Father Roy, founder SOA Watch

For some reason I felt compelled to check the AJC this morning. I haven't read it in months, so I'm not sure why today. On the front page is a link to this story about Father Roy Bourgeois, founder of SOA Watch and lifelong opponent of the US military training Latin American soldiers. I'm not often much impressed by the writing in our local rag, but this article really got to me. The reporter captures something about Father Roy that other articles I've read about the SOA watch did not. Check it out -- good Sunday reading: The protester-priest of Fort Benning.

Bourgeois is at a loss to explain how the Benning demonstrations grew from the passion of one man to an event of thousands. It is as amazing perhaps as his own transformation. A working-class boy who grew up in Lutcher, La., the son of a power company worker, he made it to college, even earned a geology degree at the University of Southwestern Louisiana. But the military provided his ticket to the world. After four years in the Navy, he volunteered for Vietnam.

The young ensign arrived in Southeast Asia in 1965, ready to serve. "I was ready to give my life," he says. But when he saw hatred in the eyes of the South Vietnamese, he was confused: "I really thought people would see us as allies. But there was another side I wasn't prepared for." In orphaned children with swollen bellies and open wounds, Bourgeois saw God. In the rice paddies surrounding Saigon, he felt his faith tugging. "That was my introduction to the victims of violence," Bourgeois says.

He had thought of a military career but decided to devote his life to healing, to being a peacemaker. After his tour, he entered a Catholic seminary. He picked the Maryknoll order — the "Marines of the missionaries: the toughest of the tough," he says. The Maryknolls sent him to Bolivia to live among the poor in the La Paz slums. He worked to start a medical clinic, day care center and education program. He watched the military take away community organizers, students and union activists.

"Men with guns were running the country," Bourgeois says he learned in the land of dictator Hugo Banzer, another graduate of the School of the Americas. Back at his hometown church, he began preaching taboo politics. He used words like exploitation to describe the fate of poor Latin Americans. Bourgeois went next to El Salvador and witnessed a war in which thousands of innocent civilians were tortured and executed by death squads that he says were extensions of the military.

"I was on fire when I came back from Salvador," he says. He knew then he could not keep silent any longer.