Last night, when students first gazed upon the Great Issues Committees’ latest speaker, Roy Bourgeois, M.M., they may have seen a peace activist, or Catholic priest, an organizer, or possibly a radical.

Everyone saw the founder of the SOA Watch, a man who has led the opposition to the U.S. Army’s Latin American training school called the School of the Americas. Little did they know they were looking at a high-school football star, who once planned on marrying his cheerleading high-school sweetheart, a man whose biggest influence was his football coach, who was the personification of “machismo.”

You see, I think it is easy to dismiss people who are involved with these “radical causes” as having grown up on some kind of hippie farm, fed on granola and separated from the rest of the world. But by no means did they ever start out as normal people. I mean, if they had, then they would obviously accept the intelligent reasoning of how our military prowess is loved and ordained by God-and that it is the best part of being American. And about how the reasoning that the Third World is poor because they deserve it, and we have nothing to do with it. Ha, ha. Ignorance makes me laugh.

Let me tell you a story. This macho Louisianan goes to Vietnam with the sole intent of earning enough pull-back at home to get promoted quickly through the ranks in order to solidify his future military career. He sees some action, and then sees his friends and buddies die at the hands of an out-of-touch, egotistical military campaign. He picks up a Purple Heart. When he isn’t fighting, he works at this orphanage where 300 kids live now that their parents are dead. A good number of the kids are injured, some burned by Napalm. Napalm is liquid fire that the United States spilled on forests and people, too.

He looks at all this death and suffering and asks a question. This question, which led to the destruction of the truths that he had been fed over his early years, resulted in the ideas that the military may not be all good. Death may not be the way. This represents the point where he “went wrong.”

So, what’s my message? Let’s go to Vietnam! Don’t like Vietnam? Fine, there is a large selection of Third World countries to go to. So, what are we going to do? Live in a world dominated by its own love of its power to kill as many people as it wants. No, I think not.

This is what I found great about Fr. Bourgeois. This guy is just a guy. He happened to have the wall that comfortably separated him from those who suffer destroyed, which left him in a state of discomfort.

In Bolivia, where he was assigned after the seminary, he came face-to-face with the systems that are all too real to those in Latin America, but all to distant from Americans. He watched his fellow students get beat up by the bullies (trained at the SOA) under the command of the murderous dictator Hugo Banzor (a “Wall of Fame” graduate from the SOA) who was being armed and supported by the U. S. government. He saw the direct influence of the CIA in the country. Then he was arrested, beat up, and then expelled for participating in a human-rights movement. This guy knows what’s going on better than us.

He now attempts to encourage us to respond with him against the systems that destroy the lives of WHOLE COUNTRIES! Still think this is too radical for you? Let me give you a compatibility test. Please answer these questions truthfully: Is the value of life discretionary? Is profit worth more than human life? Is a government justified in killing its people to stay in power? Should unionists, priests and human-rights workers simply accept death as an occupational hazard?

Those of us who are American decided a few years ago that the answer to these questions is no. Fr. Bourgeois decided a few years ago that this answer applies to the people of Latin America as well. It is as simple as that. Leaders at and of the SOA believe that these people’s lives are less important than profit, government and rights. As long as you answered no to any of these questions, then you are in support of closing the SOA. It’s that simple.

Fr. Bourgeois, and those of us who support his movement, are NOT anti-American. He has pro-American values, despite the fact that it requires a transformation in military priority. He believes that freedom and rights represent Americanism more than the military might. So hopefully that sets those of you who are afraid that we are a bunch of radical communist freaks at ease. I hope that you see that working for peace is not an utopian ideal that is unachievable. Fr. Bourgeois, who is just a normal person like all of us, knows this. He also knows that this is as American as high school football and apple pie.