Biography
S. Brian Willson is an American attorney, U.S. Air Force veteran of the Vietnam War (he served as a combat security officer in the Mekong Delta in 1969 and was deeply traumatized by the killing of civilians he witnessed there), and one of the most prominent U.S. anti-war activists of the late 20th century. After leaving the military he became a lawyer and a Vietnam Veterans Against the War organizer, and in the 1980s helped found the Veterans Peace Action Team.
On September 1, 1987, Willson and three other VPAT veterans began what they had publicly announced for weeks would be a 40-day water-only fast on the railroad tracks at the Concord Naval Weapons Station in Concord, California, to block U.S. munitions trains carrying weapons to the Reagan-administration-backed Contras in Nicaragua and to U.S.-backed forces in El Salvador. As the first scheduled munitions train approached the protesters, the Navy crew accelerated to nearly three times the posted 5-mph speed limit and ran directly through the protesters; Willson was struck and dragged. He survived but lost both legs below the knee, fractured his skull, and was left with a permanent skull plate. The driver was federally charged but acquitted; Willson later won a civil settlement of $920,000 against the Navy and the railroad. The image of his blood-soaked stretcher being carried away catalyzed a national antiwar response: more than 9,000 people protested at the gate within days, the tracks were physically torn up by demonstrators, and no munitions train rolled out of Concord for two and a half years.
He has been arrested dozens of times across his life for related civil disobedience, including jail time for fasts and trespasses at the Nevada Test Site, the SOA at Fort Benning, and U.S. consulates and federal buildings in solidarity with Central American liberation movements. He is included in this database both for the substantial cumulative time he has spent in custody for political activity and for the iconic state-violence event of 1987.
