Prisoner of Conscience

By Melinda Welsh, Sacramento News & Review. Posted June 19, 2001.

The loudspeaker crackles on and the call goes out across the prison yard for inmate No. 83276-020 to report to the administration building. Within minutes, a lanky man in khakis with white hair and clear blue eyes enters the interrogation room. The prisoner is tanned and wears an unexpected beard. He has the large hands of a working man -- powerful and full of intent.

The door is closed behind him and locked from the outside. A guard peeks in from an adjacent room through a glassed-in security window. The federal prisoner asks at once if the warden will "monitor" the interview as anticipated and advises a reporter that, if so, he intends to object because this would constitute a violation of First Amendment rights. The prisoner, ever ready to do battle for what he believes is a just cause, readies for a confrontation with the warden.

But when his keeper shows no interest in witnessing the session, the prisoner’s tension is releaved and he takes a deep breath. "In truth," he says, "life in this level of security is not much worse than military boot camp."

Charlie Liteky should know. He is now serving a one-year prison term in Lompoc Federal Prison near San Luis Obispo after being arrested for leading nonviolent protests against a Pentagon-funded school he claims violates the human rights of poor people in Latin America. And Liteky is certainly no stranger to the military. He did two tours of duty in Vietnam as an army chaplain and, for an exceptional act of valor, was awarded this country’s highest medal.

"I’m trying to help create a nonviolent world and to do so a person must face violence ... and death if necessary," writes the ex-priest in a prison diary that is read on-line by tens of thousands of religious people and peace activists across the country, including many here in Sacramento. It is no surprise to find Liteky’s journal writings full of references to Gandhi and Martin Luther King -- both of whom died fighting for justice and standing up for the poor, no matter what the personal consequences.

Liteky pens the diary entries while standing on a creaky metal folding chair in his cell, leaning across a bunk bed that serves, for now, as his desk. He doesn’t have it too bad at Lompoc. He lives in the "minimum security" section and gets along with most of the men. There are 300 of them here, crammed into two warehouse-like buildings. "I liken it to submarine living," says Liteky, who turned 70 years old in prison back in February. Thanks to the diary, Liteky remains active in the cause, able to communicate his thoughts and experiences despite his prison locale.

"Charlie is my hero," gushes Sacramento’s Barbara Wiedner, a lifelong peace activist and friend of Liteky’s who sends him books and corresponds with him regularly in prison. "He has proven with his life that he is a hero."

Still, in Liteky’s presence, one can’t help but wonder what the word "hero" means and whether the word "crazy" might be a more accurate way to describe this man for his seeming willingness to do anything, including risk his life, for what he perceives to be a just cause. And for choosing, through his actions, to spend so much time in prison among criminals and convicts instead of out in the free world, sharing his passions with wife and friends. After one of his arrests for civil disobedience, a government prosecutor questioned Liteky about his life’s choices and remarked on his tendency to take the protesting "too far." One can’t help but wonder, however, if Charlie Liteky has yet to take things as far as he intends.

The dense jungle of the Bien Hoa Province in 1967 sets the stage for an exploration of how this man turns his beliefs into action.

The air was thick that winter morning near Phuoc-Lac, 35 miles northeast of Saigon. The Vietnam War was heating up and Chaplain Liteky and other members of the U.S. Army’s 199th Light Infantry Brigade set out early on patrol and tramped through mud and brush on a mission to check out a mortar site.

Suddenly everything exploded. The brigade marched unknowingly into the edge of a Viet Cong battalion whose 500 men were so well dug in as to be invisible. "They stunned us," says Liteky. "Nobody knew they were there."

The enemy opened machine gun and rocket fire on the leading 15 men in Liteky’s group and almost every one of them went down. A few died immediately, but most did not. The shock arrived, the pain moved in. Blood streamed from the men’s chests, legs, arms. Then the screaming began.

At first, Liteky did like the rest of the unwounded men and hugged the ground, praying not to get caught himself in the fusillade of fire. But then -- moved by compassion or courage, or both -- he jolted into action. Eyewitnesses on that day say Liteky rose from the ground and began moving through hostile fire toward the wounded. He crawled to them, knelt by their mangled bodies, presided over their agony. He administered last rites to the dying. "For some reason I didn’t get hit," he says.

One wounded man became entangled in the dense, thorny underbrush. Liteky broke the vines and freed the man, ignoring the intense gunfire. He lugged the man away to a clearing nearby. Another man was too heavy and badly wounded to carry, so Liteky rolled onto his back, placed the man on his chest and carefully, as if in slow motion, crawled the man back to the clearing using elbows and heels to push himself along. He returned to the action again. At one point, said a witness, Liteky crawled to within 15 meters of enemy machine guns so as to "place himself between the enemy and the wounded men." For most of the day, Chaplain Liteky did not carry a weapon, though he wore fatigues and looked the part of a soldier. "I did stop and pick up a gun," he remembers, "but then I remember thinking -- that would be a helluva way for a priest to die! So I put it down."

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