The 1998 School of the Americas Vigil:
A Personal Narrative
Jackson H. Day
Columbia, Maryland
November 24, 1998
The United States Army School of the Americas at Fort Benning, Georgia, trains soldiers from Latin American countries. Many of them have been accused of committing atrocities -- rape, torture, disappearances, killing -- after their return. The School of the Americas has been accused of having manuals which teach torture in its curriculum. It's Hall of Fame includes graduates who have come to power through coups and death squads. Among its Guest Instructors are a number who came to instruct after they were known for involvement in atrocities. Hence for a decade, there has been a growing movement calling for its closure, SOA Watch, which conducts an annual vigil on the anniversary of the murder of 6 Jesuit priests in El Salvador by School of the Americas graduates.
Fort Benning Entrance with the painted line.
The 1998 vigil at the main gate of Fort Benning, Georgia began at 10 AM Saturday morning November 21 and ended at 5 PM on Sunday evening, November 22. The speakers were very powerful, the choruses engaged all our voices, and other events including native American drumming rounded it out.
The stage -- right up to the line.
Everywhere you looked there were people and signs identifying their groups. Order after order of Roman Catholic religious. A Unitarian Universalist social action committee from New York. A United Methodist church in Wyoming, with congregation members' signatures on the sign. And a group of teenagers in punk costumes, dyed hair, and a genuine painted Volkswagen bus straight from the sixties.
A multiplicity of organizations were present.
Light refreshments were provided.
The crowd was kept behind barricades
So traffic could continue to move.
Those present were old and young.
We were entertained from the stage
And by guerrila theater......displaying the face of death.
The diversity of age gave hope to anyone who feared that ideals would die with their own generation. The oldest person present was 93, and about a third of those present were college students and younger. Late Saturday a pretty college girl saw the Vietnam Veteran inscription on my sweatshirt and came up to me to say, "I wasn't born yet when Vietnam was going on, and I don't think I would have supported it, but I want you to know I would have supported you." I walked away misty-eyed. Late Sunday afternoon actor Martin Sheen introduced a 10 year old girl who had 'crossed the line.' "A lot of children are getting tortured," she said. "By getting arrested I show that I'm opposed to that." Sunday morning at our hotel, where acontinental breakfast was being served, 8 high school girls came in and performed a cheer they had invented. A marvelous collapsing of categories and distinctions to treat "Close the SOA" in the same fashion as "Beat Northern High".
The girls knew that most everyone at breakfast was there for the vigil; we had filled the hotels in Columbus. It was reported that normally, a convention our size in town would generate $3 million in business over the weekend; the SOA vigilers having somewhat more limited resources, they figured we only contributed $1.5 million to Columbus over the weekend. Hopefully that was not our most important contribution, but it was surely welcome. Some townspeople showed active support. The newspaper reported one woman who closed her restaurant and made the space available for protesters to sleep, saying that in a country without enough space to jail all the drug dealers and violent criminals, it wasn't right to be jailing priests and nuns.
I had gone to Columbus very concerned about the SOA but without having decided whether I would "cross the line" on Sunday and risk arrest. There was some pressure involved in making that decision. A month previously I had committed to an associate at the National Conference of Viet Nam Veteran Ministers that I would be sure to seek out the other side of the story. So, Friday, after my plane landed at noon time, I drove onto Fort Benning and went to the Public Relations office at the School of the Americas. About four other people present for the weekend had made a similar approach, and Captain Kevin McIver gave us all a tour at 2:30. He was excellent for the job, outgoing, enthusiastic, convinced of the benefit of his organization, and delighted to have the chance to talk with those with different views. I also met the school chaplain, Ruben Colon, a Lutheran pastor from New York, who I instantly took a liking to, and we stayed and talked military chaplaincy talk until 5 PM.
A while ago, the School of the Americas leadership had agreed to a closed door debate with the Maryknoll Missionaries in New York. Father Roy Bourgeois, who has led the effort to close the SOA, is a Maryknoll priest; several of the religious who have been victims of violence and murder in Latin America are Maryknoll, and the Maryknoll order has been the biggest player in the movement to shut the SOA. At the end of the day, they had issued a press release that the day had been informative, no-one's mind had been changed and they agreed to disagree. I discovered that Chaplain Colon had been among the SOA people on that visit. "It must have been very frustrating," I said, "after working hard all day to get your points across, to realize that nobody had been convinced. If there was just one thing that you really wished that you had been able to find some way to get across to the other side, what would it have been?" With very little hesitation, Colon replied, "that we don't teach those things. That's not what we're about."
Clearly there are no simple answers to this whole thing. One newspaper article characterized it as "the protestors are from Venus, the Army is from Mars." I had downloaded and printed the SOA course catalog from the Internet, and read it from one end to the other on the airplane. Mandatory human rights training had been added to every course. Even the technical aspects of advanced maintenance of Huey helicopters now has a mandatory human rights component.
Some of it is a matter of familiar words, different meanings. McIver and Colon are proud of the way the SOA introduces Latin American soldiers to democracy. On election day they are taken to the local polling stations and shown people voting: democracy in action. I am putting on paper some thoughts to the Commanding General that democracy is not just voting, it is about dissent--and not just tolerating it but treasuring it, as something essential without which democracy would not exist. If they only could have taken their Latin American students not just to the polling booths, but down to the SOA vigil itself, to say, "see, this is what it's all about. These people who think so differently are not our enemy, they are our friends. In a democracy, we listen to such people, we do not kill them."
But for the sake of McIver and Colon and others whom I hold with both respect and disagreement, I could not lightly decide to cross or not to cross the line. So many different realities, so many different truths, in a culture and era when so many people tell lies and so many facts are fabricated, and the word on the street is "the hardest thing to fake is sincerity; when you can do that, you've got it made." What a risk there was in selecting some particular truth to hold to, to ally oneself with, in distinction from the others. What a risk that tomorrow's truth would pull the rug out from below today's. And my own instincts -- to seek out both sides and try to find the common thread: how much of that would I need to risk letting go? There was mandatory non-violence training for anyone thinking of 'crossing the line' which I attended. The South Columbus United Methodist Church, a multi-racial congregation, had made its sanctuary available for the training. We filled the pews, the aisles, the balcony, the choir seats and the chancel itself, and more sessions of the training had to be added. But I had still not decided by Saturday night.
I awoke Sunday with an awareness that crossing the line onto Fort Benning, and breaking the law in doing so, was not an end in itself. We were to cross the line because we were a memorial procession, with caskets and crosses and pictures, and each represented a human being by name who was dead. Theories could be argued, and facts disputed, but one thing was absolutely certain; each name was the name of someone who was dead, someone who would have had a whole life in front of them if they had not been killed. At that moment, the issue for me was not about breaking the law, or about risking arrest, or about crossing a line painted on the road to mark a border; it was not even about which friends I would agree with and which I would disagree with; it was not even about closing the SOA. It was about whether I would stand with those who had been killed, or turn my back on them. Then it was clear, and the decision was made.
At 8:30 I joined a group of a couple dozen Veterans for Peace who planned to march a mile and a half from their hotel to the Fort Benning gate. With an American flag leading the way, we set forth. Cars of demonstrators saw us and honked and a tractor trailer, whose driver surely was not a demonstrator, joined suit. A Gulf War veteran in the group made up cadence songs.
We are here for no more war.
Peace and love are what we're for.
Torture, murder, we say no.
The SOA has got to go.
At the vigil site the Columbus police were collecting anything which might be used as a weapon. Those who had brought signs on sticks could keep the sign, but not the stick. The Veterans for Peace could keep the flag, but had to give up the flag pole.
Displaying signs after poles were confiscated.
Those of us who were to cross went to one side of the road into Fort Benning during the morning's events. Crosses and pictures were passed out with names on them. I received and carried a picture of a young man , inscribed on the back, Antonio Maria Barerra. I do not know Antonio; I don't know what country he was from, or anything about him except one thing: he was killed. I entered Fort Benning for Antonio Maria Barerra.
At one point in the morning a military person with a loud voice using his own public address system from the Fort Benning side of the line interrupted the proceedings to announce the law which would be violated if anyone crossed the line and the maximum penalty which could be applied -- a $5000 fine and six months in jail for a misdemeanor of "criminal trespass.'
The procession started at 11 AM led by coffins for the 6 Jesuit priests and 4 women church workers raped and killed in El Salvador and small ones for the children massacred at El Mozote, all implicating graduates of the School of the Americas. The pallbearers were people who were crossing for the second time; first time offenders had been let off in the past, but second time offenders faced a certain jail sentence. Then came all those who were crossing for the first time.
The School of the Americas Watch had called for 5000 to demonstrate and 1000 to cross the line. As it turned out, over 7000 came to the vigil and 2319 crossed the line. We walked onto Fort Benning in an almost endless column of fours. Three women from Cincinnati from a Franciscan church office there asked me to make up the fourth in their row. Up the hill and around a corner, out of sight of the vigilers outside the Fort Benning gate, awaited busses. The column stopped. Police took the caskets, the crosses, the pictures. Somewhere someone began to hum "Amazing Grace." It picked up and soon the entire column of 2000 people were quietly humming Amazing Grace. We were divided into groups of 44 and boarded busses. There were only enough busses for half; the rest would have to wait for the busses' return. We understood that the busses would take us to processing centers where we would be formally charged and then, hours later, after interminable paperwork, those of us who were first time offenders would be let go.
The busses set forth deeper into Fort Benning, then at the first intersection made a right turn. Soon we had left the post. This seemed a little strange. A mile or so further the busses--26 of them in convoy -- turned into a ball park and stopped. After a little wait, people got off the first bus. Then a little wait more, and people got off the second bus. Some came running down the line of busses saying we were not going to be charged. We realized that we couldn't really be under arrest because they hadn't taken our names or read any one their rights. Soon everyone exited the other busses. The Army had apparently planned to give each bus a short lecture in turn and let people go, but that had broken down.
There was a feeling of intense euphoria. We had stared the Army in the eye, and the Army had blinked. We re-formed into a column of fours and began walking the mile and a half back through civilian communities to the Fort Benning front gate where all the other vigilers were. We marched down the center of residential streets singing We Shall Overcome in English and Spanish, making up verses about closing the SOA. Families came out to watch. Children waved and we waved back. At each intersection the Columbus police blocked traffic for the full 15 minutes they were allowed to in order to let us pass. I don't know, but I think they were annoyed at the Army, and had become more sympathetic to us. My theory is that when the Army decided to simply evict the marchers from the post, they had called the Columbus police and said "We're dropping a crowd of 2400 people in one of your parks. Now they're your problem. Have a nice day."
Back at the protest site outside the front gate of Fort Benning, those who had not crossed the line waited in a long cheering line to greet those of us who were returning. A high school classmate now living in Atlanta found me and we caught each other up. The singers on the podium led 7000 people in song. A favorite was the South African freedom song Siyahamba sung in African and then in English "we are marching in the light of God" and then in Spanish "Caminamos en la luz de dios". The most repeated was a chorus of bright morning star arisin', bright morning star arisin', bright morning star arisin', day's a breakin' in my soul, to which the singers added verse after verse I swear for 45 minutes of hand clapping and swaying and a couple was doing the jitterbug and a group of college students had formed a square and were doing an 'alleman left.'
Another native American prayer ended the event. I walked back to my rented car, got to the hotel and called my wife, Fran. I'd called her in the morning to let her know I had made a decision about crossing and to please remember me in prayer. Our Methodist congregation was doing a joint service with the Unitarian Universalists and she reported they'd followed the UU tradition of lighting a candle to express a concern; she was first in line to do so. Now it was evening and I called her again to bring her up to date.
Later someone asked her, "how's Jack?" She answered "Higher than a kite."
©1998 Jackson H. Day. All Rights Reserved.
For a memorial page in poetry, see Memorial For Antonio Maria Barerra. For a slightly different and shorter version of this article, see "Finding the Bottom Line", published in the Fall, 1998 edition of The Veteran, published by Vietnam Veterans Against the War
See photos of vigil at Ann Onstad's November 22 SOAW Vigil Site.
Return to School of the Americas Watch home page.
Return to School of the Americas page, Virtual Truth Commission site.
Return to Travel page, Jack Day's Worlds
Return to Home page, Jack Day's Worlds
Updated January 31, 2005
