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Monday, May 21st, 2012 | Posted by Sherwood Ross

Why An Ex-Marine Turns Pacifist

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An Ex-Marine Turned Pacifist Now One of The “HANCOCK 33”

By Sherwood Ross

It’s been a long journey for Russell Brown, 65, from the days when he fought with the Fourth Marines in Viet Nam, to becoming one of the “Hancock 33” protesters against drone warfare. Last April 22, he was arrested walking en route to Hancock Air Force Base, just outside of Syracuse, N.Y., where General Atomics-made MQ-9 Reapers, the deadly unmanned aerial vehicles(UAV) that fire Hellfire missiles, dot the runway. The protesters would have liked to serve an indictment for war crimes on the base commander and President Obama, et al, and to reach Hancock’s 2,000 employees with their pacifist message, but the authorities were not going to have any of that.

Onondaga County sheriffs stopped them and told them they were all under arrest. “They said we were marching or parading without a permit,” Brown says. “Eventually they offered most of us an opportunity to sign a waiver agreeing to not sue them for false arrest. I believe two people signed, 33 remained arrested. Then they stopped arresting any more people.” The protesters were halted while walking in a long, thin line toward the base, Brown says, and were not obstructing traffic. (“It was a real violation of the First Amendment.”) Brown adds, the U.S. Government likes to try the pacifists before a judge so that “juries don’t learn the U.S. is committing war crimes.”

“I lost my religion in Viet Nam,” says Brown, a soft-spoken, hazel-eyed avuncular figure who ties his long white-brown hair in a ponytail with red rubber bands and sports a T-shirt that proclaims, “I Wish To Live Without War.” He thought at the time, “If God is all-good and all-wise, what am I doing holding a dead baby?” Brown, of Buffalo, N.Y., enlisted in the Marines in 1966 “without a lot of forethought” to get a two-year hitch “over with” and return to civilian life. “I was a very naive guy,” he recalls reflecting on that youthful decision. And what he saw in Viet Nam has haunted him ever since.

“A sniper shot at us from about 300 yards across a rice paddy and

via Why An Ex-Marine Turns Pacifist | Veterans Today.

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