Brian Willson, Protester Injured by Train

In all its brutality, the contra war has come home to the United States and stained our soil with the blood of peace activist and Vietnam veteran Brian Willson, who was viciously run over at the Concord Naval Weapons Center by a military train believed to be transporting weapons to the contras. According to The Times, (Part I, Sept. 2), Willson was sitting on the train tracks in an act of peaceful and nonviolent civil disobedience, protesting the Reagan Administration’s policy of arming the contras, when the train was driven over him, severing his legs and fracturing his skull. The Naval Center had been notified a week before that protesters would be on the tracks until arrested and physically removed.

Willson’s courageous act was neither foolhardy nor wrong. It followed the long tradition of peaceful civil disobedience, advocated by Henry David Thoreau, Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr., which has advanced the cause of social justice.

This barbaric incident should not be viewed as an isolated act of a deranged or murderous train conductor. Rather it is an extreme manifestation of the Reagan Administration’s immoral and pathologically obsessive policy of waging an illegal war of aggression against Nicaragua by means of its surrogate army, the contras.

The act of plowing over Willson with a train appears to have resulted from a mentality similar to that which underlies the Reagan contra policy: Nothing, not even a nonviolent protester peacefully sitting on a track, will be permitted to stand in the way of aiding the contras.

WILLIAM BOTHAMLEY

San Diego