Dear friends,
    I'm writing to tell you, that if all goes well, on the fourth Sunday of Advent (Dec.18) several of us will go to the Maryland Air National Guard in Baltimore. Following the words of Isaiah to beat swords into plowshares, using hammers and our own blood, we hope to begin to convert an A-10 Thunderbolt II Warthog fighter jet. Most likely we will all be held in the local jail.
    A-10 planes were used against the people of Iraq in the Gulf war and have been used since then to enforce the sanctions. The A-10s shot most of the radioactive depleted uranium that poisoned and continues to poison the Iraqi land and people in the south of the country. The planes are small jets built around a Gatling gun. which fires 30 mm DU shells at a rate of 65 rounds a second. These rounds can pierce through 4" of armor plating. During the Gulf war, the A-lOs destroyed over 1,100 tanks, and over 350 tons (some estimates are close to 800 tons) of DU have been left in Iraq. On impact, this radioactive heavy metal burns and aerosolizes, causing the release of tiny particles into the air. These particles can travel 26 miles and contaminate the soil, air and water. Plants, animals and people are affected. The Iraqi people and Gulf War Vets suffer increased cancer rates, renal failure, and chromosome damage that results in high incidence of congenital deformations and infertility. Some of their babies resemble those born in Hiroshima or the Marshall Islands where exposure to radioactivity was lethal.
    DU cannot be controlled in space or time; it's use is a violation of international law. Our government has also used DU munitions in Kosovo, in Vieques, Puerto Rico, and in Okinawa, Japan. Moreover, the research, development, and manufacturing of DU munitions in this country has caused sickness to the workers and to those who live near or downwind from the plants.
    Right about now, maybe you are asking: "Can't you think of something better to do? Are you being effective? "
    These may not be the exact questions you have...but I want to talk about my motivation. After all, I was recently released from prison and I struggled with the Baltimore Probation Dept. and Judge Carter in Maine to live at Jonah House. (Thanks for all the letters of support.)
    I like living at Jonah House: the work that the community does is important. Helped by sharing the daily readings each morning and participating in a shared reflection, we have a chance to examine our conduct and try to align ourselves with gospel values. In addition, much of the work seems to be teaching — Faith and Resistance retreats, the Atlantic Life Community, and student groups that come to the community for a meal or for a week. Many of the youth who come have never thought of Jesus as nonviolent and never thought of our country as warmaking. Added to that, our "one purse," shared physical work (paint jobs and cemetery maintenance), and attempts to nonviolently resist evil turn upside down the assumptions many of these youth come with.
    At the same time, I talk to Mike and Mary Donnelly, Bishop Tom Gumbleton, David Smith-Ferri and Chris Doucot about what they saw when they were in Iraq. I read about the children who have mirasmas because of the sanctions, and cancer because of the depleted uranium and other poisons that result from the war. 1 read the scriptures with my community: "I give you a new commandment: love one another"(Jn 13:34) and in reflection it's clear that this love has to be shown for others regardless of consequences to ourselves.
The warmaking and the weapons get in the way of right relationships between us and our neighbors, us and the earth and us and our God. And so we form a Plowshares community, keeping ourselves indifferent to our natural likes and dislikes in such matters as health or sickness, honor or dishonor, wealth or poverty, or between living in jail or out of jail. Together with Liz Walz, who has just helped start a new Catholic Worker house in Philadelphia, and two people you already know: Phil Berrigan and the underground priest Fr. Steve Kelly, S.J., we bring our hammers down on the weapons that threaten our neighbors and are an obscenity to our nonviolent Creator who has commanded us not to kill.
     I don't want this letter to get too long, but I'll end with this draft of a letter that I hope to get delivered to Wailifa, an Iraqi woman whose picture has been up on my wall in prison and at Jonah House.

Dear Wailifa,
    I have a picture of you that I see every day. It's a picture that Mary Donnelly took of you and your child, Makarum, in the Saddam Pediatric Hospital in Baghdad. Mary was in Iraq with Voices in the Wilderness, and she came back and shared your story. Like you, I am a mother, and I feel tremendously grieved that the country I live in is waging war against you and your children.
    I don't know if anything I could say to you would convey how sorry I am. The best I can imagine is to go up to one of the war planes—like the ones used against you and your family— and begin to hammer on it so that it can no longer be used for war. The plane—the A-10 Warthog—is the one that spread much of the 350 tons of radioactive depleted uranium in Iraq, and it has been used to enforce the sanctions. We know that depleted uranium causes sickness and cancer, particularly to children like Makarum. Mary told us that Makarum had an advanced stage of lymphoma and could not get the proper medicine because of the sanctions the US had imposed.
    The prophet Isaiah, who I believe we both share, had a vision about a day when swords would be beaten to plows and nations would not plan to make war on other nations. In the tradition of this prophet, we hammer on the death dealing warplanes and pour our own blood on them. We hope to convert our hearts to nonviolence and we hope that the people of our nation will join us in converting all our weapons.
    In my faith tradition, we are taught to love each other as brothers and sisters. I want you to know that many of us consider you our sister, and we care about you

Susan Crane
Jonah House December 1999

PS. The recent school shootings across the country are presented by the media as an abnormality. And yet our culture teaches our youth the same lessons that the military uses to train troops to kill. I think it bears some reflection. In his book, "On Killing," Lt. Col. Dave Grossman states that in WW II, only 15-20% of the combat troops were willing to kill even to save their lives. In the Korean War, the percentage went up to 50%, and in Vietnam, over 90% of the combat troops were willing to shoot directly at others. After WW II, the social scientists did some research and the military trained their soldiers to get over their natural resisitance to killing. Grossman concludes that the process the military used to train youth to kill in Vietnam is being indescrimi-nately taught to our youth today.
    Today children are desensitized to violence. TV and movies show detailed murders which are associated with candy bars, social fun and intimacy. It has become normal for children to practice killing while playing computer games. The nation makes warmaking its first priority (look at our federal taxes) while funding for libraries, schools, job programs, medical care and rehab programs is a low priority. Violence is considered normal in our culture, military might is seen as a solution to problems, and the US is the largest purveyor of weapons world-wide.