THE PRICE
FOR PEACE
PHOTO COURTESY OF BO BOUDART PRODUCTIONS
Vietnam veteran S. Brian Willson visits the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Wall in
Washington, D.C. The peace activist lost his legs to a train during a 1987protest.
A new documentary tells the story of Portland
activist S, Brian Willson, a Vietnam veteran
ABOUT
THE FILM
BY MARTHA GIES
CONTRIBUTING COLUMNIST
TTTe have assumed the name of
1/t / peacemakers,” wrote the Rev.
V V Daniel Berrigan, the beloved
Jesuit prophet, author and activist who died
in April, “but we have been, by and large,
unwilling to pay any significant price.”
Yet some were willing.
A new documentary, “Paying the Price for
Peace: The Story of S. Brian Willson,”
chronicles the journey of this internationally
known peace activist, who now lives in
Portland.
Producer-director Bo Boudart began
working on this film five years
ago, when Willson published his
IF YOU GO
memoir, “Blood on the Tracks.”
What. KBOO FM Radio screening 'Willson had served as an Air
Force lieutenant, leading a
of “Paying the Price for Peace”
combat security unit of 40 men
When: 7 p.m. Sunday, July 3
at a small Vietnamese airbase.
“My experience in Vietnam
Where: Clinton Street Theater,
changed my life forever, as was
2522 SE Clinton Street, Portland
the case for so many young
Tickets: $10 at the door
men and women who found
themselves struggling for
physical and psychic survival in the jungles,
rice paddies, and villages of Southeast Asia,”
Willson wrote on his website,
www.brianwillson.com.
One particular early morning scene would
haunt him for years:
“The ground was strewn with bodies of
villagers and their farm animals, many of
whom were motionless and bloody, murdered
from bomb shrapnel and napalm. Several
were trying to get up on their feet, and others
were moving ever so slightly as they cried
and moaned.... At one dramatic moment I
encountered at close range a young wounded
woman lying on the ground clutching three
young disfigured children. I stared, aghast, at
the woman’s open eyes. Upon closer
examination, I discovered that she, and what I
presumed were her children, all were dead,
but napalm had melted much of the woman’s
facial skin, including her eyelids.”
He began to regularly express his
opposition to the bombings and particularly
to the large numbers of civilian villagers he
saw slaughtered. After five months, the Air
Force had heard enough from Willson. “I
was suddenly separated from my unit and
ordered to return to the U.S. nearly one
month ahead of schedule.”
Eighteen years after Vietnam, a period
characterized by career restlessness,
struggles with his own post-traumatic stress
disorder, and sinking hopes for changing our
country back to the “America” in which he
“Paying the Price
for Peace: The
Story of S. Brian
Willson”
Produced and
directed by Bo
Boudart, 2016.
Narrated by Peter
Coyote. 110
minutes.
S. Brian Willson has traveled the world, witnessing human suffering instigated by U.S. policy.
grew up believing, Willson traveled to
Nicaragua and saw firsthand the Contra war.
There, he recognized the pattern of violence
perpetrated on an innocent peasantry, and
he heard from the mouth of President
Ronald Reagan awful and yet familiar self
justifying lies.
Willson began to care desperately about
ending the killing in Nicaragua. He fasted on
the steps of the national Capitol, organized a
Veterans Peace Action Team to walk through
Contra ambush areas and protested the
shipment of arms to Nicaragua.
In 1987, while protesting outside the
Concord Naval Weapons Station, a military
train carrying munitions to the Contras ran
over him. It turned out that train personnel
were actually under orders to speed up,
should anyone be demonstrating on the
tracks.
Willson lived, but lost both legs.
At some point during the 29 days that
Willson spent in the hospital, fellow activist
David Hartsough recorded him at his
bedside. Willson sounded hopeful as he
quoted President Dwight Eisenhower: “I like
to believe that people, in the long run, are
going to do more to promote peace than our
governments. Indeed, I think that people
want peace so much that one of these days
governments had better get out of the way
and let them have it”
Upon his release, Willson returned to the
protest on the tracks in a wheelchair.
Today, he gets around on prosthetic legs,
making it look almost easy. For 20 years, he
traveled the world as a self-made
ambassador to people suffering the effects
of U.S. foreign policy. He was particularly
struck by Korea, which he visited on eight
separate trips, and the history of a war so
similar to Vietnam, yet so unknown to most
of our own citizens who paid for it.
In 2008, Willson and his wife, Becky
Luening, moved from Arcata, Calif., to
Portland, in search of a cycling community,
an Amtrak station, and a Veterans Affairs
hospital. He meant these to be his reflective
years - Willson turns 75 next month - but it
appears he will soon be traveling again, as
this film makes the rounds of festivals before
it is released to theaters.
Since 1969, when the Rev. Berrigan wrote
those challenging words, we have sent troops
to countless countries until finally, in 2001,
we began an endless Orwellian war whose
name simply changes as the years wear on.
“Paying the Price for Peace” is a film that
should be seen in colleges, high schools and
theaters around the country. Perhaps it can
rekindle our hopes of peace and infect the
rest of us with an activist’s courage and
resolve, that we may someday use our tax
money for teachers and health care, instead
of this killing that we sponsor throughout
the globe.
Martha Gies is a Portland writer who has
taught human rights and lobbied for low-
income housing.
Vietnam Veteran
S. Brian Willson
paid the price for
peace by nearly
being killed by a
military train during
a nonviolent
protest. Since
then, he has not
stopped calling
attention to the
U.S. government’s
defiance of
international law
through waging
endless illegal
wars. “Paying the
Price for Peace”
exposes the truth
about the United
States’ addiction to
war and the lies it
perpetuates in
order to wage
ongoing violence.
Source: payingthe
priceforpeace.com