MISSILE VANDAL FREED

ANTINUCLEAR ACTIVIST AGREES TO OBEY LAWS

Antinuclear protester Martin Holladay, who vandalized a Minuteman II missile silo in Missouri as an act of conscience, was released from prison this week after serving 19 months of an eight-year sentence.

At a hearing Wednesday in Kansas City, Mo., during which Holladay agreed not to violate the law, he was freed by the same man who put him behind bars, U.S. District Court Judge Elmo Hunter. Hunter further offered to lend him $135 for the air fare home.

"I just told him I would advance him the air fare," Hunter said yesterday from Kansas City. "But his legal counselor thought he could find some other way to get it."

"I was certainly grateful for the gesture," said Holladay, 31, who borrowed the money from his lawyer and flew to Boston Wednesday night to join his relatives. "What can I say? It feels wonderful to be in the bosom of my family. Wednesday I woke up in Leavenworth penitentiary; four or five hours later I was in Kansas City International Airport on my way home. It's such a disorienting change."

Asked if he noticed any differences in the outside world, he said, "Gasoline is cheaper and cars drive too fast." He added that he expects to return to the house he built in Wheelock, Vt., and resume his life as a carpenter and subsistence farmer, which he felt compelled to give up to protest nuclear weapons.

On the morning of Feb. 19, 1985, Holladay scaled the fence surrounding Silo N-11 in Lafayette County, Mo., poured blood on the silo's concrete lid, spray-painted antiwar messages and, with a hammer and chisel, smashed two electrical boxes and broke off the handle to the silo's maintenance access hatch before Air Force security personnel arrived to arrest him.

His action was part of the Plowshares movement, started in 1980 by radical Jesuits Daniel and Philip Berrigan and named after the words of the prophet Isaiah: "They shall beat their swords into plowshares." Holladay, representing himself in a four-day jury trial in Kansas City, admitted his action but argued that it was legally justified. He was convicted of sabotage and destruction of government property. Wednesday's hearing was in response to Holladay's motion for a reduction of sentence.

"This doesn't take him out of the peace movement," Hunter said. "He's simply not going to use illegal means. I think he has come to the realization that he can do at least as much, and probably a lot more, if he keeps his actions on the legal side."

Hunter, who last August sentenced four other Plowshares protesters to eight years each for similar offenses, said that for him, "these are emotionally difficult and trying cases. These are people who ordinarily don't belong in the penitentiary. Their lives, other than this one quirk of thinking, are good lives. They are honest, responsible people. But they need to learn the lesson to use legal means." Under the terms of his release, Holladay will remain on probation for five years, and within 2 1/2 years must pay a $1,000 fine and $2,242 in restitution to the government for damage to the missile silo.

Articles appear as they were originally printed in The Washington Post and may not include subsequent corrections.