Boertje-Obed was slight and soft-spoken, wearing a beige prison uniform that looked a couple of sizes too big. But, as I listened to him talk about his faith and his devotion to non-violence, it became clear that deep down he was harder and tougher than most of the inmates in the yard. Henry David Thoreau spent a single night in jail as an act of civil disobedience and then wrote a famous essay about it. Boertje-Obed had already spent more than a thousand nights behind bars for his beliefs and may spend at least a thousand more. He seemed to have no regrets. ‘You must live your Christian beliefs fully,’ he told me, ‘as though judgement may come at any moment.’

Boertje-Obed said that no one from the government has ever asked him for suggestions about how the security at nuclear-weapons sites could be improved. He certainly doesn’t want terrorists to do what he’s done. The Bureau of Prisons sent him to Leavenworth, nine hours away from his family, he said, because it considers him to be a ‘domestic terrorist’. Boertje-Obed plays a lot of Scrabble now, belongs to a Bible-study group, and spends time teaching someone in his cell block how to read. If Boertje-Obed’s attacked by another inmate, he won’t fight back. But he might intervene to separate other inmates who are fighting.

Right before the corrections officer led him out of the room, Boertje-Obed looked me in eye and gave a subtle little smile.

I stood across the street from Leavenworth Penitentiary for a moment, taking in the view. When I’d visited the place twenty years ago, the sky was gloomy and grey. Now it was clear and blue. Sunshine glistened in the razor wire, and the Stars and Stripes hung from a flagpole in front of the steps. The prison looked like an image on an old postcard, a haunting, uniquely American symbol of state power. And a thought occurred to me: the walls of the penitentiary guarding this pacifist were taller and more impenetrable than any of the fences at Y-12.

9 March 2015

A Note on Sources

Those wishing to know more about Catholic pacifism and the Plowshares movement will find much to enjoy in the memoirs of its three seminal figures: Dorothy Day’s The Long Loneliness: The Autobiography of the Legendary Catholic Social Activist (New York: HarperOne, 2009); Philip Berrigan’s Fighting the Lamb’s War: Skirmishes with the American Empire (Bloomington, Ind.: iUniverse, 2011); and Daniel Berrigan’s To Dwell in Peace: An Autobiography (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1987).