When Brian Willson regained consciousness in the hospital, his wife was reading to him from Gandhi`s writings about passive resistance.
Seeing he was alert, she said, ”You know that the train didn`t stop, don`t you?”
Willson said, ”What?”
”The train didn`t stop,” she repeated.
She paused before telling him the rest. ”Brian,” she said, ”you`ve lost your legs.”
At first he wasn`t sure he understood.
”I was under so much morphine I couldn`t tell if I had legs or not,” he said during an interview. ”It`s a blessing, but I still have no memory of being hit. When I woke up in the hospital, I didn`t know what had happened.” Millions of Americans knew, however.
A train struck Willson about noon on Sept. 1, 1987, as he and four other people sat on railroad tracks outside the Concord Naval Weapons Station a few miles from San Francisco.
The attempted blockade of the train, which was believed to have been carrying munitions for the contras in Nicaragua, was held to protest U.S. policy toward the Central American nation.
Willson lost both legs below the knee, the train severing his right leg and mangling the left, which would be amputated. Part of his skull was crushed, the bone lacerating his brain.
A fellow demonstrator recorded the shocking, grisly incident with his videotape camera, and that evening, before Willson was conscious, the footage was played on all the network news programs.
The moment of impact was not filmed; the tape showed the locomotive moving toward the demonstrators and a brief period immediately after he was struck. Viewers could hear the cries of witnesses and watch as people knelt over Willson.
”The whole country saw it,” Willson said. ”The whole world saw it. I woke up, and everything had changed.”
To some, he was simply a tragic curiosity, a new member of a group that might cynically be called Celebrity Victims, people who have attained prominence through misfortune, usually because their tragedies were played out on the nation`s television screens. Among their ranks are former hostages and survivors of other serious crimes or adversities.
Many saw him as an object of sympathy, a hero who literally put his life on the line for his beliefs. To others, he was an unpatriotic fool who got what he deserved.
For the insatiable mass media, he was a good story. After the initial avalanche of coverage, featuring frequent reruns of the compelling ”visuals” at trackside, the inevitable mating ritual resulted in the obligatory spread in People magazine, contracts for a book and made-for-TV movie, national talk- show bookings and numerous newspaper articles.
For the peace movement, Brian Willson, 46, a Vietnam veteran turned antiwar activist, has become a martyr and star attraction.
In addition to many requests for appearances in this country, Willson says he has been invited to speak in more than 40 other countries, mainly by the peace constituency or those who want to underscore or exploit its message. He came to Chicago at the end of a 44-day tour that had taken him to nine states and Nicaragua, where he attended the opening cease-fire talks between the contras and the Sandinista government and received that government`s most prestigious medal.
He was interviewed here after holding a press conference in the Loop offices of the Chicago Religious Task Force, formed in opposition to the Reagan administration`s policies in Central America.
”No one is neutral about what happened to me,” he said during the press conference. ”Some people are very hostile. They accuse me of doing this for publicity or being a drunk or jumping in front of the train.”
But he said the overwhelming reaction has been supportive. ”I think the symbolism of what happened to me is what has affected so many people. I think the image that came through was that of the military machine running out of control, barreling over its own citizens, who are simply saying, `Please stop this madness.` ”
Willson was asked if he thought he would have reaped all this attention if it weren`t for the extraordinary circumstances of his injuries and those galvanizing images on television.
”Probably not,” he said. ”You probably wouldn`t be here interviewing me if I hadn`t been hurt in such a public way. I just try to accept this new role.”
The physical cost, of course, has been enormous. He was fitted with artificial legs and walks with canes, but he`s able to get around without them and expects to use them less.
Taking a brief inventory of his surgical repairs, Willson touched the long, curving ridge of a fresh scar near his receding hairline. ”I had a hole here in my forehead until they put in a plastic plate two months ago,” he said. He then touched his left ear. ”This ear was torn off. They had to sew it back on.”
Because the stumps of his legs shrink, he must occasionally be fitted for new artificial legs.
Before the ”assault of Sept. 1,” as Willson calls it, he was 6 feet 3 inches tall. ”I`m used to looking at people from a certain height, and it`s a strange feeling being this much shorter. I`m on my third pair of legs, and the doc says he can get me up to 6 feet 1, but that`s about the limit; any taller, and I`d have trouble getting up from a chair.”
Considering the severity of his trauma and disability, he has handled everything remarkably well.
Turn down the political rhetoric and peel away the celebrity label that defines him as That Peace Guy Who Got Run Over by the Train, and the story of Brian Willson simmers with the complexities and contradictions that infuse every human being.
Often of late, he marvels at the turns his life has taken. As a young man, he was a born-again Christian who planned to be a Baptist minister;
politically, he was extremely conservative, supporting Barry Goldwater for president in 1964 and backing the war in Vietnam.
Before entering seminary, however, he had begun to question the strict views of his denomination, and he decided that he could serve his faith better as an attorney, entering law school at American University in Washington.
In 1966 to avoid induction in the Army, he enlisted in the Air Force, serving four years and spending a tour in the Mekong Delta in South Vietnam.
”One of my duties was to visit villages to assess the effectiveness of our air strikes, which meant counting bodies.”
His inspections were a revelation. ”All I saw were the bodies of these young mothers and children lying on the ground. It was devastating. I remember looking into the face of one of these young women and I remember saying, `I don`t see any ideology in her face.` Shock waves went through me. I said,
`This is murder.`
”I turned 28 in Vietnam. The war was the experience that confirmed the new sense of justice that was challenging everything I used to believe in.”
As his philosophy has evolved, he said, he has left careers as a lawyer, dairy farmer and public servant for a commitment to peace, which began full time two years ago when he fasted for 47 days on the steps of the Capitol with three other Vietnam veterans as a protest of the war in Nicaragua.
”The fast was an exhilarating, empowering, liberating experience,” he said. ”It was the beginning of the path that led me to the tracks at Concord.”
Today his embrace of the principles of Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. have led him and his second wife, Holley Rauen, to found the Institute for the Practice of Nonviolence, in San Francisco.
”I`m still reflecting on all this. I ask myself how a kid who grew up in a small town in New York came to be fasting for peace and sitting in front of trains. I know my hometown has a lot to do with who I am in ways I don`t fully understand.”
While on this tour, he returned to Ashville, N.Y., population 250, hoping to find some answers. ”I walked along Goose Creek, where I used to fish when I was a boy. It runs just behind the house I grew up in. My parents still live there. They`re in their 80s now.
”I`m a normal guy. I played basketball and baseball in the high school there, and I was president of the Baptist Youth Fellowship and a Boy Scout and a member of the honor society.
”I`m proud of what I`m doing now. I think I`m upholding the standard of citizenship I was taught as a kid. I learned some fundamental values growing up in Ashville.”
Willson has an openness and warmth that suggest ingenuousness but that may actually reflect an absence of self-consciousness and anger.
On this day, his attire betrayed a deep disinterest in fashion. He wore an unpressed tweed sport coat that matched his graying beard, safari-style khakis, black socks and black leather running shoes.
The clash of his multihued tie with his patterned sport shirt was almost audible. Topping the ensemble was a St. Louis Cardinals baseball cap, testifying to a long, rabid admiration for that team.
His tranquility, he said, is recent and the product of great effort and will that gradually conquered the anger that he always carried with him. ”For years I seethed with hatred for my father, who hated Jews and Catholics and blacks and people who talked about peace, all the while claiming to be a born- again Christian.
”I couldn`t reconcile this. We had terrible arguments. I told him he was like a fascist and he had to change. If he changed, I could love him. I went through psychotherapy to deal with my feelings for my father.
”It`s important to me not to have bitterness or hatred for anyone, which is at the core of my beliefs about nonviolence. I told my therapist I wanted to love my father whether he changed or not.
”If I can`t do that, then I can`t wage peace in the world because I`ll hate everybody who disagrees with me. Unfortunately, this attitude is common with people I know in the peace movement.
”I said if we can`t offer love as an alternative, then we ought to stop what we`re doing. And I don`t mean the wishy-washy sentimental stuff that passes for love. I mean a tough, principled love. Now when people are hostile to me, I rarely feel hostile in return, and if you don`t respect me, I can deal with that, too.”
As far as that sunny September day of last year, Willson said, ”We all thought the train would stop. We had notified the Navy, the county sheriff`s office, the Concord Police Department and the highway patrol several days in advance. We told them what we planned to do.”
He expected to be arrested. ”This would be the first time in my life that I would be arrested. It was a big step for me, and I`d thought it through very deliberately. This was not a scheduled, cross-country train. It`s on a 3- mile spur line from munitions bunkers to a nearby shipping port.”
Attorneys for Willson have filed a federal lawsuit against the Navy and the train crew, seeking compensation for medical expenses and disability.
The train crew has brought a countersuit against Willson, accusing him of inflicting them with emotional distress. ”We believe their lawsuit is particularly outrageous,” said Thomas Steel, a Willson lawyer. ”Essentially, they`re saying Brian got run over intentionally to make them feel bad.”
Steel said Willson`s case will draw on the Navy`s investigation of the case. ”The Navy found that the crew could see the demonstrators at a distance of 600 feet and could have stopped at a maximum distance of 160 feet,” he said. ”Perhaps the most amazing finding in the Navy report is that the crew never attempted to apply the brakes until after they hit Brian. The Navy found the train was going approximately 17 m.p.h. The speed limit at this crossing was 5 m.p.h.”
Steel said the crew also has filed a countersuit against their superiors, alleging that the superiors failed to inform them of the presence of demonstrators and ordered them to proceed.
Willson said the crew has become scapegoats. ”They were doing what I did in `Nam. They were following orders that are part of an insane policy. They`re the fall guys.”
When he visited his parents recently, Willson and his father didn`t talk about what happened last September; the distance between them remains.
As he was recovering, Willson had evidence that his father somehow returns that love in this sad, strained relationship. ”My father was interviewed on a local news program the day after I was injured, and many weeks later my brother sent me a videotape of it,” Willson said.
”He was crying. He said he was in shock. He said he`d just seen pictures of his son being run over by a train. He said we`d never agreed on much of anything but that he had come to respect me for standing up for what I believed.
”He`s never told me that. I saw him say that and I cried.
”Then he said, `He was just a typical American boy. A typical American boy.`
”And then the TV reporter said: `Until Vietnam?`
”And my father said, `Yes. Until Vietnam.` ”
