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Common People With Common Sense: Fighting The Mix

By Lee Channing

Vietnam veterans continue to be at the forefront of anti-war activity. In the western U.S John McNamer, a 35-year-old Bronze Star winner is one of the most noteworthy. THE VETERAN spoke with McNamer during a Chicago stopover on a nationwide tour he is making to underscore anti-MX missile activity.

"I make it clear right off I'm a Vietnam veteran because the basis of my feelings comes directly from the nonsense of having to destroy a village in order to 'save it'," McNamer asserts. "This is the same kinds of twisted logic that we're seeing with the MX, only this time it's western U.S. that will be destroyed and I'm not going to stand for it."

McNamer first got active in 1980 on Easter when he accompanied Rev. John Lemnitzer of the Missoula Montana Prince of Peace Lutheran Church and others of the congregation to form a symbolic barrier to the entrance of Malmstrom Air Force Base near Great Falls, Montana. Two hundred Minutemen missiles are deployed in that area. Rev. Lemnitzer had previously been warned by the Air Force that he was prohibited from entering the base and should he do so, he would be arrested. On this Easter Sunday, carrying a cross, the minister stepped over a painted white line marking the base boundary and was arrested. He was subsequently charged and convicted and sent to a federal prison.

The following Easter McNamer took the place of the incarcerated clergyman and he "crossed the line" and received a warning. "I felt a real good to have my name on the record and my body on the line," he recalls. "I had been thinking a lot about this country's nuclear weapons' build-up....I had read news accounts of the Pentagon's boast that the Carter administration's plan to build an MX 'racetrack' in Nevada and Utah would be 'the largest public works project in the history of mankind. I thought at that time, 'What a sad commentary on this society! Is this what this nation is all about?'"

McNamer remains appalled by what he terms the "obscene wastefulness" of the race track proposal and the MX-posed dangers to the land he loves. He began talking to many people and reading extensively about the MX. "I started to understand that the people who oppose the government's nuclear weapons policies aren't crazy individuals....I finally made up my mind that I had to do something," says McNamer in explaining his slow evolution from a simple rancher to organizer and activist. His present stature, however, didn't crystallize until August of 1981. At that time the Reagan Administration was considering rejecting the MX racetrack plan in Nevada and Utah. Montana, among other states, was being predicted as one alternative and that would bring the issue right into McNamer's backyard. "It was clear to me that the federal government wasn't carrying through in Utah and Nevada because of organized opposition—basically hostility—to the MX in those two states. The Pentagon was looking for a dumping ground for the project and Montana was a likely candidate because we already had Minutemen silos in the state."

McNamer responded by drafting the "Peoples' Petition" which simply stated: "We the undersigned herby register opposition to the placement of MX missiles in Montana and express our concern over the escalating development in deployment of nuclear weapons by the U.S." Says McNamer, "It was a pretty strong statement directed specifically at the U.S."

The Petition built quickly into what became Initiative #91 on the Montana ballot in 1982. With the assistance of Women For Peace and a full-page newspaper ad, a statewide petition network was formed and saw the success of the Initiative #91 when 57% of Montana voters favored it.

What began as a one-man army evolved into "Ranchers for Peace" and now "Western Solidarity." Eight western states now interact among groups opposing the MX. "The movement is growing," says McNamer, "because it's attracting common people with common sense—people who refuse to have faith any longer in a handful of men who claim infallible expertise while promoting the absurd and the obscene—the escalating nuclear weapons overkill capacity which, obviously, instead of protecting our national security threatens our destruction of the world."

(John McNamer can be contacted at Ranchers for Peace, Route 1, Box 104, Charlo, MT 59824)

—Lee Channing VVAW National Office