19 activists board guided missile destroyer USS Sterett and hold banners: Disarm the Sterett: Love your Enemies
Japanese Buddhist Nun, Sr. Ichi Kawa, joins the "Faith and Resistance Retreat" for the commemoration of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
At the Pentagon, on August 6, Sr. Ichi led the procession into the Pentagon and drummed and chanted throughout the vigil and then led the recession.
At the Sterett, she and others walked down Key Highway to the fence surrounding the pier at whcih the Sterett is moored and drummed and chanted, with others from the community, throughout the 2 hour witness.
The guided missile destroyer, the USS Sterett, came to Baltimore August 2, 2008. People from the Atlantic Life Community, at the Faith and Resistance Retreat, took a tour of the Sterett on August 7, 2008. The ship has 90 vertical launch system cells which can hold Harpoon Missiles, Tomahawk Cruise Missiles and others. The Sterett can carry missiles with nuclear warheads.
In line on the dock in Baltimore, ready for the tour of the USS Sterett. The ship cost 1.3 billion dollars to build. In these economically hard days, 1.3 billion could pay 21,000 teachers for a year, or convert 33,000 houses to solar or wind energy, or buy food for 154,761 families for a year.
Our tour guide, ENS Brett Robbler. The USS Sterett is capable of shooting guided missiles from its deck into towns and villages over 1000 miles away. During the tour, we found the crew polite, friendly, proud of their ship, and, for the most part, very young. Yet they seem very far removed from the consequeces of the missiles or munitions on the ship. We know these crew members are thinking that they are doing something good by serving on the destroyer. But think about it--is it right to kill other people? People we haven't met, people who are loved by God?
During the tour, we were thinking: "Who are we killing? And why? And for what purpose?"
One of the crew guarding the ship. It's important to think about why the US is asking these crew members to serve on the USS Sterett.
Camilo Mejia reflects on his time in the military, and his decision to apply for Conscientious Objector status, and eventually go AWOL: "And I realized that none of the reasons we were told about why we were in Iraq turned out to be true. There were no weapons of mass destruction. There was no link between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda. We weren't helping the Iraqi people and the Iraqi people didn't want us there. We weren't preventing terrorism or making Americans safer. I couldn't find a single good reason for having been there, for having shot at people and been shot at."
The USS Sterett is designed to withstand chemical, biological and atomic warfare. It's hard for us to imagine that radioactive contaminants just wash off....
We unfurl our banners on the USS Sterett. Disarm the Sterett! Dr. Martin Luther King reminds us:
"Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that. Hate multiplies hate, violence multiplies violence, and toughness multiplies toughness in a descending spiral of destruction....The chain reaction of evil--hate begetting hate, wars producing more wars--must be broken, or we shall be plunged into the dark abyss of annihilation." Martin Luther King, Jr., Strength To Love, 1963.
Holding disarmament banners on the deck of the guided missile destroyer, the USS Sterett. Kathy Boylan, Eda Uca-Dorn, Eve Tetaz hold banner, "Jesus would never join the military." Joe Lorenz and Molly Brechtel hold banner "Disarm the Sterett, Love your Enemies."
Would Jesus join the military? "Jesus would never join the military," the banner states. Art Laffin leads us in singing, "Peace, Salaam, Shalom."
Peter De Mott and Susan Crane hold a second banner with the message: "Disarm the Sterett: Love your enemies!" on the deck of the USS Sterett.
