Flames of War and Peace

For decades the poetry and peace witness of Daniel Berrigan have touched the souls of people hungering to make change in the world. Now we can also be touched by the story of his life journey.

The following is excerpted from Berrigan's autobiography, published in October 1987. It covers a slice of his life during the Vietnam War years, spanning his exile from the Jesuit community as a result of his peace commitment, his work as a activist and professor at Cornell University, his rescue mission to Hanoi, and his participation in the burning of draft files at Catonsville, Maryland, an action which galvanized resistance to the war.

His words both affirm his deep conviction about peace and unfold the doubts and wrestlings that preceded his decision to join the Catonsville action. They speak deeply to all who want to walk with integrity in their journey to make peace. --The Editors

THERE WAS the Vietnam War. The war was to become an all but permanent horror, a kind of great salt machine in the sea, churning out tears, bitter unrest, and death, turning national life to a welter of sorrow and division.

The Cold War was sinking world temperature to a zero, the war in Vietnam was expanding more savagely.

Warmaking required no center; its reality was that of a machine, which we rightly call a war machine. And a machine has no center; it has parts, which are required only to mesh and move in gear.

The question for me, as peacemaking came to be a question, was one of soul, of center. The soul of peacemaking was simply the will to give one's life. As war sanctioned the taking of life, peacemaking must sanction the giving of life.

Many believed (many still believe) that peace will come through a certain, nice adjustment of warmaking power, through diminished stockpiling, through a nuclear freeze. We still have not found our soul, or created a soul, or been granted a soul. We arrogate the metaphors and vocabulary of warmaking and call it peacemaking. For the war-makers want peace too, and always have. Which is to say, they seek a tolerable level of warmaking, one that will protect hegemonies and self-interest. And we too seek a certain level of peace--one that will protect our self-interest, modest as it may be; our ego; our good name in the world.

We are still unable to attend to the considerable and central question--that of soul. Or more precisely, of the spiritual change required for peacemaking.

The machine is incapable of this because it is a machine; and the peacemakers are incapable because they are afraid. And each of these, the fear of consequence and the fearless machine, conspire in the end to the same thing--which is to say, war preparation and war. Or at best (in the case of the peacemakers), a pallid mitigation of the full-blown fury.

I was assigned to work in New York. I planted my feet on the macadam of the city, but I was in reality stepping to the edge of a volcano. It was even then rumbling away, and its eruption would all but scuttle me.

Thus, what might be called my real life--episodes that would set me, for good and ill, on a lifelong quest--was shortly under way.

The war turned me upside down, my family also. Upside down, our pockets turned out, possessions and honors and the credit of a good name, routine, soutane, long black line, institutional life, all suppositions of geography and soul.

It came to this, as far as one could judge in those tumultuous times: Violence was the norm, the war was the norm. The times, the bloodletting, these were normal. Their (always regrettable) 'incidents' were the responsibility of no one in particular. What was one to do, what was a president to do, or a bishop, or any citizen?

"Normal" meant morally acceptable. What was abnormal, morally unacceptable, was ourselves, nonviolence.

I SPECULATE AT TIMES, or in idle moments I pose the question to my family: What might have happened to us, had there been no civil rights movement and no war in Vietnam?

It is a question apt to boggle the thoughtful, or something absurdly unanswerable in the nature of things, like What if we had not been born at all?

I had been born; one began from that. And because of the war, I had been born again; and one must begin from that. Short of that event, and its literally befalling me, I could conjure up some ghostly mischance of a scenario. A cleric, professor, writer, strolls the acres of academe. He passes gracefully from sunlight to shadow. He is beloved of a coterie of readers of poetry and theology, is welcome at the tables of the wealthy, writes books diligently, teaches adequately. Each book published adds imperceptibly to his repute.

The ghost fades into the back of the mind. Then he is gone and good riddance.

I was assigned in 1964 to work as an editor of a Jesuit magazine in New York. The assignment I took to be a none-too-gentle nudge; the salad days of academe were over.

The time was early in the notorious '60s. No campus was looking for more trouble than was already brewing. Who needed to import trouble in the form of the likes of me--given the bearish market, the millionaire trustees,, the sanctities of property and investment? From a sensible point of view (Jesuit officials are nothing if not sensible), I no longer belonged on a college campus.

Meantime the war expanded. I remember saying to my brother Philip soon after my return from Europe in 1965 something to the effect that we had best be declaring our no, loud and clear and soon, under pain of never saying it at all.

We started to say no. The word was tentative at first, hardly audible. It came from our mouths like the first word of an infant: No--a word simple in the extreme, but still wondrous, on lips such as ours; on the lips of Catholics, clerics to boot, the word of a foreign tongue.

It must be recalled that others, highly placed in the church, were saying another word with all their might: a hearty, confident yes. Their approval of the war could be heard around the world. Among Catholics the yes swept all before it or pretended to. In any case, it drowned out for a time all conflicting sounds and second thoughts.

There were many others, bishops and famous clerics, who said nothing at all, and that of course came in the end to the same thing. It was the yes of silence which here and there has been named the crime of silence. A silent yes and so understood by those directly responsible for expanding the war.

Church and state were smoothly adjacent, as complementary, as soothing, as hand and glove. Indeed (the common reasoning went), the times being chill, the hand had best be in the glove, the glove warming the hand. Then in emergencies the hand, clothed and armed, might kill, and bless the killing; and who in right mind would object to that?

Right mind or mind awry, we would.

War, even so-called conventional war, constantly blurred the moral sense, the sense of limits. Inevitably, war became total war--more troops, more fire power, more bombings of civilians, more everything.

And at home, equally and inevitably, more lies, more disclaimers of guilt, a constantly shifting language of justification, shoddy politics, the corruption of once-decent public conscience. A growing unease in a public used only to its ease.

We found a few things to do. Something in us insisted; there were tasks, we must come on them. The process was largely improvisational. We tried something, it failed; no matter, try again.

Nonviolence first and foremost, with its fiery trail of implication: compassion for the adversary, care of one another, community discipline, prayer and sacrament and biblical literacy. Long-term carefulness and short, care of little matters and large, the short run and the long.

It was easy to set down a formula and devilishly hard to live by it, even in minor matters.
We had to discover such things for ourselves by reading the lives of the saints, pondering their secrets and spirit and tactic; what they had come on, what accomplished; the place of trial and error, that great winnower and humiliator. And by pondering the gospel. And by listening to one another, and talking. But listening more than talking, a rare proportion and difficult to honor.

PHILIP WAS TEACHING seminarians of his Josephite order in Newburgh, New York. He and his students labored among the poor of the town, especially the black poor, in housing and community organizing.

The war, he thundered, had already come home, not only in the sealed boxes of the dead, but among the suffering living, in our urban stalemate and fix. Because there were limitless millions for the war, there was nothing for the victims of the war here and now.

Then the war came home in an altogether new way. Philip was being shoved abruptly out of the seminary. Objection of the city officials against his anti-war passion had reached a boiling point. He was assigned to a parish in the inner city of Baltimore.

So Philip went into domestic exile, a fate reserved elsewhere, as we knew, for those who oppose governments, and in our country, as we were learning, reserved for those who resist churches which resemble governments.

To have no inkling of the future is a mercy. I could hardly know, my bones being far from prophetic, that events were ensuring that the fate of Philip would soon be my own.

The sequence of disasters got under way one morning. A dreadful message arrived from the Catholic Worker house in lower Manhattan. A young member, Roger LaPorte, a former seminarian, had torched himself in protest against the war, in front of the United Nations building. He died within a few days.

His death could not but touch my life with fire. Not because he was a close friend, but because his death was so terrible, such a homing of disaster in the youthful Catholic Worker community.

The next message, from my superior, arrived in tones of absolute panic. I was under no circumstance to issue a public statement regarding the young man's death. Such matters were presumably to be left to my betters, more exactly to the authorities of the chancery.
The message of the cardinal was delivered to the New York public in due time. It spoke of suicide; it reminded Catholics that our moral theology in no way countenanced such an act.

I thought that a series of nagging questions was by no means resolved by this pronunciamiento. Was the death of LaPorte in fact a suicide? And even if it was, did the official judgment on the matter reflect the compassion of Christ?

And more: What if the death reflected not despair but a self-offering attuned (however naively or mistakenly) to the sacrifice of Christ? Would not such a presumption show mercy toward the dead, as well as honoring the grief of the living?

A Eucharist was held a few days later at the Catholic Worker. I was urged to speak. I aired my reflections before the stricken community: the question of suicide and the possibility of sacrifice, suggesting that we leave the imponderables to God. It was the best I could do; it was also, I thought, the least.

Word of the liturgy got around, as was predictable. I was accused of disobeying an order.
The clouds were lowering. Decisions were arrived at. I was kept in outer darkness, an "object" of obedience. I was, in fact, reduced to a zero, whose fate his unaccountable actions had placed in saner hands.

I walked into the cloud, which all but swallowed me. I sought a meeting to discover whose actions, decisions, were governing this murky state of affairs, a state which might be presumed to concern me. No meeting allowed; the cloud thickened.

At one point, at wits' end, I took my torment to a priest of my community and was told laconically that "the fat was in the fire." What had kindled the fire, I knew. And whose fat, meager indeed, was sputtering there I also knew. But the knowledge brought little comfort.

Our community was put on a war footing. And since I was objecting to the war, I must be treated like a deserter or an informer. The form of punishment narrowed--there was silence, then ostracism, scorn, and, finally, exile.

The following are, for the record, a few elements of the decision regarding my fate, as this was signed, sealed, and delivered to me in the autumn of 1965: I must depart the country for Latin America, with all possible speed--as soon, in fact, as visas could be procured. I was forbidden to visit my family, though my parents were aged and in ill health. No date of return was mentioned, presumably none was envisioned. Meantime, I must immediately leave New York and await elsewhere the necessary travel documents, while dwelling in whatever Jesuit house might be willing to receive me.

And inevitably, a cover-up was arranged. Exile? Of course not. I was sent on a "routine assignment" to Latin America, as editor of a Jesuit magazine, to file reports on the work of Latin Jesuits. It was contemptible and saddening.

I went; on my back, the incubus--both betrayal and burden. And in four months across the length of the southern cone, I suffered the death of friends, unutterable loneliness, dread, even despair. Encountered in almost every country, a pre-Medellin church, a church for, of, and by the powerful and wealthy.

And here and there, like a radioactive capsule in a diseased body, were groups of biblically alert Christians--groups usually led by women, dwelling in barrios and favellas, passionately loving and beloved by the poor.

And I learned and absorbed and nodded assent in my deep soul. It was right to make peace, I would continue to make peace, here or elsewhere, the peace that does justice.

And I discovered, gradual as a dawn over the mind, the irony that is a most delicious form of knowledge. To wit, the act that was designed to break me in pieces was serving only to toughen my resolve. Who was it said, "That which does not kill me, only strengthens me"?

And then word reached me from New York: in effect, come home, all is forgiven.

Forgiven? What was there to forgive?

I acceded, under condition. To wit, no conditions imposed or accepted. The work that occasioned the trouble would continue.

Indeed, I questioned my soul, had authorities been so fond as to assume that exposure to the realities of Latin America would turn the offender from his offense? A far better plan would have seen me disposed of in mid-Sahara or some remote polar region, surrounded by ruminant camels or flocks of penguins.

The edict was thoughtless, the outcome almost hilarious. With neither dromedaries nor spiffy birds for company, but surrounded by the infection of misery and injustice, even a slow learner like myself found his learning speeded up wonderfully. I came home, worse than ever.

IN THE WINTER OF 1967, two clerical gentlemen appeared at the door of Jesuit Mission, armed with an altogether novel proposal. The two were in search of a third to complete the troika, someone whose responsibility was inscrutably referred to as "activism," off and on campus. Would I come to Cornell?

Cornell was seething with anti-war furies, most of them exploding around the religious community. There was need of cool heads to ensure that the blaze did not die out in a flare. I packed up for the Finger Lake country.

A printing press was established in a store front on the edge of campus. It went clanking and humming away inkily, night and day, churning out a seemingly endless stream of indicting material. Like "Who owned Cornell anyway?" and like "What connections joined the Cornell trustees to the warmaking and war-profiteering of the time?"

In the view of many, we were anathema. We were guilty, along with lesser crazies, of placing an intolerable strain on the campus life. Civil disobedience, fasts and vigils, picketing, sit-ins, political drama and music and poetry, the hearing we granted to the inflammatory and outrageous, the animosity we fostered toward authority--thus went the charges.

Thus my first year at Cornell passed, and a fateful year dawned, a year that was to mark me with the stigmata of the tumultuous times, neither victim nor executioner. Something else--the times themselves must reveal it.

My brother Philip arrived at Cornell sometime in the late summer of 1967. There was a plan afoot. He wanted me informed of it, not precisely to induct me into the action. I think he sensed how far I was from being a ready candidate for something so audacious as he purposed.

The plan came to this: He and a few cohorts would enter a draft board in downtown Baltimore and pour their own blood on the files contained in the building.

It was all quite simple. It was also unprecedented, calculated to set the head spinning.

But the head on my shoulders was not so much set spinning as further stuck in place. I was shaken to the core by the venture. I was by no means convinced on the spot or won over, even as a friend in court, much less as a participant.

For many reasons the Catholics were the least equipped to grasp the import of that audacious action. For a thousand years, the peacemaking Jesus had been out of fashion.

The war signaled the end of the questioning of war. What emerged from audiences of Catholics after the Baltimore action in 1967 was not questions at all, but accusations, indignation, anger, moral conclusions, cut and dried. The war was moral; it was wrong to impede it, especially in such undignified, indeed hooligan tactics, lawless, unclergylike. Priests belonged where priests had always been--in church sanctuaries and rectories--certainly not in draft boards and courts and jails, places where the faith could be held only in ridicule and scorn.

We read in scripture exhortations to love enemies, to do good to those who assailed us, to walk another mile with the opponent, to turn the other cheek to the persecutor. But our country was at war! And the bloody matter of war, like the bloody hands of Mars, closed the book in our hands.

We were taught, not by Jesus and the apostles, but by churchmen, a circumstance which many would be inclined to call a different matter indeed.

The pope and bishops taught, up to the Vietnam War and its horrid course, that a given war could be called just, and therefore in degree godly, under certain conditions. There was no place, no appropriateness, for argument. The argument was the war, and the war was just.

IT WAS IN AN ATMOSPHERE charged with ominous event that I drove toward Washington that November day. I knew the draft board action was imminent.

I traveled to Washington to support friends from the university and elsewhere who were planning to surround the Pentagon. Support was all I was ready for, or so I thought.

It was my first such demonstration. Indeed, nothing prepared me for the spectacle of the Pentagon--the awesome pile of utterly characterless masonry, pretentious as a pharaoh's tomb and as morally void. It was also the first mesmerizing sight of a great throng, pressing against the river entrance, sitting, standing, singing, praying, exhorting, spilling upward like water defying gravity, up the lawn, up the steps, in face of the massed soldiery.

We stood or sat or knelt in the glare of public knowledge and legal jeopardy. Eventually, it was announced with a great blare, "At midnight the law will take effect; all who remain in place are liable then to arrest."

My friends, of course, chose to remain. And so, by force of example, did I. Again and again in the heady Cornell days, we had applied to one another the word "friend." It seemed fitting that the word be tested here, in a place where presumably only weapons were to be tested, or humans, it might be, but only insofar as these were useful appendages to the weapons.

We were brought to a disused military camp in Virginia. There, for a matter of some days, we were treated somewhat like wayward children in summer camp. Then one day, out of the blue, a squad of legal skulls descended on us.

Most of the formerly fervent seized the bait and departed on the instant. The remaining, who might be judged arbitrary spirits, requested a trial. They were thereupon judged apt to benefit from "a lesson."

We had begun an improvised fast--a way, we thought, drawn from civil rights' experience, of gaining a modicum of mental clarity. There came a moment of clarity indeed--the moment when the children's camp days were over. We survivors of the legal eagles were placed in holding cells to await transport to the D.C. jail.

We were taken off to Washington in cuffs and chains and there segregated from the prison populace in our own dormitory. A great rumble arose about our daring a fast. The fast continued. And within a week or so, we were released.

A friend in the Washington area was waiting to transport me to a Catholic Worker house nearby, where I was fortified by a bowl of soup and so in short order regained my land legs. But it was in the car en route that we heard the news. The derring-do of the Baltimore Four--the draft board raid, the successful pouring of blood on the files, and the summary arrests.

It was a curious juxtaposition. I had taken part in a low-intensity act, together with those who shortly thereafter would vanish once more into the tunnels and byways of college routine.

But when Philip and his friends walked through the door of the draft board, there was no exit, not for years. They were seized by the great Seizer. They were trespassers on his turf, had dared muck up the exquisite order of his necrophilic files where the names of the soon to be killed, or the soon to kill, or both, were preserved against the Day of Great Summons.

Arrived at the Catholic Worker, I phoned home. My mother's incalculable calm touched me. This was by no means the first test of her equanimity, nor would it be the last. I explained things as best I might. "You mean," she responded, "that you are out of jail, and your brother is in?"

The Baltimore Four were held in jail for some months, then released in view of a trial. The supposition was that being sufficiently chastened by their enforced stay, they could now be trusted to behave themselves. So went the fond presumption; their wings and talons were clipped.

It would be difficult to conjure up a greater illusion than this: that the law, which was protecting the horrid war, would effectively put Philip to silence. Indeed the law would hear more of him for years and years, and so would I.

AT CORNELL ONE MORNING, my phone rang. Two Americans were invited to come to Hanoi and receive three American pilots to be released on occasion of the Buddhist Tet holiday in January of 1968, conducting them back to the United States under auspices of the peace movement. Howard Zinn of Boston University had already agreed to go. Would I? I would, with all my heart.

For me, being under American bombs was an education without parallel. No one was exempt. We and the pilots were as expendable as the Vietnamese peasants or their children.

The airmen were released, we started home with them, were interrupted in Vientiane by the American ambassador. The airmen were ordered to complete their journey home in an Air Force plane.

We came back alone, and I added to my education a new subject--that of betrayal.

THE SPRING OF '68 dawned over Cornell. My "Cornell conclusion," for what it was worth (not much), stood firm. It stood, hardly weakened by the exemplary action of the Baltimore Four. To wit, we, the good anti-war clergy, had gone as far as could be. We had counseled the young in their quest for a peaceable kingdom. We had even approached lawbreaking and conspiracy in our support of the campus ministers who renounced their draft cards.

We had not yet come on the moral equivalent of the resisters; we were far removed from their legal risks.

How is an impasse broken? Only a startling discovery, epiphany, dawning, could
reveal my ignorance for what it was.

Into our sublime serene island, our El Dorado, came Philip. He is not to be thought of as a portent--nothing so pretentious. He was a friend, and he came bearing a gift.

Such a gift as stops the heart short. He and others, he stated simply, were not content that the action at the Baltimore draft center should rest there, a flash in the pan, a gesture. For it was more than that, and government leniency or sternness in the coming trial must not steal the thunder of the peaceable.

The action, in short, must be repeated elsewhere; and he for one, and Tom Lewis for another, were prepared to repeat it.

Would I join them?

Well, would I? The idea was immensely attractive; it was also a shocker. But it was less frightening than it would have been months before. I was freshly returned from Hanoi, where I had cowered under American bombings. That helped wonderfully to clear the mind.

I told Philip I would give the proposal 24 hours, monitoring meantime the course of emotion and mood. And if my purpose held for that period, I was in.

Which in due time I was, up to my chin.

A sense, as I recall, of immense freedom. As though in choosing, I could now breathe deep and call my life my own. A sense also of the end of a road or a fork or a sudden turn, and no telling what lay beyond. At the same time, a certainty deeper than logic; what lay behind was best placed behind, once and for all, and no looking back.

Who was to tell me all this? There was no telling. There was only the force of a friendship, and an offer. And suddenly, my hands and heart lifted, and I knew. What had stood at center stage, the focus and heart of things--Cornell and all I loved there, perhaps intemperately--this receded quietly, in an hour, to the wings. At the center stood darkness, myself, my friends. And what would come of it all, no one of us could tell.

In place of eyes, or sight, I had only faith to go on, or trust, which perhaps comes to the same thing. I knew my brother. I knew his testing and his coming through and the travail he was inviting on his own head. I knew also his love for me. So there was no such element as pure darkness. How could there be? Instead of sight or evidence or logic, there was something better to go by--a hand in mine, someone to walk with. Enough, and more.

It was only after the Catonsville action that I came on a precious insight. Something like this: Presupposing integrity and discipline, one is justified in entering upon a large risk, not indeed because the outcome is assured but because the integrity and value of the act have spoken loud.

When such has occurred, matters of success or efficiency are placed where they belong--in the background.

I was in need of such reflections as we faced the public after our crime. The revulsion could only be called ecumenical. All sides agreed: We were fools or renegades or plain crazy.

The supporting arguments were wonderfully diverse and inventive. The action was useless, it "spoke to no one." It was violent, it involved an assault on property, which the government had made sacrosanct. It was scandalous, including as it did two priests who should have known better. And so on, and so on.

I tried in response to put matters biblically. That there was a history of such acts as ours. In such biblical acts, results, outcome, benefits are unknown, totally obscure. The acts are at variance with good manners and behavior. Worse, they are plainly illegal. More yet, everything of prudence and good sense points to the uselessness, ineffectiveness of such acts. And finally, immediate and perhaps plenary punishment is bound to follow.

And yet, and yet, it is also said the poor mortal is ordered to go ahead in spite of all. To go ahead in faith, which is to say, because so commanded. One had very little to go on, and went ahead nonetheless.

So, despite all, a history of sorts was launched on a May morning in 1968. Also, a tradition was vindicated, at least to a degree. Or so I believe to this day.

The night before that fateful May morning, we assembled at a friend's house and made a rite, preparing the napalm. Kerosene and soap chips. A simple formula out of a Green Beret handbook ignited the hell.

Next morning, with fast-beating hearts, we drove to Catonsville. The draft board was on the second floor of a tacky frame building, above an office of the Knights of Columbus.

On Catholic ground! We entered, armed with our resolve and symbol, the container of home-brewed napalm.

We reassured, as best we might, the transfixed employees, withdrew the A-l files, carried them outside to a parking lot. And shortly a fire flared.

The act was pitiful, a tiny flare amid the consuming fires of war. But Catonsville was like a firebreak, a small fire lit to contain and conquer a greater. The time, the place, were weirdly right. They spoke for passion, symbol, reprisal. Catonsville seemed to light up the dark places of the heart where courage and risk and hope were awaiting a signal, a dawn.

For the remainder of our lives, the fires would burn and burn--in hearts and minds, in draft boards, in prisons and courts. A new fire, new as a pentecost, flared up in eyes deadened and hopeless, the noble powers of soul given over to the "powers of the upper air."

"Nothing can be done!" How often we heard that gasp--the last of the human, of soul, of freedom. Indeed, something could be done, and was. And would be.