Review: ‘Paying the Price for Peace’
PAYING THE PRICE FOR PEACE: The Story of S. Brian Willson
Bo Boudart, director/producer
110 min., 2016
Some people are committed to protesting the many wars and conflicts started by the government of the United States and to working for a truly peaceful society and world, and that is a good thing. But few people I know have actually paid a heavier price for that commitment than an American veteran of the Vietnam war by the name of S. Brian Willson. This newly released documentary film is his story.
That story begins with Willson’s youth in a small town in New York state in the 1940s — an all-American boy who was born on July 4, the USA’s Independence Day — and how he excelled in school and at sports. In the mid-1960s he joined the U.S. Air Force and went to the sovereign nation of Vietnam, where the U.S. government was fighting a losing battle against the so-called Viet Cong guerrilla forces.
It was during his time in Vietnam that Willson’s life was forever changed, when he saw firsthand the many dead bodies of “enemy fighters” that the U.S. bomber jets were massacring: innocent women, children and elderly people in rural Vietnamese villages. He understood at that point that the whole U.S. military presence in Vietnam, and indeed his whole life up to then as a patriotic young American man, was a lie: “I did everything right,” as he reflects in the film, “and it was all wrong.”
That was the beginning of what Willson calls his own personal awakening about the violent, oppressive history of the USA and the wider implications of that for the rest of the world. After returning to the U.S. from Vietnam, he became a lawyer and was active in various social justice issues. In the 1980s, when the U.S. government under president Ronald Reagan was waging an illegal, covert war against what it called the “communist threat” in the Central American nation of Nicaragua, Willson got involved in that protest as well.
He and three other U.S. war veterans staged a hunger strike for more than a month on the steps of the U.S. Congress capitol building in Washington DC in 1986 in opposition to the U.S. covert war in Nicaragua. A year later, on the west coast in California, he and other protesters made plans to hold a sitting protest on the public section of railroad tracks that were used by U.S. military trains to ship weapons from the U.S. to Central America, in hopes of stopping the trains and keeping the American-made weapons from killing people in other countries.
On September 1, 1987, Willson’s life was changed once again, when he was struck on those railroad tracks by one U.S. government train and nearly killed. He suffered damage to his brain, and lost both of his legs below the knee. He was lucky to be alive. But as soon as he was able, he resumed his peace activities with even more vigor, and continued his work of visiting various countries and documenting the truth about the death and destruction that the war policies of the USA had wrought on the innocent people of those countries.
I remember that I was newly arrived in Japan around that time, starting my work as a full-time reporter for the Osaka office of the Japan Times newspaper, when I read a brief news article about that event concerning Brian Willson and the train in the newspaper.
It was much later, around 2003, when I and my wife happened to get acquainted with Brian Willson and his partner, Becky Luening, in the small town of Arcata in Humboldt County, northern California, where I was living. There, the four of us moved in the same circles of people committed to peacefully protesting the U.S. government’s illegal, immoral war in Iraq. For Willson, it was an extension of his peace activities going all the back to the war in Vietnam, and it seemed clear that the U.S. military was headed for sure defeat in Iraq as badly or worse than it had been in Vietnam decades before.
This film, Paying the Price for Peace, documents Willson’s journey through all those years, supported by an impressive array of archival news footage and video interviews of other U.S. war veterans (spanning from World War II to the Iraq war), close friends of Willson and various fellow peace activists — some of which are famous public figures like actor Martin Sheen and author Alice Walker. I also like the way that the film’s director, Bo Boudart, weaves music throughout the film as a soundtrack.
The hardest parts of this film to watch for me (and I’m sure for others too) are the parts showing Willson being run over by the U.S. government train in 1987. It was a miracle that he survived and that he is still able to carry on today with his writing and public speaking. But somehow Willson is able to take all this in stride, and he emphasizes in the film that the physical violence used against him by the U.S. government is just a small part of the violence heaved upon people around the world every day by the USA through its policies of war and economic exploitation.
For Willson, paying the price for peace also means not participating in the kind of wasteful American lifestyle that results in the world’s natural resources being used up and destroyed at an alarming rate, as we are seeing more and more in the news these days. He travels locally on a customized hand-driven bicycle and by train within the United States, and does not travel anywhere overseas by plane. He lives a simple lifestyle, growing organic food in his home garden in Portland, Oregon, where he now lives, and following the creed of spiritual revolutionaries like Mahatma Gandhi and Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. that nonviolence is the most effective tool for achieving social change.
At the same time, Willson is firm in his belief that more and more people in the U.S. will need to stand up, raise their voices in public protest and take even greater risks before any meaningful social change will take place. I share that view with him completely. And these lessons are not just for Americans: With the Japanese government now following in lockstep the U.S. government’s addiction to war, the people of Japan will be faced with the same kind of critical choices about war and peace in the future that many Americans now face.
This film generally follows the story line of Brian Willson’s memoirs, Blood on the Tracks, published in 2011. I heartily encourage you to buy this book and read his story. As for the film, Paying the Price for Peace is now being shown at a few movie theaters in the U.S. and you can order your own DVD version of the film directly from the movie’s official website.
To keep up with what Brian Willson is doing these days, you can follow his blog on his personal website as well. There is much food for thought in his writings, and much to motivate and inspire those of us who are committed to living in a peaceful world.
But at what cost will that peaceful world come about? That is up to each one of us to decide individually. In the case of one person, Brian Willson, paying the price for peace, as documented in this film, has meant a lifetime of sacrifice and commitment. We all can benefit by taking some time out of our own busy lives to sit and watch this movie, and then take its important message to heart.
Brian Covert