Mennonite Weekly Review

MOUNTAIN HOME, Idaho — Under gathering late-afternoon storm clouds, a heavy stream of cars entering and leaving the base slowed down to view a Good Friday vigil April 10 at the gates of Mountain Home Air Force Base, a key launch point for U.S. global air strikes.

Mennonites, Catholics and Quakers sing during a Good Friday vigil April 10 at Mountain Home Air Force Base in Idaho. Members of Hyde Park Mennonite Fellowship in Boise initiated the event, with support from the Idaho chapters of Veterans for Peace and Iraq Veterans Against the War. The vigil called for an end to air strikes and de-escalation of the U.S. war in Afghanistan. — Photo by Leonard Nolt

About 20 people from Mennonite, Catholic and Quaker congregations in southern Idaho — an isolated region known for its bountiful potato harvests, snowy mountain slopes, and substantial Basque minority — held a plain wooden cross and several signs. Some members of Hyde Park Mennonite Fellowship in Boise initiated the vigil. Members of Saint Mark’s Catholic community in Boise and the Boise Friends Meeting joined them. Organizers in the Idaho chapters of Veterans for Peace and of Iraq Veterans Against the War expressed their support.

Supersonic F-15E jets from Mountain Home AFB, located in the high desert some 50 miles southeast of Boise, regularly carry out ground-attack missions in Afghanistan, where last year more than 500 civilian men, women and children were killed by U.S. air strikes.

Organizers intended for the vigil to help spark church and community action at facilities across the country to challenge the increasingly costly and rapidly escalating war in Afghanistan, Pakistan and other areas of Southwest Asia. Vigil participants, including retired farmers and a couple who brought their 2-year-old son, expected the skeptical or negative reactions they received from occupants of some passing cars. They were surprised by the number of favorable reactions from base personnel and families. Numerous drivers honked, waved and gave thumbs-up gestures. “I’m with you!” a woman called through her open driver’s window, as she drove from the air base, waving to the vigilers. Participants were also glad that some base residents or employees who disagreed with the peace witness were willing to stop and constructively discuss the religious and social issues of war and nonviolence with them.

“I felt at peace during the vigil,” said Tamara Masarik, a member of Saint Mark’s social justice committee. “I prayed for those coming and going through the gates that they, too, might find peace.”

The gathering took place on public-access Bureau of Land Management terrain, just outside of the base’s black steel fenceline. Rows of massive, tomb-like weapons storage bunkers for Mountain Home’s nuclear-capable fighter-bombers were visible on the base. Plainclothes military police warned vigilers not to take pictures with the base in the background, though they could cite no law that forbade such photography.

Signs and banners that vigil participants held for three-and-a-half hours near their wooden cross included ones saying, “Jesus tells us all to love our enemies (Luke 6:27),” “the deaths of 552 to 680 Afghan civilians in ’08 air strikes will not hurt the Taliban,” “Bring U.S. troops home now” and “Pray for peace, act for peace.”

At the midpoint and conclusion of the gathering, vigilers formed a circle to pray, sing and share reflections. Organizers hoped action and contemplation in southern Idaho and across the country would continue after the vigil to challenge the deadly air strikes on Afghan villages and rural areas in which Mountain Home AFB’s ground-attack jets play an important role.

Mountain Home Air Force Base has been a significant part of the U.S. air wars in Vietnam, Yugoslavia, Iraq and Afghanistan. One of the first GI coffeehouses for Air Force troops questioning or opposing the Vietnam war was started in the town of Mountain Home. Although that local Idaho soldiers-for-peace café was firebombed by suspected right-wing arsonists, the GI coffeehouses were spreading rapidly across the United States, becoming an important strand in the fabric of grassroots movements that stopped the Vietnam war.

Now Mountain Home’s F-15E supersonic ground-attack jets carry out regular strikes from Afghanistan’s Bagram Air Base — a facility that became notorious as worse than Guantanamo for detention without charge, severe conditions and abusive interrogations. In the past year civilian casualties in the Afghanistan conflict have been rising sharply, with U.S.-led forces inflicting nearly as many as Islamic militants did — a pattern which many analysts say will alienate the very villagers essential to stopping the Taliban. These analysts have called, like some at the Good Friday vigil, for an end to the air strikes, rapid de-escalation and a massive increase in civilian aid to impoverished Afghan communities. Even the U.S.- established Afghan government has called for an end to the air strikes on villagers.