Veterans Fasting for Life: The Psychohistorical Drama of a Business that Says it Wants to be a Country

 

by Elizabeth V. Hallett

On September First, each year, some of us commemorate two highly significant events in the Peace Movement that occurred in the days of resistance to the U.S. unconstitutional military involvement in El Salvador and Nicaragua. I remember it well.

At the time, the U.S was busy trying to “unseat” the democratically elected Sandinista government of President Daniel Ortega in Nicaragua after the 45-year U.S. supported dictatorship by providing the counter-revolutionary Contra with military aid.

On June 27, 1986, two days after the U.S. Congress moved to give the Contra $100 million; the World Court had rendered its final decision on Nicaragua’s suit against the United States. In an unprecedented decision, the court ordered the U.S. to immediately cease and refrain from training, arming, equipping, financing and supplying the contra forces or otherwise encouraging, supporting and aiding the military and paramilitary activities in and against Nicaragua.” The court also ordered the U.S. to pay reparations to Nicaragua determined to be more than $17 billion dollars. In response President Ronald Reagan declared the United States was not subject to the World Court, although it had been a signatory to the original World Court’s charter.(1)

This was a bald indication of the entitlement that the U.S had assumed in relation to controlling another country, and indirectly, a whole continent of countries, in direct violation of our own democratic principles as defined in the U.S. Constitution. U.S. subversion of Central and Latin American governments in the interest of corporations is well documented and known.

George Mizo, Brian Willson, Duncan Murphy, and Charles Liteky on day one of the Fast.

The 1986 Fast for Life and the 1987 Nuremberg Actions Vigil were citizens’ actions taken as shareholders, if you will, to increase awareness of the colonial agenda that United States was perpetrating in the name of the American people. Both actions were completely structured around nonviolent resistance, grounded in a long tradition of nonviolence as a legitimate and moral form of freedom of expression.

Many US veterans, seasoned by the disastrous bloodshed in Vietnam, (and other wars coming forward) have sought transformation in U.S. foreign policy and values, asking questions about the moral accountability of our country in the face of unending bloodshed that has, in fact, led to a defeat for the United States not only in Vietnam, but currently in Afghanistan. Veterans including S. Brian Willson and Charlie Litkey had gone on vet delegations to El Salvador and Nicaragua to see for themselves what was going on. They feared for the next generation of America’s sons and daughters that could end up as cannon fodder. They also feared what attacking innocent civilians in Central America would do to our sense of morality as a nation.

US Veterans march in Nicaragua in protest of US military support for the Contra forces.

Anthropologist Jim Phillips recalls the day in 1986, in the village of Venezia, Nicaragua, when he watched as one of the women, Dona Chepa, put her hand on the heart of former Marine Chaplain Charlie Litkey, saying: “Please go home and put your hand on Mr. Reagan’s chest and tell him to stop killing us!” (2)

The Veterans’ Fast for Life, grew out of Dona Chepa’s request, as a way to call attention to the pending U.S. funding for the Nicaraguan Contra. It also grew out of the veterans’ own moral and spiritual anguish as human beings. S. Brian Willson described the plan the four men from the Veterans Fast for Life undertook as a nonviolent protest, at a time when the U.S. Senate was in a process to bolster President Reagan’s “Freedom Fighters.” In planning for the fast, Willson wrote:

The key for us was to make absolutely clear to the public why we were fasting. Reagan’s terror wars were illegal and demonic. We wanted to increase public awareness. Our plan was simple. We would sit on the capitol steps, the front porch of Congress, so to speak, and drink only water. We would be proxies for the people in Central America, who were invisible in the United States, people who were dying because of U.S. policies. We wanted to do more than talk. We wanted to feel their anguish, and we wanted others to feel their anguish through us.” from Blood on the Tracks: the Life and Times of S. Brian Willson. (3)


Terrorists or Patriots? Veterans Seeking At-one-ment…

Faster, trained lawyer and former Air Force Lieutenant Brian S. Willson, had been an information officer in Vietnam who was shocked out of his military mindset by what he saw inspecting the “effectiveness” of bombing Vietnamese villages, including dead women, children, water buffalo and napalmed forests. Duncan Murphy had been a medic during WWII and seen the ravages of cannon explosions, as well as the desperate liberation of Bergen Belsen concentration camp in Germany at the end of the war. George Miso, had been a platoon sergeant in Vietnam and was seriously injured when most of his unit was wiped out in an ambush. Each warrior sought healing for their own traumatic experiences and for the country. They understood that they were inextricably bound to the patriotic values and democratic principles they thought they had been fighting for in war. Now they would sit in front of the domed, white marble temple of the U.S. government, to put their bodies on the line in prayer and contemplation for peace and justice in Central America.

In a press release on September 1st, 1986, Willson said:

“I and three other veterans of war have decided to embark upon the most important mission of our lives — a fast for life. Once, having put our bodies on the line elsewhere, for issues we did not fully or even minimally understand, we now chose to put our bodies on the line here in this country in the waging of peace for issues we possess a clear understanding of. We do so with great affirmation of life – all life -whether for Nicaraguans, North Americans, Soviet citizens, etc.”(4)

Funding the Contra War was part of a larger U.S. strategy in Central America that had the fingerprints of earlier CIA interventions, including that of the coup in Chile in 1973 under Pinochet and the war in El Salvador, for instance, from the late 1970’s to 1990. El Salvador was a platform for munitions being sent into Nicaragua.

Daily support for the Veterans Fast for Life in Washington DC.

Their water-only fast began on the Capitol steps in Washington, D.C. September 1, 1986. Two vets each staggered the timing so as to extend the fast as long as possible. Charlie Litkey, had earlier received the Congressional Medal of Honor for heroically saving twenty of his comrades under fire. The commendation details will give you chills. As a chaplain, he had also often had the unhappy assignment of visiting family members of deceased soldiers lost in battle with the bad news. He was aware of the spiritual, emotional and physical pain; of the waste of war. There should never have been any question about his patriotism. Nor that of the other three vets. They were now confronting what it means to be a true patriot, upholding the ideals of the Constitution and the value of a democratically elected government. In his autobiography Blood on the Tracks, Willson writes:

“The key was for us to make absolutely clear to the public why we were fasting. Reagan’s terror wars were illegal and demonic. We wanted to increase public awareness. Our plan was simple. We would sit on the capitol steps, the front porch of Congress, so to speak, and drink only water. We would be proxies for the people in Central America, who were invisible in the United States, people who were dying because of U.S. policies. We wanted to do more than talk. We wanted to feel their anguish, and we wanted others to feel their anguish through us. (5)

Before embarking on our mission, Charlie wanted to renounce his silver Medal of Honor, the highest award for a military person, in a protest of U.S. policies in Central America. On July 29, 1996, at a solemn ceremony at the Vietnam Memorial, he placed on the ground at the Wall’s apex, an envelope containing the medal and a letter addressed to President Reagan. In the letter’s conclusion, Charlie wrote:

I pray for your conversion, Mr. President. Come morning, I hope you wake up and hear the cry of the poor riding on a southwest wind from Guatemala, Nicaragua and El Salvador. They are crying, “Stop killing us!” (6)

At the beginning of the Fast, Willson announced:

“We veterans had been trained to go to war and to take the lives of “the enemy.” We had trusted the “causes” our government declared necessary for “national security.” We obediently participated in an unjust war, having believed everything we had been told. Some of us, myself included, were still hurting from having been betrayed so callously. Now, dictated by conscience, we were going to risk our lives for peace to save the lives of “the enemy.” (7)

The veterans were also seeking some form of redemption not only for themselves, but for their country, from the atrocities of war that the U.S.A. had engaged them in, as recruits. Their personal quest for a remedy to soothe their devastated souls, as well as their belief in their country, was also one that many civilians and U.S. vets identified with as a remedy for the United States of America: STOP THE KILLING.


Whose Orders Do We Follow?

These fasters and many other U.S. vets were grappling in 1986, as they are now, with what they saw or see as legal and moral responsibilities about following orders, in the face of a government with colonial policies that lead to violence and bloodshed for those in other countries, as well as for our own enlisted citizens, and in violation of International Laws and our own U.S. Constitution.

As a yardstick, they referred to the boundaries of the Nuremberg Principles which had been used as a moral compass with which to charge Nazi war criminals, after the fact, of their war crimes. There was, in 1986, at least the hope that these principles created in 1945, after WWII, could set some new boundaries with which to judge “crimes against war, crimes against peace and crimes against humanity.” (8)

“The Nuremberg trials established that all of humanity would be guarded by an international legal shield and that even a Head of State would be held criminally responsible and punished for aggression and Crimes Against Humanity. The right of humanitarian intervention to put a stop to Crimes Against Humanity – even by a sovereign against his own citizens – gradually emerged from the Nuremberg principles affirmed by the United Nations.”

Justice Robert Jackson, U.S. Supreme Court and Prosecutor at the Nuremberg Tribunal 1945-1946. (9)

During the Nuremberg Trials, between 1945 and 1949 in Germany, the accused were tried and punished for their roles in engineering the mass killings in the death camps by following orders rather than speaking out and refusing to participate in what the Nuremberg Principles and the International Tribunal defined as crimes.

The Nuremberg Principles used to be embedded in the moral code of the military Law of Land Warfare Manual every soldier was required to read. The Principles require, by International Law, that individuals speak out and refuse to commit various forms of proscribed violence and to disobey orders that may cause them to be violating the rules laid out. In other words, the individual bears the responsibility to follow orders or not.

Who is the Terrorist?

Unsurprisingly, elements of the U.S. legislative and Intelligence apparatus worked to discredit activist campaigns that sought to engage in a conversation about the moral and constitutional basis of U.S. involvement in the wars in Salvador and Nicaragua. While the veterans were committed to nonviolence and showed no signs of being anything but that, they would later learn that they were being investigated as “terrorists.”

Behind the scenes during the fast, an ominous project was underway to discredit these veterans and others like them. In Chapter 17 of his autobiography, Willson writes:

“On the forty-first day of the fast…Senator Warren Rudman (R-NH), a member of the House Intelligence Committee, made a shocking accusation that we fasting veterans were the equivalent to Middle East terrorists.” (10)

Subsequent investigations by the FBI followed, aligning them with the nonviolent Plowshares Group in Chicago that claimed to be in solidarity with The Fast for Life.

“The accusations issued by the government officials toward us seemed not only ridiculous, but also very ominous. It demonstrated how frightened our supposedly democratic government is of free speech and of real resistance to its policies, even nonviolent resistance.” (11)

“On the same day Rudman made his preposterous statement accusing us of committing the equivalent of terrorists acts by fasting, the New York Times reported that U.S. officials admitted to illegally assisting private agencies and organizations to arm the Contras, the consequences of which were, of course, a war of terror against countless peasants, murder and mayhem. The tide was beginning to turn, we hoped, though it was hard to be happy about these media stories; the hypocrisy of Rudman accusing us of being terrorist when the U.S. was arming terrorists was sickening.”(12)

The fast lasted 47 days with many urging the veterans to stop as they were on the verge of dying. They had inspired five hundred documented actions around the country in solidarity with the Fast for Life. Many veterans came forward to support the effort, seeking redemption, healing and the fervent hope that the prayers and acts of contrition could affect the policies of their government.

October 17, 1986 New York Times article marks the end of the fast.

On the forty-seventh day of the Fast, they held a public communion service on the Capitol steps and broke bread together.

Soon after the end of the 47-day Fast for Life brought more than 2500 people to the Capitol steps in D.C., including twenty-two legislators, and inspired hundreds of actions around the country, the US Senate still approved the bill. The legislation allocated $100 million for the Contra to fight the elected Nicaraguan government. The Fast for Life community was sick with the knowledge that it would mean more bloodshed for the Nicaraguan people and that the U.S. was operating as a terrorist government.

Were the Fasting Veterans Terrorists or Patriots?

While, in 1986, the Veteran’s Fast for Life on the Capitol steps in D.C saw four U.S. veterans call for an end to U.S. funding for the Contras, who President Reagan called “Freedom Fighters,” no one could have predicted that on the same Capitol steps in 2021, several thousand U.S. citizen-insurrectionists, inspired by a treasonous United States President, would try to prevent the legitimate, democratically elected candidate, Joe Biden, from becoming the inaugurated president of the United States. They claimed to be patriots.

On January 6th, 2021, intoxicated with the “orders” they received at a rally not far from the Capitol, thousands of MAGA-hypnotized followers of Donald Trump surged up the same Capitol steps, and into the building capitol in an attempt to prevent the peaceful transfer of power mandated by our Constitution and by the election results that had now-President Biden ahead of Donald Trump in the popular vote as well as the Electoral College.

Many were carrying weapons. They cast themselves as “Freedom Fighters.” Some called for the hanging of Vice President Mike Pence. Others sought out senators with lurid chants implying they were going after them. They invaded legislators offices and pilfered documents.

And then, in an attempt to minimize the criminal nature of the insurrectionists who breached the Capitol and wounded 140 policemen, as well as directly causing death to at least two others, these insurrectionists were labeled by one gaslighting senator as “Tourists.”


Nonviolent Nuremberg Actions at Concord Naval Weapons Station
September 1,1987: 34 years ago

On August 31, 1987 Concord Naval Weapons Station Commander cabled his superiors in Washington notifying them that three fasting veterans would NOT move off the tracks.

Willson’s August 31 and  Sept. 1, 2021 Facebook Posts

On September 1, 1987, the year after the Veterans Fast for Life began, the fasters again created actions to call attention to U.S. violations of International Law and our own U.S. Constitution, assembling others to commit to what became known as the Nuremberg Actions Vigil. It was a vigil had begun June 10, 1987, with various religious and political groups taking turns to be witnesses to the on-going flow of military ordnance moving across the tracks from Concord Naval Weapons Station to Port Chicago and the ships headed for Central America that were awaiting their deadly cargo, including white phosphorus rockets, ammunition, grenades and more.

On the occasion of this 2021 anniversary, S. Brian Willson writes about the nature of the daily vigil which had already been ongoing outside of Concord Naval Weapons Station (CNWS), three miles from Port Chicago, the depot for all munitions headed to Central America. In symbolic continuity with the 1986 Fast for Life, the four men were maintaining a presence and sending a message. Charlie Litkey and George Miso held their presence outside the East side of the Capitol building in D.C. while Willson and Murphy took the Fast to the tracks outside of Concord Naval Weapons Station, where peace activists had been demonstrating against the exportation of munitions since June of that year.

On September First it was Commander Lonnie Cagle, at Concord Naval Weapons Station, who gave the orders for a munitions train to run at high noon crossing a narrow public triangle of space where the nonviolent demonstrators were committed to blocking the train. Their expectation was merely that, according to historical precedents for such nonviolent actions, they would be arrested.

The train was a metaphor. It represented U.S. foreign policy. The U.S. government was willing to fabricate a story making the demonstrators into terrorists, while sending the message that human life is expendable, even for U.S. citizens, and that freedom of speech against U. S. policies is considered terrorism.

Willson writes two posts, including a succinct account of the day that changed his life forever and sent a chilling message to all U.S. citizens on the day before and on the actual anniversary of the incident.


S. Brian Wilson in 2019.

Posted on Facebook: August 31, 2021 by S. Brian Willson

On August 31, 1987, 34 years ago, Concord Naval Weapons Station Commander cabled his superiors in Washington notifying them that three fasting veterans would NOT move off the tracks.

The Concord, CA Naval Weapon Station had received my letter of August 21, 1987, giving notice that I and two others were to begin a 40-day blocking and fasting action ON the railroad tracks commencing September 1.

Commander Cagle cabled this information to his superiors at Naval Sea Systems Command in Washington on AUGUST 31, outlining our plans, and identifying me, “S. Brian Willson” as “protest principal.” Cagle wrote: “Fasters will NOT move for approaching rail traffic. Local sheriff and police offices aware of threat.”

Since the whole point of the train blockade was to protest the illegal movement of armaments to murder impoverished campesinos in El Salvador and Nicaragua, I took every possible opportunity to publicize what we were planning to do and to explain our motives. On August 28, 1987, an article was published in the local Contra Costa Times titled, “Peace Group Sets Arms Blockade: Will Block Weapons Hauls at Concord Naval Station.” That article reported, “The weapons blockades will coincide with a 40-day fast beginning Tuesday.”

With this sustained vigil, I believed I was taking another step in walking my talk. By sitting on the tracks, I would be putting my body directly between the weapons and the campesinos of Nicaragua. The three fasting veterans positioned on the tracks offered a valuable lesson: if the train crew could stop for the three of us, they could stop the train entirely, thus saving the lives of thousands of campesinos destined to be murdered by the weapons on that train.

In the process, the train crew would be upholding international law, the Nuremberg Obligation, and the U.S. Constitution. We would be part of a process intended to prevent the killing of innocents, while forcing a reckoning with U.S. legal requirements to uphold international and domestic constitutional law.

S. Brian Willson
Facebook 8/31/21


Posted on Facebook: September 1, 2021 by S. Brian Willson

The Nuremberg defense requires two separate components:
(1) Is the United States Government committing a crime of aggressive war?
(2) If a citizen is aware of the crimes of his/her government, that individual citizen is criminally responsible under international law if he/she aids his/her government in the commission of this crime.
Once aware, that citizen is under a DUTY to DISOBEY the orders of his/her government which in any way relate to this crime.

Thus, two critical questions:

First, is there in fact a crime against peace being committed by the government? Yes, US unlawful murders of campesinos in El Salvador and Nicaragua with weapons originating very specifically from this CNWS.
And second, is the act which the defendant has refused to perform (getting out of the way of the illegal munitions train), resulting in the charge against him in domestic court, one which would make him individually liable under international law for the commission of this crime against peace? Yes, and we refused to allow the criminal and illegal movement of these death weapons past our bodies.

The penalty identified on a large sign near our vigil site specified penalties of one year in prison and a $5,000 fine. But we were upholding international law, which in the US Constitution is incorporated as part of the highest law of the land. So, no problem, right? Ha, Ha!

The US along with Allied powers codified the Nuremberg Principles as international law at the end of World War II. The principles codified in the charter, and established by the International Military Tribunal’s judgment, were so widely affirmed that their source as a statement of international law is not open to question, which included the long-standing concept of individual responsibility for international crimes.

The US Constitution, Section VI, Clause 2: This Constitution, and the Laws of the United States which shall be made in Pursuance thereof; and all Treaties made, or which shall be made, under the Authority of the United States, shall be the supreme Law of the Land; and the Judges in every State shall be bound thereby, any Thing in the Constitution or Laws of any State to the contrary. Thus, the Nuremberg Principles are part of international law, and incorporated into the US Constitution per Section VI, Clause 2.

So, no problem, right? Of course the US is not a nation of laws as we are taught, but a nation of men in a system where justice is discretionary depending one’s race, sex, class, and political ideology.

At about 9:45 am, on September 1, 1987, I arrived at the CNWS track blocking site, along with Holley Rauen, my partner at the time, Gabriel, her 14-year-old son, WWII veteran Duncan Murphy, and David Duncombe, a WWII and Korean War veteran, to get ready for our 40-day blocking and fast action. By 11 am, about 45 friends and supporters had gathered around us to launch our plans for a sustained action upholding international law.

As the train sped up, protesters attempted to flee the scene of their nonviolent action.

The first weapons train was spotted nearly 600 feet down the tracks about 11:55 am. It was a bright sunny day, and the legal speed limit for this train was a posted 5 mph. The law required arrests by either local police on military police if there were any people on the tracks as a train was moving. We took our positions, I sitting in a lotus posture between the rails, David crouched on his knees to my left, and Duncan crouched on his knees just in front of me and slightly to the left. The trains had always previously easily stopped from their 5 mph velocity to allow for arrests. Two spotters stood on the cow catcher platform on the front of the locomotive in constant radio contact with the train engineer at the rear of the locomotive.

I had prepared myself in advance, as the other two veterans had, to spend a year in prison for our actions. So, I was not particularly worried about being injured, except perhaps by the manner in which the police would arrest me.

From here on it was all bedlam. The train never slowed down from its 5 mph speed limit, but instead accelerated to more than 16 mph at the point of impact according to the FBI’s examination of the copy of the one video footage of the crime. David Duncombe jumped to the left just in time, but Duncan jumped straight up, grabbing the railing over the cow catcher platform, and for a split second joined the two spotters, before jumping off the still accelerating train to the ground and was the first person to my crumpled body after the locomotive and its two weapons-laden box cars had passed over me. The train continued for about 500 feet before it finally decided to brake.

The rest is further history. I miraculously survived after spending 29 days in a trauma hospital in Walnut Creek, CA, with 19 major injuries, including a number of broken bones and a severely fractured skull, and two amputated legs (fortunately in each case below the knee). A piece of my skull the size of a lemon was dislodged from the cranium and was thrust into, while destroying, my right frontal lobe. The doctors later told me it was a complete miracle that I survived because of being struck head-on by a 200,000-pound locomotive would have normally severed my brain membrane from the brain itself, causing a massive bleed and death within about two minutes.

The Navy ambulance that arrived within minutes refused to help because the crew said my body was not technically lying on Navy property. So, I was delayed for nearly 20 minutes of getting to a trauma hospital. But Holley Rauen and Gerry Condon, a member of Veterans For Peace, worked feverishly on stopping the bleeding in my legs, while Duncan worked on stopping the brain bleed, and another supporter, David Hartsough, holding my head and severed outer ear.

So, my Facebook friends, I am very fortunate to still be alive communicating with you all. Duncan Murphy and I had been, as it turns out, on the FBI’s domestic terrorism suspect list since our open-ended water-only fast a year earlier on the US Capitol steps, protesting the same Reagan terrorist policies in Central America. Never thought I would make into my 81st year, but here I am in revolutionary-free Nicaragua.

In one of the photos you can see one of my severed legs lying along the tracks, along with my crumpled one-gallon water jug. My St Louis Cardinal baseball hat was also lying nearby which I still have, along with a piece of my right shin bone found along the tracks as well. C’est le vie.

One silver lining: A community of resisters set up a permanent campsite at the location of the crime, and blocked EVERY train for 30 months as more than 2,000 people were arrested and doing jail time. The police broke people’s arms and legs during that time, but the resisters were tenacious, courageous, and full of tough love.

S. Brian Willson
Facebook, 9-1-21

Conclusion

The message of the train assault was that the U.S. Government does not stop for human beings if they are determined to be in the way, even if they have legal rights to free speech. In an interview with Brian Willson from his hospital bed, a detective, Ed Nunn, asked: “Were there any plans…to board the train?” The government defense argued later that they believed the three men on the tracks, known nonviolent protesters and U. S. veterans, were planning to ”board the train, i.e. to hijack it.” This narrative fit the U.S. paranoid mindset about the veterans, who they knew were nonviolent, and allowed them to justify their actions. In truth, they were worried about the growing sentiments about U.S. interventionism and the number of veterans and civilians that were galvanizing their resistance. Making the veterans a “security issue” made perfect sense.

In Chapter seventeen of his autobiography, Willson quotes an old and familiar propaganda trick. He recalls that President Reagan has said that a defeat of the $100 million support for the Contra War would mean a “consolidation of a privileged sanctuary for terrorists and subversives just two driving days from Harligen, Texas.”

Willson writes:

“In late March [1986], the Administration’s rhetoric became even more Orwellian when the State Department declared Nicaragua to be an aggressor state in Central America. Of course, The U.S. Administration’s aim was to negate NIcaragua’s claim of self-defense under international law. This Is an old trick: an authority figure rhetorically identifies an enemy as being ready and able to invade our own country, threatening our “exceptional” way of life, in order to whip up popular support for war. Such claims may sound absurd later on, but we know from history how well they work: it is the big scary lies that evade critical thinking and public scrutiny. Hermann Goering, Hitler’s second in command, explained it this way:

Naturally the common people don’t want war neither in Russia, nor in England, nor, for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to do the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the peacemakers for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country.

(See: S. Brian Willson, “Blood on the Tracks: the Life and Times of S. Brian Willson: The Life and Times of S. Brian Willson, A Psychohistorical Memoir”, 2011 PM Press, (p. 167).)

And so we came to January 6, 2021, with an insurrection of “patriots” — or terrorists — invading the Capitol building prepared to override the most sacred process of any democracy – a carefully monitored election process.

Elizabeth Hallett was at John Muir Hospital in Walnut Creek, California on September 1, 1987, when Brian Willson was in surgery after the train assault. During this time, she was drawn into a remarkable window of time, working closely with Brian Willson, Holley Rauen and many others of the Nuremberg Actions Vigil from September 1st, 2021 through the months and years of the aftermath. In 1987 and 1988 she interviewed over seventy veterans and civilians regarding their experiences at the tracks as well as their reasons for becoming involved and has written an unpublished memoir regarding those experiences. She served as the Director of Peace House from 1993 to 1996 and Co-director with Ruth Coulthard in 1997. She returned to Peace House in 2013, first as a Board member and then in 2016 as Program Manager/Director.

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1. The Charter or the International Military Tribunal – Annex to the Agreement for the prosecution and punishment of the major war criminals of the European Axis (“London Agreement), Article 6 https://www.refworld.org/docid/3ae6b39614.html
2. James R. Phillips, Nicaragua, July 4, 1986, “Field Notes from a “Secret” War (Article published in COUNTERPUNCH on June 26, 2021)
3. S. Brian Willson, “Blood on the Tracks: the Life and Times of S. Brian Willson: The Life and Times of S. Brian Willson, A Psychohistorical Memoir”, 2011 PM Press, p. 172 4. Ibid. pp. 173
5. S. Brian Willson, “Blood on the Tracks: the Life and Times of S. Brian Willson,” PM Press, 2011, p. 172
6. ibid p. 173
7. Ibid p. 173
8. Ibid p. 173
9. The Influence of the Nuremberg Trial on International Criminal Law Justice Executive Summary, Robert H. Jackson Center: https://www.roberthjackson.org/speech-and-writing/the-influence-of-the-nuremberg-trial-on-international-criminal-law/
10. S. Brian Willson, “Blood on the Tracks: the Life and Times of S. Brian Willson,” PM Press, 2011, p. 177
11. Ibid p. 177
12. Ibid p. 177
13. For more photos and information regarding the Veterans Fast For Life, 1986, also see https://www.williamgbecker.com/veteransfast.html

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