entire book - Chris Hables Gray

[ 240 ] The Future
Air Command (Minuteman and MX missiles; B-52 and B-l bombers) is
"Peace is our Profession." The justification for Star Wars is framed in the
same way, as were the invasion of Grenada, the kidnapping of Noriega (in
the search for drug "peace"), and the war for Kuwait.
The recent upsurge in UN and NATO peace missions discussed in
Chapter 1 represents something new, both qualitatively and quantitatively.
Whether or not it means the military can convert to peacekeeping we don't
know yet, but the growing disatisfaction with war has clearly spread to the
warriors themselves, and that is reason for hope.
But even as military culture struggles with whether or not war will
continue, others from outside have sought to redefine what being a warrior
means as well.
New Types of Warriors
This very refusal of war might be the next step in the evolution of warriors.
It is not a new idea. Through the ages soldiers have become nonviolent, and
nonviolent activists such as Mohandas K. Gandhi have called for pacifist
warriors. This can lead to bitter irony.
Brian Wilson, who served as an Air Force intelligence officer in Vietnam,
later lost his legs trying to block a weapons shipment from the Concord
Naval Air Station in California to Central America. Being a peace activist
was much more dangerous to Wilson than serving as a soldier.
This is a paradox. Many peace activists around the world, even in
Western countries, have had friends murdered by the state; they have seen
people killed; they have been chased by cars, trucks, police, soldiers; and they
have been captured, beaten, and locked up. These nonviolent activists have
seen more violence than most military people. Their emotional experience
can be quite similar to men and women in combat. Only their refusal to kill
makes them different from warriors in the commonly accepted sense.
So, unsurprisingly, there are also strong currents in the peace movement
proper that are trying to remake the warrior metaphor and claim it for
themselves. Sometimes they look back to premodem versions of war. Native
Americans and their supporters have often referred to themselves as rainbow
warriors, a title also taken up by the Greenpeace eco-activists. Within
grass-roots antiwar and peace groups there have been proposals for activists
to make a commitment of several years to a peace army (from the First Strike
Project) 4 or to work for peace (Beyond War). Established pacifists have an
international peace brigade program that inserts peace "soldiers" into war
zones as varied as Guatemala, Kuwait, and Sri Lanka, as the religious Witness
for Peace and the Veterans Action Teams are doing in Latin America.
While most peace people, as they often call themselves, still manifest