Like many men of his generation, Phil Berrigan was trained by the U.S. Army to kill Nazis. It would be years later before he questioned war and imperialism. His war experience deeply affected him and helped forge the strength and fervor that made him one of great radicals in the struggles for civil rights, economic justice, peace and against the insanity of the nuclear arms race.

His current struggle is with the scourge of cancer, and he is debilitated. So I would like to share my perspective on the life of Philip Berrigan.

Returning home from the killing fields of Germany, Phil was inspired by his brother Daniel, a Jesuit. He entered the seminary to become a Josephite priest and live and teach in African-American communities. The nature of racism thrust him into the burgeoning civil rights movement. The Catholic hierarchy soon began to look askance at these troublesome priests when Phil and Dan marched with the dispossessed in Selma, Alabama.

Phil saw the contradiction of a president signing civil rights legislation while unleashing the Pentagon's war machine in Southeast Asia. Because of U.S. imperialism, covered up by government fabrications, some four million Southeast Asians lost their lives, more than 50,000 U.S. soldiers died, and the country was nearly ripped asunder.

Recognizing the enormity of the disaster, he and others in the Baltimore Interfaith Council concluded that anything short of direct action was untruthful. This led, on October 27, 1967, to one of the first draft board raids. The Baltimore Four entered the U.S. Customs House downtown and poured blood on Selective Services files. Blood is a powerful biblical symbol which stresses the prohibition against killing. It is believed Phil was the first Catholic priest in this country arrested for civil disobedience. The Four were convicted, but released pending sentencing.

Phil left the Josephite order in 1968, and secretly married Elizabeth McAlister, a Catholic nun. On May 17, 1968, he joined Dan and other religious activists opposed to U.S. intervention in Southeast Asia in a group that came to be known as the Catonsville Nine. They used napalm, made from a Green Berets recipe, to burn the County's draft files. Dan, an author and poet from New York City, immortalized their courtroom experience in THE TRIAL OF THE CATONSVILLE NINE.

Peace activists were going to federal prison for burning paper at time when the government was burning people. Phil received a six-year sentence for the Customs House raid, and a three-and-one-half year concurrent term for Catonsville.

While Phil was imprisoned in 1970, the Justice Department charged him with masterminding a plot to kidnap Nixon aide Henry Kissinger and blow up heating tunnels at the Pentagon. Dan was named an unindicted co-conspirator.

In 1971, Phil and Dan were on the cover of TIME MAGAZINE. Raised a Catholic in sleepy Erie, PA, I was startled to learn Catholic priests and nuns were going to jail for protesting war. I found this deeply moving, yet quite far away. How does one become such a serious resister?

J. Edgar Hoover strategically decided to hold the conspiracy trial in archconservative Harrisburg, PA. Now living in Johnstown, I attended a weekend support rally and heard for the first time a speech by Liz McAlister. The show trial ended in an acquittal for all charged.

Long before the WASHINGTON POST fired Colman McCarthy, an outspoken pacifist, he wrote a syndicated column, which appeared in the PITTSBURGH POST-GAZETTE. It was in one of his columns that I first read about the Jonah House. It was founded in 1973, by Phil, Liz, and other resisters on Park Avenue in the tough Reservoir Hill neighborhood in Baltimore.

In 1996, the community moved from the row house on Park Avenue to its present location in West Baltimore, another down-and-out neighborhood, and became caretakers of a Catholic cemetery. Their faith-based community engages in acts of nonviolent resistance, does house painting to provide for its subsistence existence, and shares all its resources. The three Berrigan children were raised in the Jonah House, but now live elsewhere.

While in the Peace Corps in Botswana, I saw in the INTERNATIONAL HERALD TRIBUNE that Phil, Dan and six others, on Sept. 9, 1980, entered the General Electric Nuclear Missile Re-entry Division in King of Prussia, PA, and hammered on nose cones for the Mark 12A warhead. The Plowshares movement, enacting the biblical prophecy of Isaiah 2:4 to turn swords into plowshares, was born.

Initially charged with over ten different felony and misdemeanor counts, they were denied a "justification defense" and could not present expert testimony. Due to suppression of testimony about nuclear war-fighting policies, there were protests throughout the trial, which Emile de Antonio recreated in his film IN THE KING OF PRUSSIA. Martin Sheen played the fascist judge. All eight were convicted of burglary, conspiracy and criminal mischief and sentenced to prison terms of five to ten years.

Like many protesters, my criminal career is a direct result of the influence of Dan and Phil, and I have been arrested with both of them.

In 1983, I worked with Nuclear Free America in Baltimore and met Phil when he was painting at the American Friends Service Committee office. When the DC-based Center for Creative Nonviolence organized a 40-day Harvest of Shame in 1984, I was ready for my first political arrest and linked up with Peter DeMott, from the Jonah House, Phil's brother Jim and an activist from Frederick, Maryland, who wanted to be arrested for praying for peace. We assembled at a gate leading to the White House, but the Park Police planned to charge us with incommoding, so our cohort from Frederick dropped out. In his place, a drug dealer stepped in to take a bust. Phil and Dan also mentored him at Danbury.

Phil was always risking arrest in Baltimore and Washington. On Apr. 14, 1986, 43 advocates, wearing 1040 forms with "No Tax Dollars to the Contras" scrawled on them, performed a die-in at Baltimore's federal building. 60 MINUTES was there filming Phil and, since my body died next to his, I had my three seconds of fame when the show aired.

On Nov. 16, 1989, six Jesuit priests, their housekeeper and her daughter were murdered in San Salvador by another Reagan administration-supported terrorist group. Soon thereafter, Joe Mulligan, a Jesuit, came to the Jonah House and brought from El Salvador dirt encased with the blood of the martyrs. A plan was developed to go on the White House tour, and then pour blood mixed with the dirt from El Salvador on the pillars facing Pennsylvania Ave. However, an informant alerted the government, and we were stopped from going on the tour. We then demonstrated on the sidewalk in front of the White House, and Phil threw the blood on a gate. As I was being arrested, I watched as an indignant police officer shove Phil's face into the blood.

Eight of us were arrested December 5, 1991 protesting weapons of mass destruction research at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory [APL] in Howard County, MD. Phil dubbed the place the Death Lab and came to our March 26, 1992 trial before our long-time nemesis, District Court Judge James Vaughan. He would not permit any testimony about the APL's research, and found the first defendant in contempt for mentioning nuclear weapons research. Phil said "Let him speak, judge." Then the second defendant was removed, so Phil repeated his entreaty to Judge Vaughan, and he was arrested for contempt. Two more of us were removed and charged with contempt. Vaughan quickly found the four remaining defendants guilty and declared a mistrial for those removed for contempt.

Furthermore, he dismissed our contempt charges, but he wanted the revolutionary ex-priest to apologize for his comment, "This court is a disgrace." Phil responded, "I have one condition. I will change my position when you allow people in this court to speak about the work of the Applied Physics Lab." Vaughan found him guilty of contempt and sentenced him to five years.

We contacted the ACLU and the media and organized a protest outside the courthouse for the following day. The contempt conviction was finally dismissed, and Phil was released in time to join at the demonstration.

At another protest at the lab, Phil, Sister Margaret McKenna and I were the first and only protesters to get into the APL director's office. On his door, we posted an indictment of the lab's research and poured blood over the statement. During the trial, Judge Becker, a Catholic, showed deference to the former priest and nun. He found us guilty of trespass and property destruction, but sentenced us to time served (several hours in jail after arrest). The next time I was arrested at the APL and appeared before Judge Becker, my co-defendants were not priests or nuns. He found me guilty and sent me away for 30 days in the Howard County Detention Center.

Of course, Phil continued to engage in Plowshares actions. Undaunted, Phil and four others, known as the Aegis Plowshares, acted on Easter Sunday (March 31)1991 to disarm the USS Gettysburg, an Aegis Missile-equipped cruiser. The next morning they were arraigned in the quaint Sagadahoc County [Maine]courthouse just across the road from the Bath Iron Works. The judge offered to release them on an unsecured bond, but they chose to stay in jail. By April 3rd they were released unconditionally, and later, without explanation, the State dismissed the charges.

Phil returned to the Bath Iron Works on February 13, 1997, as part of the Prince of Peace Plowshares. The following morning, he and five other defendants were taken to that same courthouse to be arraigned for disarming USS The Sullivans, a nuclear-capable Aegis destroyer. Judge Joseph Field described Phil as "a moral giant" and the "conscience of a generation." Again the State decided not to prosecute the Plowshares.

This time the federal government did, and the six were convicted by a Portland, Maine jury on May 7, 1997. Phil described the trial as a "joke" and a "farce," as U.S. District Judge Gene Carter denied them any defense. What could the defendants expect when Carter was nominated to the bench by Maine Senator William Cohen, who would later serve as President Clinton's Secretary of War? Carter was also a friend of Buzz Fitzgerald, the former CEO at Bath Iron Works. At sentencing on October 27th, the prosecutor described the Plowshares as terrorists, and Judge Carter sentenced Phil to 24 months incarceration.

After completing that sentence, Phil's spiritual muse led him to the Maryland Air National Guard Base outside Baltimore. On December 19, 1999, the four Plowshares Vs. Depleted Uranium hammered on two A-10 Warthog [Fairchild Thunderbolt II] aircraft, which use a Gatling gun to fire 3,900 rounds of depleted uranium per minute.

Before the trial, Baltimore County Circuit Court Judge James T. Smith Jr. issued a gag order to prevent testimony as to intent and to prevent expert witnesses from being called. This sealed the Plowshares' fate, so the defendants refused to appear in court on March 22nd, 2000, when they were convicted of conspiracy and property destruction. The vindictive judge exceeded the guidelines by sentencing Phil to 30 months. On November 5, 2002, Smith, now a retired judge, was elected Baltimore County executive.

After serving that sentence, Berrigan returned to Portland to face Judge Carter, who sentenced him to an additional year in prison for probation violation. So Phil was in prison on May 3, 2001, when INVESTIGATION OF A FLAME, the Lynne Sachs documentary about the Catonsville Nine, was shown in Baltimore. Both friend and foe were there to see the film and listen to the discussion afterwards.

One foe was Steve Sachs, who led the prosecution of the Nine and remarked that night, "I didn't feel any sense of guilt or regret at prosecuting what I regarded as excessive, arrogant attempts to inflict their views on others." He presumably does not mind when the U.S. engages in excessive, arrogant attempts to inflict imperialistic views on other countries.

Released from prison in December 2001, Phil gave what I thought was the best speech. It was at the massive April 20th demonstration in D.C., when he urged the masses to do nonviolent direct action. He later wrote:
"April 20th proved to me that tens of millions of Americans were ready and willing for non-cooperation, for teach-ins, rallies, and boycotts, for tax resistance, civil resistance, and plowshares, for a multitude of 'No's' --refusals to run the system for the bosses and billionaires."

On April 24th, he fell and broke his left arm, which delayed his hip replacement. Finally his troublesome hip was replaced in July, but he failed to regain his strength and vigor. In October, he was diagnosed with cancer. Letters can be sent to: Jonah House, 1301 Moreland Ave., Baltimore MD 21216.

I think the best way we can say thanks to Philip Berrigan, for what he has done and how he has inspired so many of us, is to do nonviolent action, as serious as possible, against this war-mongering government.

Finally, there are many books written by and about the Berrigan brothers. FIGHTING THE LAMB'S WAR [1996] is the autobiography of Philip Berrigan written with Fred A. Wilcox, available from Common Courage Press.

Max Obuszewski, a member of the Baltimore Emergency Response Network [BERN] and can be reached at mobuszewski-AT-afsc.org.