explain the lessons, the insanity of Vietnam, to people who had supported the war but had not experienced the insanity of it? Society had detached itself from the meaning of Vietnam, and we veterans felt very alone. This nation wasn't able to deal with why we spent $400 to $600 billion dollars in Vietnam over 10 years; and I realized that if we couldn't deal with that issue, we couldn't deal with anything.
I didn't know where to turn. I could just talk about the truth of my own feeling, but most people couldn't respect or understand that. I began to wonder how war could continue if we didn't consent to it. Why weren't we chaining ourselves to the front doors of the offices of the members of Congress who vote for war?
Well, maybe it's because people live their own private lives, and what's most important is their careers and their families and their reputations. But I saw veterans who were becoming homeless, drug addicts, and alcoholics because the issues were so profound and they had no paradigm or frame of reference to turn to for hope. I began finding my hope in nonviolence.
What was the next step for you?
At the end of '85, I resigned from the veterans outreach center and said, "I want to go to Nicaragua to see for myself." The first week I was there, the contras hit on the outskirts of Esteli and killed 11 people. I could hear the machine-gun fire three nights in a row.
I was furious. I told the Nicaraguan woman with whom I was staying, "This is my money and it's killing people and it's for a lie. I've been through it before, and I won't go through it again. I'm going to be a spokesperson somehow with my life for the truth."
I came back from Nicaragua after two months, and I went into seclusion for a month because I was so affected. I just had to come to grips with all my feelings.
So I read and read, and I typed my thoughts out. I started talking about the revolution in my own consciousness and the need for a revolution in the consciousness of my country.
Then I went back to King's speeches, and he was right there. And that confirmed for me that I was not crazy. But it's hard work; society's almost more entrenched now than it was in '67. Yet I believed that we were at this extraordinary time in history in which peacemaking and an alternative way were the only things that made any sense.
I asked myself, Am I up to it? I wasn't alone, but I felt alone at the time. And I thought, "I don't have any alternative. This is not only intellectually honest, but it's what my heart is saying." I prayed for help, that I would have the courage to speak my heart through my brain with my life to the world, and that I would find others who were doing the same thing.
And, of course, I did find others. There were three others in the veterans peace movement who wanted to fast. I said to them, "I'm prepared to fast to the end if I have to, to awaken the consciousness of my country." And it wasn't done with despair or depression; it was done with incredible affirmation.
I had no interest in dying. I went to the steps of the Capitol with a desire to affirm life in the most profound way I could, by saying, "I'm willing to put my life on the line for life."
After the Veterans Fast for Life, I felt really liberated and went immediately to Nicaragua. I spent a lot more time there traveling around the country, meeting people, and then working on putting together these veterans teams to go into the war zones. I met Holley, now my wife, in Managua during that trip.
The first Veterans Peace Action Team went to Nicaragua last spring. We spent two weeks in the war zones, and everywhere we went, we were either just ahead of the contras or just behind them. The contra atrocities were occurring almost in front of our eyes every day -- mortar fire and bridges being mined.
When we returned to Managua, we decided to plan a walk from Jinotega to Wiwili. There were 11 of us, unarmed and undefended, who walked the 73 miles on a road that had previously been ambushed and mined. It was the road where the Pantasma landmine explosion occurred in October 1986. Fifty-five people were blown out of the truck; 11 ultimately died, six immediately and five later.
On that walk we prepared ourselves for losing our legs. We went through role playing, through medical procedures for how to stop the blood flow. And Holley, being a midwife, was our medic. She carried all our bandages and medical supplies.
We met the amputees from the Pantasma mine explosion -- 12 in all. Then we went to all the hospitals in the country. I personally visited more than 400 amputee victims, and I cried a lot.
I think I grieved over the loss of so many legs in Nicaragua that I had already grieved over the loss of mine. I believed that at some metaphysical level, their legs and my legs became the same, and that their legs were no less valuable than mine. I was not articulating that consciously, but I really think that was happening inside me.
When you returned from Nicaragua this time, you began vigiling outside Concord Naval Weapons Station. What moved you to begin thinking about another fast there, and possibly blocking the trains?
I had seen the munitions trains all summer. And all I could see in my mind were bodies in those boxcars, because they were loaded with bombs and rockets. The first two days I saw the munitions trains, I just broke down. And I said, "Well, I'm going to begin blocking these trains, but I'm not ready to do it yet. I don't have the strength mentally."
Other people started blocking munitions trains right away, but I spent 60 days preparing for September 1. What happened September 1, I think, has to be considered providential.
Why do you say that?
Well, first of all, I survived. And second, it's such an extraordinary event in history that it couldn't have been conceived in advance. It was such an unbelievable thing that happened. And yet I believe these kinds of things are going to happen if we're going to stop the violence. In other words, we're going to have to start taking risks to stand up for the truth. Those of us who are speaking truth are going to be intimidated, jailed, injured, killed. But when you start living the truth, and what you really believe in, the risks don't matter anymore. It's not that you do stupid things -- in fact, you do things even more thoughtfully and carefully -- but you are going to push the system. You are going to give those in power an alternative, which to them is perceived as a threat to their national security. But their national security is a threat to my personal security, and the world's security.
And so the train running over me was something people could relate to. It represented our standing up to the madness, and it had an empowering effect. I know this from reading my letters. People say, "Your blood is our blood, and I haven't recovered from it yet. And I don't know what it means, but I know it means something very significant for my life."
I was just there on the tracks; I didn't have anything to do with the train moving over me. But it's so powerful, it's just way beyond me and all of us why this happened, how it happened.
Jim Douglass, from the Ground Zero Community in Washington, came down and said, "I really believe, Brian, that you were the right person to be on the tracks at this moment in history, because the train ran over you, and yet you survived and came out of it with a vision that doesn't involve retaliation."
I'm just a normal person like all of us, and I've just chosen to follow the truth of my heart, which everybody can do. And that's what happened on September 1. People said, "My God, he's just doing something extremely natural and rational. He's stopping the death trains. And they had the audacity to run over him! That tells us a lot about our government and about the ethic of the society, the insanity." I think it has helped people to realize that the power is in themselves and not in these people on the trains. Where do we turn for our expression? Well, we've got to turn to each other now and build a new society that withdraws our consent from the government, that resists through an alternative of affirmation.
We resist, not because we like to resist, but because we love life and we must resist policies that destroy life. No government can function without consent of the people -- through taxes, through participation, through complicity, through silence.
The events of September 1 have been a real watershed for the peace movement in this country. It has inspired and motivated people. Has it been that watershed in your life? How has it changed you?
I'm still coming to grips with what it all means. This kind of celebrity status I now have is very unnatural to me. I don't feel comfortable with it. I'm just trying to surrender in a way to the truth of the moment and say, "God help me. I don't know how to do it, I don't know how to be, except just to fall back and be myself."
I'm amazed that people look to me as much as they do. I'm just a normal guy; I just happened to be the one the train ran over. I don't have any special wisdom. I just have a commitment that I'm not going to continue supporting the madness.
Probably a third of my mail calls me a hero; and I worry about it, because I didn't do anything except walk out and sit on the tracks and say, "You're not going to kill any more people in my name without at least dealing with my body."
Now, anybody can do that. It didn't take any skill. I understand it takes an evolution of your consciousness, but it doesn't take any skill at all. None. It doesn't require any special preparation outside your internal process of consciousness. We all can do this.
You can define the train, and your track, however you want, but we all need to be participating now in a new society. And each person's heart will tell them what their role is and what their truth is.
That's part of what I see as the revolution of consciousness -- that people take their own power, and listen to themselves, to the intuitive self, the inner voice, the higher self, whatever you want to call it. The answers are there.
You know, people get irritated at me sometimes for not telling them what they should do. I say, "I just encourage you to listen deeply as to what you think is the truth. Do you think killing mothers and fathers and children is wrong? Do you realize that you're paying taxes to support that policy? Do you believe that you might be able to express yourself in some way you haven't before? The answer is in yourself as to how to do that."
We all need to do it, we all need to start thinking about whether the solution is in the political structures, or within our hearts and our collective energies. It's very simple if you understand that the government can't function without the consent of the people.
Besides being a celebrity of sorts now, you have also caught the attention of the Reagan administration, which is now monitoring your activities. How does that make you feel?
I was shocked when I saw I was on the government's terrorist list. How did I find out? I was in the ABC-TV studio here in Washington in December. They asked me to come in for an interview, and they showed me the documents and said, "We want your face on camera looking at these documents." I didn't know anything about it until then.
I'm in a position now where I feel incredibly liberated because I've been put on the terrorist list. They've monitored all my mail and phone calls for the past 14 months, they've taken off my legs, they've fractured my skull, and they've threatened to put me in jail for tax resistance. They can do whatever they're going to do, and I'm going to keep doing what I'm doing because I believe in it. And if I'm in jail or dead or have my arms taken off, I feel like I've found a place in the universe that's whole and feels clean.
I think of Nelson Mandela, who has been in prison for 25 years for what he believes in; and he always talks about his spirit, his indomitable spirit. That's why I cherish more than anything having an indomitable spirit that can withstand what is in the way of the truth. I can confront it and walk through it.
My prayer every morning is that I'll be open to the infinite wisdom and truth of the universe that can be embodied in me and that I'll have the courage to follow what my inner voice is saying. I sometimes say, "Hold my hand because I don't know how to do it."
I don't know how to set up a peace force in Nicaragua, but I'm committed to it. I didn't know how to fast, and I didn't know how to create a Veterans Peace Action Team with other people. And then all of a sudden, we were doing it.
Do you believe there was an order for the Concord munitions train not to stop? Did you believe that all along?
Well, others believed it more than I did. From the beginning a lot of people came up to me and said, "You know this can't happen without it having been designed and intended to be this way." I'm not a very conspiratorial-thinking person, nor particularly a paranoid person. I'm kind of naive.
But when I came to the congressional hearings last November 18, that's when I started thinking differently, because Navy officials admitted that they knew all about me. Navy Captain S.J. Pryzby told the congressional committee, "Oh, yes, we knew all about Mr. Willson, about his fasts, his trips to Nicaragua, and his being on the tracks since June 10, and that he was a man of his word." And I'm sitting there thinking, "They knew that I wouldn't get off the tracks."
That was the first moment I thought that there was attempted murder. Then I found the notes of the unsanitized Navy report that had not been made public lying on the table in the room next to the hearing room. I started reading them and said, "My God, this is in the original report that they didn't release to the public." I put them in my briefcase, and I didn't even read them through for another month.
Also, I just got a copy of the local sheriffs report, which was not included in the Navy report. It contained the interviews with the train engineer, who said he was under orders not to stop the train.
So I'm still coming to grips with what all of it means -- metaphysically, spiritually, and in terms of the realities of what my own government will do to its own citizens.
I don't hear any bitterness or anger or resentment in you.
Well, I don't have bitterness or anger or resentment that I'm aware of. I might be in denial. I haven't had any depression or grief either over the loss of my legs. So it's possible I'm in denial, but I don't think so.
I worked hard to rid myself of retaliation. It was all part of the development of nonviolence for me. I worked this through in therapy dealing with my father, who I hated. Working through that was a big breakthrough in my personal nonviolent development. Not my intellectual commitment to nonviolence, but my deep emotional commitment to nonviolence, my ability even to grasp it.
I also learned from the Nicaraguans who, when they saw one contra dead, grieved over the loss, saying, "If we'd only had five minutes with this contra, we could have convinced him to be part of the revolution." And I said, "You know this is really the gospel in action, or love in action."
So it's not that I don't have moments of anger, and even rage, but I choose not to act out of anger and rage anymore. There are moments when I'm feeling anger and rage, and I cannot relate to somebody. For example, I may get to the point with a police officer at Concord, where I recognize, "I'm not at a good place right now, and I cannot offer this person an alternative of love." So I will not participate at that point.
What are your feelings toward the operators of the Navy train that ran over you?
I have a lot of empathy for the train crew, and I'll tell you why. First of all, they're all living the way I used to live; they're brain-washed like I was. I really can identify with that. Second, they probably do have traumatic stress, which is what they're suing me for, because I think they're caught between following their orders and following their conscience.
So they are living with a tremendous conflict. And third, they're caught between a rock and a hard place. They're on the lower end of the totem pole of a chain of command that's involved with a criminal policy -- madness. And they're the grunt men like we were in Vietnam.
My offer to them is that the solution to their stress is within themselves, not in suing me. But if they are going to sue, they should sue the Navy, which has money and gave the order.
I condemn their action. I just plead with them to be open to transformation, which is the only way to heal their stress, and to tell the truth about who gave the order.
What are the lessons we should learn from all of this?
All these decisions that are being made by the policy-makers should reveal to the people of the United States that our solution is not here in Washington. This realization represents a paradigm shift that's happening in the country. It's empowering, it's liberating; but first you have to walk through an emotional minefield, come to grips with your own power, and realize that we can assert our power.
By being here, fasting on the steps, we're beating the policy-makers' delusions. They really are our employees, yet we've let them become our masters. That's why I don't like the lobbying anymore. The most I could see myself doing now is fasting, which most people don't think much of, but it helps me to reflect and become clear.
There is hope -- tremendous hope -- but it's not in Washington, and it's not in our political structures. It's in the consciousness of human beings, which, for me, has come through liberation theology. I'm very hopeful that people are beginning to sense that the solution is within each of us, as we work with one another.
There is no security without justice. I'm interested in promoting the security of the world which comes from everybody working for justice. That's what I'm into, a revolutionary consciousness for North America.
So I'm hopeful. I had a political conviction, a political channel to begin working. I became very non-ideological and said, "I'm going to reconstruct my heart as a human being." Now I know that my power is not in Washington; my power is in my heart.
Vicki Kemper was news editor of Sojourners when this article appeared.
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