PEACE WARRIORS

Former priest Philip Berrigan and former nun Elizabeth McAlister believe they have a sacred duty to awaken us. They will pay any personal price. They have turned their backs on material comfort and convenience. They have been arrested scores of times. They have been jailed for a total of seven years. This hasn't always been easy for their three children. But the kids understand -- and approve

THERE IS FRIDA, A 14-YEAR-OLD GIRL WHIRLING AROUND A POLE ON the Day of Resurrection. Her auburn hair, cropped like a boy's on the sides but long over one eye in a way that maddens her father, saucers about her head, turns all that she sees into fuzz and fleece. Her father has just gone away, perhaps for years, because of an idea. Idea: A weapon that can fly 1,500 miles and murder 100,000 people should not exist.

The whole world smudges as she whirls, the ground eddies, the trees drip, thelinesbetweenthingsrun, and for a dizzy moment the reason why her father must be the one who attacks the missile launcher of a U.S. battleship on an Easter Sunday is not sharp or clear at all.

All she has to do is stop is stop is stop, and surely all that fuzziness will go awaaaaaaaaaaaaaay . . . TOWARD HER RUNS HER BROTHER, JERRY, YOUNGER BY A YEAR BUT thicker, taking short, choppy strides across the grass.

He hasn't cried yet about his father, the way he did when his mom attacked the bomb bay doors of a B52 and spent two years in jail. This surprises him -- he must be getting tougher.

He lives and plays in an inner-city neighborhood where boys steal his bikes and have threatened him with bottles; he risks that for an idea. Idea: If truth for two out of every three human beings on Earth is poverty, oppression, violence, how can a child who grows up on green lawns behind suburban fences know truth?

From the corner of his eye he sees whirling Frida, one of the few to whom he's told his dream: One day he'd like to be a car salesman in the Green Mountains of Vermont. BEYOND THEM DASHES THEIR LITTLE sister, the brilliant charmer Katy. She is 6 and has blue eyes and a hole in her mouth where a baby tooth just fell out, and she says, when something bores her, "Oh, I find it quite ordinary."

She flits away from Jerry -- he is It in their game of tag -- giggling and wondering why she feels so nervous even though her dad sat her on the bed before he left and told her very explicitly not to be, that they were lucky because some children's parents die or are thrown in jail forever, that she'd have to be strong for an idea. Idea: If a father truly loves his child, won't he do everything to make sure she never wakes one morning, twitching and screaming beneath a rain of radioactive dust? "If the watchman sees the sword coming and does not blow the trumpet, so that the people are not warned, and the sword comes, and takes any one of them . . . his blood I will require at the watchman's hands." -- Ezekiel 33:6 JESUS CHRIST HAS RISEN FROM THE dead, but the sky doesn't care. A gray lid of clouds seals off the Easter Sunday sunrise, a 14-knot wind runs its knuckles across the ocean and up the bay.

Small ships jiggle nervously at the naval base in Norfolk, Old Glory crackles and snaps, flagpoles clang . . . clang . . . clang to the beat of small metal rings. And the big boats ignore all of it, gulls dozing on the barrels of their guns: gray bird atop gray metal upon gray sea against gray sky.

Not far away, the watchman awakes. He wriggles out of his sleeping bag, rolls it up and neatly ties a knot. Nearby lie a three-pound mason's hammer and a plastic baby bottle filled with his blood. Oh, he has tried the trumpet before, blown it till his lungs emptied and his jaws ached, but still the sword is coming and the people haven't heard.

What is it with the people? Sometimes at night back in prison, when the howling of other inmates became unbearable, he had plugged his ears with wet toilet paper so he wouldn't have to hear. Is that what everyone was doing now, even the ones who'd never been in jail? Oh, yes, of course, legions of them had heard his warning in the '60s, rushed to join him on the front lines in the streets. But then, one by one, all but a few had deserted, the celebrities to their agents and shiny cars, the nameless to their level-headed lives. After all, they had careers to think of, and children, and mortgages and life insurance to pay, didn't they? The war was over, wasn't it?

Disgust, like some sulfuric spit, wells up inside the watchman's mouth. No, it isn't over. Twenty-six years he has been fighting, 70 times arrested (by his guess), 30 times jailed, 5 years imprisoned, and now the enemy is stronger than ever, the sword more terrible; sometimes the watchman feels incredibly weary and almost alone.

Maybe jail isn't enough anymore to make them hear. Maybe you have to give your legs, like that man in California who lay in front of the train, and maybe your legs aren't enough, and you have to give your life. Who knew what might happen this afternoon when he entered the world's largest naval base, boarded the battleship and headed for the launcher of the Tomahawk cruise missile, when he drew back his hammer and the Marines came running with their M16s?

The 20-year-olds with beards and bandannas and nothing to lose -- Ezekiel, answer me, where are they now? The small ships jiggle. The big ships doze. Into the gray morning goes the 64-year-old father of Frida and Jerry and Katy.

Katy snores like a V-8 engine!

No, I don't -- You're a liar, Jerry! DAWN. THE HOUSE IS SILENT, THE children sleeping. Sometimes that's when a mother hears echoes. In a basement turned into a bedroom, Phil Berrigan's wife grins and gazes at her youngest, Katy, curled up where Daddy usually sleeps. Sorry, Kate old girl, Liz is thinking. The prison sentence for destroying government property could last five years; we'll have to break you of this one.

No good reason for her little one to rise and race upstairs. The kids had held their Easter egg hunt three days ago on the Pentagon parade grounds while Liz and the other resisters who live with them were protesting the war machinery grinding on inside.

She rises, pads across the rug-sample squares she'd stitched together to make a carpet and climbs the stairs of the rented brick Baltimore row house. No one would see her cry, but God, she'd miss him. Theirs was the love of two white-haired warriors who'd battled and bled together, whose energies and hopes all flowed down the same stream. "A resister to the core," Phil invariably said of his 48-year-old wife -- stronger love words than that, he didn't know. Somewhere there is a newspaper photo of Elizabeth McAlister being hauled away from a demonstration at the White House, one of her arms immobilized by a cop while her free hand and her teeth kept her banner unfurled all the way to the paddy wagon, the look on her face saying not to worry, the sonsabitches would see her and her bed sheet again soon.

And they did. At dawn on Thanksgiving 1983, she neglected to stuff and salt her turkey. She was sneaking through a barbed-wire fence at Griffiss Air Force Base in Rome, N.Y., entering a hangar with six others and hammering a B52 bomber capable of dispensing in one payload the nuclear equivalent of 320 Hiroshimas, then waiting to be handcuffed. How like a good soldier she'd bitten back the tears when the children visited once a month during her two years in the penitentiary; then one day on the prison phone, all she had to hear Katy say was "Hello, Mommy" in her breathy, 3-year-old voice, and Liz cried and cried and cried.

Jerry's grades plummeted while she was gone, Katy's swollen glands and fevers kept recurring, and Frida ran to her room sobbing with frustration. And yet, after Phil's jail term for today's attack on the battleship, it would be her turn; she'd start making plans to do it all again.

Just two nights ago, alone on the steps of the Pentagon during a midnight vigil, she had gotten it straight in her head for the hundredth time. They had to beat upon B52s and battleships, not because it would actually stop bomb-makers from continuing to kill human beings in their lifetime -- but because human beings weren't worth saving from bomb-makers if they could no longer even bring themselves to evil's gate to raise their arms and make the gesture.

She starts the coffee, checks how many days remain on the Ronald Reagan Countdown Calendar. Her blue eyes have the twinkle to gentle her husband's blue-eyed flame; she'll find a way to tweak as well as hammer, honk a party horn at passers-by who sneer. She's the organizer, the newsletter editor, the banner painter, the logistics whiz, the dispenser of hugs and kisses. Raising three kids while keeping a houseful of activists snapping at the heels of the government is an ongoing experiment, but one thing's sure: It takes a Liz.

In another lobe of her mind, she is planning out the day for Jonah House, the home Phil and she established for people dedicated to non-violently resisting man's appetite for war and weapons and materialism, people who would join them in painting houses to make ends meet. That was back in '73, when Phil was fresh out of jail for taking a bundle of draft files out of a government building, soaking them with homemade napalm, striking a match and watching them flake up to the heavens, back when the news that Phil and Liz had secretly married in '69 made him a defrocked Catholic priest and her a former nun. Back, way back, when Phil and Liz agreed they could not have children because the idea they lived for would not possibly permit them the energy or time, back when they both thought the rhythm method worked. And then . . . and then . . . and then . . . NINE A.M. THE EASTER CHURCH BELLS ring. The small ships jiggle, the big ships doze. The priest is not in church.

A car stops near a river bank in the woods. From it step Andrew Lawrence, a 28-year-old former Peace Corps volunteer and current resident of Jonah House; Sister Margaret McKenna, a 57-year-old nun dressed in a poncho; and Greg Boertje, a 32-year-old former Army lieutenant finally about to emerge from hiding 4 1/2 months after being sentenced for damaging U.S. naval helicopters. And the watchman.

He is dressed in dusty black shoes, khaki pants, Brooklyn Dodgers T-shirt, old blue prison work shirt and blue jacket, the kind softball teams stitch logos on. He looks and jokes and laughs and curses like an Irishman recently retired from 30 years on the Baltimore docks; he still considers himself a priest. An odd thing to say about a man whose life has been dedicated to non-violence, but here it is: You'd want this guy beside you in a fistfight.

One last time, the four rehearse the deed. He seems cheerful, gentle, he makes jokes. Who can know what is happening inside him? Only someone counting the cigarettes he keeps lighting, who knows his normal ration is four or five a day. It's there now, the dread almost like nausea that has always filled him on the days when he goes after them: from the very first time, Selma in '62 -- when he and the big mob of blacks defied the cops' order to disperse -- all through the quarter-century since, blockading the bastards with his body, getting pitched in a heap on the concrete and going right back to stand in their way, digging mock graves on their front lawns, pouring blood and sprinkling ashes on the walls of their hallowed institutions, spray-painting their airplanes, hammering their missiles on the nose, turning his back on their judges, refusing to eat in their prisons, undergoing strip searches and solitary confinement for educating their inmates, standing before them in court on charges ranging from "burglary" to "conspiracy" to "criminal mischief" to "destruction of government property" to "trespassing" to "creating a nuisance" to -- and this is the one they can bust him for every day from now till doomsday -- "failure to quit." Goddam right he'd fail to quit, no matter how gray like the sky and the sea and the gunboats the people had grown with apathy, no matter how gray and wrinkled his body grew. Only once had they broken him down, one night in a darkened prison TV room after years in courts and prisons as he watched Richard Nixon announce a resumption of the carpet-bombing of North Vietnam; his head had dropped into his hands, and he'd bawled like a baby, asked God what all his pain was for. Yet here he was, 16 years and three presidents later, the fists that he refused to use still balled up, still raised high.

How could he still be at this? the people wondered. How could I not, how could you not? he'd cry. There it was again and again in the Bible for anyone who claimed to be a Christian, explicit directions to love thine enemy, to shun violence, to "beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war anymore." Were they reading, were they seeing, were they thinking? Five billion humans could be liquidated tomorrow, and it would all be perfectly legal; nay, not one cockroach could point an antenna at a single atomized shadow and say, "That man was a criminal." And even if that twisted morning never came, even if you scoffed at Scripture, could you abide to live quietly in a country spending three-quarters of a billion dollars each day on armies and weapons while 40,000 of the world's children each day died of illness and malnutrition? Well, you are, you are! The bomb is killing right now!

Oh, how the watchman could make them squirm when they let him take the floor, everything as black and white as those thick-framed reading glasses against that frosty head of hair, glaring out at them like an angry grandfather, hitching up his pants, thumping on the podium. "We're a bloody race! A bloody people!" he'd seethe. "There's no place in the world where injustice exists to the extent it does in this country, because we're so damn rich {thump} , so damn arrogant {thump} and so damn powerful {thump} ! America has commercialized war as its number-one national business . . . $4 trillion spent on it since 1946, 2 trillion during the Reagan years alone. A fraction of that could eliminate hunger, clean the ecosphere, provide decent housing and medical attention for the poor -- a fraction! And the law protects all this pathology, so we must break the law intelligently, in community and non-violently. If people have the slightest good will, they have to consider your message if you risk your liberty for it. If you're not in jail, you haven't given enough of yourself, and even then you haven't given enough. We either disarm or destroy the planet. We don't have any choice!"

Sir, please, the liberals who'd invited him would rise to their feet and plead -- what about trying to get a peace candidate elected, what about leafletting, marching, chanting, writing checks for charities, what about anything but handcuffs and jail cells and goodbyes to our jobs, our wives and kids? Poor liberals, they didn't understand. This was not one of their kind they'd invited, but one of Isaiah's and Jeremiah's and Ezekiel's, one of the handful born to every century who see an ocean of injustice in every teardrop, who must herd men to the summit in order to save them from the abyss.

The watchman would take their questions, shake his head and sigh. No, none of their alternatives would intrinsically change the system -- and it's the system that's wrong! No, because leafletting needs only your hands and marching your feet and chanting your tongue, and a man needs to commit everything to combat a totality as horrifying as nuclear war, everything short of violence to stop violence.

Funny. When he had cried that out in the early '70s, the booking agents had called: 90 grand a year on the lecture circuit, my man -- the first Catholic priest ever in a U.S. pen! He'd refused, of course, to go on tour, accepting only an occasional speech. But now the speaking requests were drying up and the newspaper accounts of his civil disobediences were shriveling and the publishers who once printed his words were hawing and hemming. Results, people wanted to hear about now, not gestures. In other cultures, a human being gathered veneration and force the longer he persisted, but the watchman lived in one that craved the newest face and hottest trend, in one that breathed what's next, what's next, what's next?

"Like some stale tactician, people look at us now," sighs his brother Daniel Berrigan, the 67-year-old Jesuit priest who himself has been at it for a quarter century. "Like, why not get in a wheelchair and call it quits? Why do they act surprised we're still doing this? What else is there to do? We could die, but who wants to die? It's as if people expect a man to do a few good things, to stand up for a value, but not to make a living out of it. But that's like saying, 'Let's have a child,' then having it and saying, 'Let's give our child away.' How can you?" IN THE GAUNT LIGHT OF THE OTHER basement bedroom, the eyelids of Phil and Liz's first beautiful accident are opening. Frida's gaze roams from the poster taped to the heating duct of four children sitting in front of a mushroom cloud . . . to one of Snoopy wearing braces . . . to a placard saying No a la intervencion en Centroamerica . . . to a set of photographs of baby ducks, baby goats and horses . . . then to Question Authority (parents, teachers, presidents of the U.S., etc.), a pair of ice skates, The Death Penalty Is Dead Wrong and B104 Means Music . . . and finally to a plaque that reads:

Out of the greatest pain, confusion, struggle

Will probably always be born

The greatest joy, clarity, peace -- after which she heads upstairs for Cheerios.

In his bedroom upstairs, Jerry is stretching away the sleep, contemplating which of the 150 sports cars pictured on his walls would best flatter him as he tools through town, still a little torn between the Twin Turbo Supercharged Porsche 928 and the fire-red Ferrari Testarossa. He steps into his high-top sneakers, the toe of one etched with a peace sign, the other with an A inside a circle. "Anarchy," he says. "Maybe we should all live like the bushmen. They had food for everyone, no rules, and they all seemed happy. I prefer to have no rules than to have some that protect what is wrong." He leaves the sneakers untied -- "it's cool" -- and in four strides he has gone from a photo of a $125,000 Lamborghini to one in the stairwell of his father and uncle Dan standing over the burning draft files, moments from becoming prisoners of conscience. Hey, why did people make such a big deal -- couldn't a guy believe in both?

The children, Liz and two resisters living with them -- Dale Ashera-Davis, a 34-year-old former nurse, and John Heid, a 33-year-old former social worker -- gather on the hand-me-down chairs and sofa of the 100-year-old house. To be one of them, you must be willing to climb 40-foot painters' ladders without health or life insurance, to contribute your share of the earnings to the house kitty, to own no property and to survive without a microwave, dishwasher or electric can opener. You must learn their vocabulary -- "CD" means civil disobedience, a "casualty" is one who drops out of the movement, an "action" an organized display of resistance, a "community" a household like theirs, consisting of people not necessarily related, committed to resisting.

Their living room this morning blooms with apple blossoms, daffodils and tulips for the Easter liturgy that they and friends will hold there at 10, but the mood is as gray and nervous as the sky. Everyone thinks of Dad; no one mentions Dad. Their house, they fear, is too likely bugged, their emotions too terribly mixed. No one knows what time he plans to strike, what time the telephone call will come saying all has gone well and your father is in prison -- or there has been confusion, a panicky guard, a bullet ricocheting off the steel of the narrow passageways of the battleship's upper tier . . .

"Are you nervous?" Dale asks Frida.

"About what?" Frida dodges.

"About, uh . . . sitting through the liturgy," shuffles Dale.

The phone rings. Everyone jumps.

It is only someone else. NOW THE MORNING IS OLD AND THE watchman weary of weighing why-nots and what-ifs. The perfect gesture, he senses, the symbolic act that sticks a stove poker up the tail of history, is never choreographed or plotted; it is something as simple as Rosa Parks' rear end plopping onto the front seat of a Birmingham bus. "Give me a hammer and point me which way to go," he says to the others at last. "There's a point at which we have to stop thinking it out and have faith."

And there you have it, the phrase that stopped the whirling that made the lines between things run, the sentence that birthed all the world's religions, that sent men after battleships and battleships after men, that banished the one demon few men could ever truly bear . . .

. . . Ambiguity. As in questions the watchman doesn't ask himself: Is it possible that nuclear weapons, even as they raise the threat of the most unthinkable war, have frightened the two superpowers from waging it? Is it possible that U.S. disarmament -- rather than increase the freedom in the world -- would enlarge the appetite of totalitarian regimes? If even for a moment a man's eyes saw that both one and the other might be true, could he take a hammer to a cruise missile launcher and submit himself to prison? No, to do that a man had to be certain; is it possible certainty has killed far more men than atomic bombs ever have?

"The spirit of liberty is one which is not so sure it is right," said U.S. Attorney Stephen Sachs during the government's 1968 trial of the watchman for pouring blood on Selective Service files.

"They seem to carry self-righteousness to an extreme," says Johns Hopkins University President Steven Muller. Members of Jonah House have picketed and blockaded the university's physics complex, which has a $346 million Navy contract that includes Star Wars research and evaluation of nuclear-weapon delivery systems. They've also poured blood on Muller's office desk. "When you're sure your point of view is so unassailably correct that it gives you the right to break laws and step on the rights of others, you've crossed the boundary. All it engenders is ill will and rejection of their point of view. I wish I lived in a world where only a minimal investment had to be made in national security, but I don't. Arguing is a vital part of academic life, but I believe men should be able to do it and then have a cup of coffee."

A cup of coffee. The watchman tenses. This was the most maddening development of all, the grinning courtesy and swiftness with which they had begun to whisk him in and out of jails, reducing the charge to one that allowed no jury trial, no medium to explain the gesture, to wake the walking dead. Here are your belongings, Father Berrigan, you can go home now, have a nice day. Goodness gracious, manacles and martyrs are just plain bad PR -- what middle-level manager in 1988 couldn't tell you that?

They were forcing him, dammit; he'd have to up the ante, exaggerate the symbol; he'd have to get in jail. His eyes close, his teeth clench; the irony snickers in his ears: The firing squad was gesture's friend, its enemy the little yellow happy face!

A cup of coffee? Yes, kind sir, let's discuss incineration over a cup of coffee, white with three sugars for me. When oh when would these pragmatic psychopaths, these grinning godless good-fellow death mongers ever . . .

The watchman stops himself. Maybe they are right. A little right. Maybe he needs to be more tolerant in order to insist that man should be. He knows that about himself; he's trying to work on it. From where does it come, this acid in his mouth, this urge when he's painting the living rooms of the posh to leap up onto the La-Z-Boy chair and start ranting? If you found a way to dissolve it, would your resistance to the madness that spewed each night on the 6:30 news begin to melt away, too?

No, at that price -- never! Even if it meant watching the 6:30 news with murderers and thieves and arsonists instead of with Frida and Jerry and Katy, no longer exchanging guffaws and snorts and eye rolls with his wife and children at absurdity in 20-second clips. Yeah, he'd miss that when they put him in jail. "Tend to the TV!" he'd bark to one of the kids as the community gathered each night in the living room. And Jerry or Frida would pull a chair a few inches from the tube, just off to the side so as not to block the view, and cut the sound the second the commercials began. But then the strangest thing would happen. His three children would sit there saying the words that the silenced nitwits in the commercial were mouthing, and singing the jingle that the flapping toilet seats were performing on the screen; sweet Jesus, please explain -- how do they learn these things when they don't watch TV? SO WHAT'S THE BIG DEAL, WHY CAN'T a teen-age girl watch "Napoleon and Josephine" without half the household gagging? Frida, how could you? Napoleon was an emperor, a dictator, a conquerer mentality. A movie romanticizing their relationship while he was subjugating people is morally wrong.

Yeah, yeah, she knew all that. So could she watch it anyway? If they still said no, she and Jerry could often pull it off regardless, huddling two inches in front of the small black-and-white in his room with the volume turned down to a whisper while the grown-ups meditated on the Gospel according to Luke or schemed against the world according to Reagan. All she had to do, when she heard the stairs creak, was switch to something educational about wildlife and loudly say, "Oh, neat, look at those monkeys," or to a special report on the latest campaign primary, and say roughly the same, and as often as not, she'd get away with it. As long as you didn't press it too far, like Jerry did that night with "Miami Vice" . . .

She is in the tiny kitchen now, disappearing into herself the way she can reading a book while walking down the school corridor or whirling around a pole in a playground, trying to make her mind go anywhere today, anywhere but . . . does he have to do it? It is hard not to think about it because she is standing over the griddle now, doing what he'd be doing at this very moment. Legendary, Dad's Sunday pancakes were -- who else would think to add peanuts and raisins?

There'd be more chores for her now that Andrew and he were gone; that left only three adults in the house rotating assignments of house-painting, child supervision, laundry, cooking, dishwashing, foraging for wood for the wood stove, dispensing food to the poor and scavenging for it every Tuesday at dawn in the garbage dumpsters of a fruit and vegetable distribution center outside the city.

Dumpster duty, that's not so bad, as long as she wears gloves and remembers to breathe through her mouth when it's warm. Well, maybe she wouldn't tell her friends about it; they might not understand. She'd only told two of them about the four times she'd committed civil disobedience, about the time she'd joined a blockade at the Pentagon and the cop tossed her aside by the seat of her pants and she'd almost started to cry. You never know how kids will take something like that -- there was that boy who'd found out her mom was in jail, and started passing the story that she was in for pushing drugs. Or even adults, like her fourth-grade teacher who warned her to watch it, that civil disobedience could go on her permanent record. Heck, whose side do they expect her to be on, when the FBI busts into her house, when the government calls her mom and dad criminals because they care, takes them away and throws them in jail?

She flicks her head; her hair flies out of her face. If only she didn't care what other people thought, how much easier this all would be. If only she could force her eyes to stop hopping to that mirror. This is crazy, she knows it, her changing clothes four times each day in a house where the adults change once every four days, but she can't help it, she just thinks clothes are . . . neat. Not trendy or designer stuff, like the stone-washed jeans other kids wear, but crazy stuff from thrift stores like men's felt hats or colonial three-cornered ones or purple and yellow high-top sneakers with pink socks rolled down to bare her ankles or bandannas tied around both wrists, both ankles, her neck and her head, or even her dad's big baggy flannel shirt after she'd scissored off the sleeves -- oh God, do you remember his face when she pulled that one? And now he's going to . . . and is anything really going to change?

It can! It will! Remember that worker at the Applied Physics Lab at Johns Hopkins who had quit his job rather than videotape her family as they committed civil disobedience? In her mind she clings to the image of that man, grips it tight the way she does her cat when it tries to squirm away; the one small proof she has that a painful gesture can make change.

She shakes the hair from her face, measures the pancake mix, then goes to the refrigerator for milk and eggs. On the icebox door, where other families keep magnetized cliche's, is a picture of a Hispanic girl with haunted eyes, and the words: "When they come for the innocent without crossing over your body, cursed be your religion and your life." She feels a sudden flush of pride. Her best friends, let's see now, five are black, one Chinese and one Peruvian. Eyes like that little girl's, Frida sees at school and on her streets and at her door, asking if there's food. Thank God somebody's standing up for these people, somebody's trying to change the world -- and that somebody is us!

She opens the freezer. If she wants to sneak a spoonful of ice cream, she might have to rummage past four baby bottles of human blood, on ice for use in the next protest. Why is it she always feels queasy, and yet she always has to watch when the nurse visits to draw blood from the adults? And how could she ever explain all this to the other kids at Mount Royal Elementary/Middle School? Some days it makes her feel twice their age -- "I'm glad I'm going to high school next year," she's told her mom. "Grade school's getting kind of dog-eared." And other days, when classmates are growing fat with babies and teasing her about being a virgin, she feels not half the age of any of them.

How can she explain to them how much she loves listening to the swirl of ideas around the long pine dinner table and how much she hates it when she can't squeeze in a word of her own, how much she loves it when the doorbell rings and someone new and interesting is moving in his duffel bag and hates it two years later when that person, as close as an uncle or an aunt, suddenly vanishes, 500 miles away in prison . . . ?

She flips a pancake. The phone rings. Everyone lunges. Someone else. THEY'RE QUIET NOW, NURSING FINAL thoughts. It is nearly time to move. The watchman walks off to be alone by the river, beneath the trees.

He listens to the water wash over the rocks and the birds trill and the wind shhhhhhhhhhhhhh among the leaves. Let go . . . slow down . . . let go, all of life is saying. His shoulder aches from when the ligaments tore lifting a ladder, and sometimes the arthritis cramps his knuckles and knees, and isn't he at an age when a firebrand can gracefully cool, slow down, let go, act as the movement's sage?

Ha-ha. He chuckles like that often in mid-sentence, a ha-ha deep and tired with irony. A human being is such a weak, pitiful thing. A thousand times he's answered this question, and here at the eleventh hour it comes again: Why does he have to do this, why, why?

And why does he rise each day at dawn and stand on his head to get the blood and the good thoughts flowing? Why does he drop to the floor and do push-ups in the middle of a paint job, run dashes up and down the driveways when he's working in the suburbs or laps around the clutter in the basement, why does he still play defense belly-to-belly, full-court, in a friendly game of three-on-three? Why does he leave friends sitting at the dinner table when dessert is done and it's time to do his nightly reading in his basement rocking chair? Why does he dump the dirt out of old vacuum-cleaning bags and restaple them, why splash water on himself like a bird to wash up rather than let go and take a shower more than once a week. And why a week or two after they let him out of jail does he start to feel unclean again, diminished as a man, his voice sounding tinny in his ears, as if it needed the acoustics of a barren cell to give it resonance, and why do the hair in Frida's eyes and the Lamborghinis on Jerry's wall make him bark more and more the longer he is -- free?

And why does the water washing over the rocks and the birds trilling and the wind shhhhhhhhhhhhhhing through the leaves sing to him in couplets, one voice saying, let go, slow down, the other saying hurry, hurry, soon all this will be forever snatched away? And why does he feel sweat on his arms and pounding in his arthritic knees? Alone, by the river, the 64-year-old man is running. THIS IS THE PART JERRY NEVER understands. Why not attack the battleship and scram, have a turbo-charged Porsche waiting on the dock, maybe rent one for the day. Jump in the Porsche and gun it, yeah, and have an old junker wait- continued on page 46 ing to block the gate after you've gone through so nobody can follow, then flip the bird to the guard and put the pedal to the floor! Why does everyone say, aw, c'mon, Jerry, when he comes up with ideas like that? Okay, maybe it's a little too risky to pull off on this one, but hell, why sit and wait for them to arrest you, why do their job for them, the way his mom did after messing up that B52? Man, do you realize she could've just walked right back between the strands of barbed-wire fence where she'd entered the base, nobody would've ever known who did it, and those two years he would've had a mom? What is it with gesture? Why do they all keep saying it's ruined if you run?

Okay, it's true, Jesus Christ didn't scram when they came for him at Gethsemane, but Jesus Christ wasn't born and raised where Jerry was, four doors down from the two old folks murdered in their house, right across the street from the man who took a knife in the belly and bled to death, just around the corner from where poor old Sid was blown away, two blocks from the alley where they found the little girl smothered a few months back. Not to mention the man who'd walked right into their house with a gun and taken $40, and the two guys who slinked in while no one was looking and walked out with the family's TV, and the three bicycles ripped off from Jerry. Wolves and rabbits survive on these streets, the strong and the swift. Lambs aren't symbols here, they're dinner.

His sisters wouldn't understand. There are choices to be made in a landscape like this that define a boy and who he'll be, in ways a girl can never know. Is there pavement where you can feel like a man and never need to swivel your head, turf somewhere between victim and bully?

God, he's trying to live the idea his parents have poured their blood into, but it's so hard here. He's big for his age, and sometimes kids pick on him, almost beg for a punch in the nose; walk away and he's a coward. So he's let them have it a few times, maintained his self-respect -- then gone home and been told he did wrong. Then there was that day a couple of bullies came up to Frida and him in the park and snatched her bike, and Jerry said to them, "You want mine, too?" Not only did his dad lecture him for being soft -- but the bully did, too!

Some days he longs for soft green hills where the choices aren't hard, other days he feels his jaw stick out in stubborn pride. If the neighborhood gets yuppified, he'd say, we gotta move. "Inordinately pleased," that's how he felt the day the stock market crashed.

The tightness in his chest, won't it ever go away? It's 2 p.m. on the Easter that won't end, he's chasing his sisters across the playground in a game of tag. If only someone would say the word -- out here, where there are no FBI bugs to listen in; when it's all the three of them can think about, why can't anyone bring themselves to mention . . . ?

If only he could be there to watch him do it, maybe stick out a foot and trip a guard. Man, nothing in life he loved better than to see authority stumble or at least squirm. Teddy Roosevelt was a lousy president -- he'd let his third-grade class know that. What, did they expect him to stand and recite the Pledge of Allegiance? Okay, sometimes he would. "I pluck aluminum from the face of the you-know-whats of amnesia," he'd say. Heck, he'd even told his parents he didn't like living in a community -- too many authority figures all over a kid's case. Yapped too much, some teachers said, but damn, what's a kid do to rebel when his old man's digging up the front yard of the secretary of defense?

Short, choppy strides he takes across the grass now, first after Katy, then after Frida. Oh, Jerry Berrigan, which way will you go -- Alfa Romeo dealer in Montpelier or flaming tongue in Lafayette Park? Oh, Lord, please spare your servant Philip the affliction of his only son going straight . . .

He homes in on Frida, she grabs the pole and whirls. Her hand flies out against her will, smacks Jerry, and all the waiting and the worry burst out of him at once, the flood he's been saving up to shout into the FBI's bugs when the telephone call finally comes and the seal of silence is finally broken -- "Goddam, Frida, you stupid ass, what the hell are you . . ." THE GUARD NODS. THE CAR CARRYING the watchman and his friends rolls past the gate and toward the water. For a moment, sunshine breaks through. Then the gray closes up and puts it away.

They park among the tourists, climb out and stare. There she is, three football fields of steel, show ship of the Navy -- the USS Iowa. The dread is gone now, there's a tingling inside him, the kind he used to feel as a semi-pro first baseman just before the first pitch of a big ball game . . . or as an artilleryman in World War II just before the big guns began to shriek and boom. And when he'd found that tingle not enough, he'd entered infantryman officers training school near Paris in order to be on the front lines, where the air whined with bullets and the earth soaked up blood -- that was the place Lt. Phil Berrigan yearned to be.

The war ended on him before he got his chance; instead, he found himself walking through the smoking rubble of Germany, a victor inhaling the sweet stink of decomposing flesh. One day he walked into the ruins of a building where the Germans had been conducting tests on bombing victims. Bluebottle flies buzzed everywhere, jitterbugged from corpse to corpse. He stared at a pregnant woman, where her head used to be. He shook his head and walked out; the wind changed, the fire in his belly began to blow a different way.

Not all at once, of course -- wind didn't work that way. He went home, got in a few more good years of drinking beer and chasing women and wearing nice clothes, until the gap between his brother Dan's life as a Jesuit priest and his own became more than he could bear. He entered a Josephite seminary. Violence and healing, infantryman and priest, hadn't they both always been inside him? Which was it that delivered him to the dock of this battleship on the Easter of his 65th year -- the hand of his father, suddenly striking out at his sons in random rage during the Depression years, or the hand of his mother, who ran to them to soothe? Or maybe, as the watchman thought, the hand of God . . .

Fire in the belly without an idea in the head to guide it -- the watchman had seen it in his father and knew it for a sorry, sorry thing. It is 3:15 p.m. on the Day of Resurrection. Thomas Berrigan's youngest son has an idea in his head. A hammer under his armpit. A foot on the deck of the USS Iowa. A WAIL FROM THE ALLEY FILLS THE house. In runs Katy, Katy who all day has kept to herself the fear that this time they're going to lock up her dad for life; Katy who sprinkles sugar on homemade cookies while singing out, "Sprinkle it on like ashes on the White House, like blood on the Pentagon!"; Katy who has climbed with her brother and sister atop the roof of a Johns Hopkins laboratory on a 12-degree morning to protest the war research inside, defied the workers' shouts and cops' orders to come down, stood firm until the SWAT team came up in a cherry picker to haul her down; Katy who has blinked into the FBI agents' flashlights during a dawn raid of her house as they searched for a fugitive activist who had lived there; Katy who has written, in one of her first school assignments after learning cursive, I have a dream that the government will make the companies feed and give shelter to the homeless. I have a dream that parents will stop child abuse. I have a dream that people will stop slavery all over the world. I have a dream that there will be peace and happiness -- that Katy runs to her mother sobbing, "Frida hit me with two water balloons -- and she was on my team!" I looked on the earth, and lo, it was waste and void

To the heavens, and they had no light.

I looked on the mountains, and lo, they were quaking,

All the hills moved to and fro.

I looked, and lo, there was no man;

All the birds of the air had fled.

I looked, and lo, the fruitful land was a desert;

All its cities were laid in ruins

Before the Lord, before his fierce anger.

-- Jeremiah 4:23-26 HE LOOKS UP TOWARD THE UPPER TIER of the USS Iowa, and lo, there lies the machinery for accomplishing all that. The watchman points to the longest, widest barrel. "How often can that gun re-fire?" he asks the crew member who is acting as guide.

The seaman is happy. There are 17 people in his tour group, and a few seem especially curious. "Twice a minute," he says proudly. "With a range of 41,000 yards."

"Ohhh," says the watchman.

"Up here," the seaman continues, leading them onward, "you can see our radar system, which is designed . . ."

Now there are 13 in his group; he doesn't notice the four who fall behind, one of them the pleasant white-haired gent with his hands in his pockets, the wind buffeting his jacket, gazing upward, waiting, waiting . . .

"Yes, that box up there is where the launcher is for the cruise missiles. We're not permitted to say whether or not . . ."

In a few hard strides they are on the stairway, pounding up, then loose on the level above, the watchman digging inside his jacket for the plastic bottle, unscrewing the top, flicking his wrist and watching the blood ooze red across the gray of the cruise missile launcher, now gripping his hammer, face hard like rock, song bursting in his heart, right arm cocking way back behind his ear, throwing into the motion all his life, all his body, all his shoulders, hips and legs -- clang! -- and again -- clang! -- ringing echoes -- clang! -- across three football fields of steel -- clang! -- clang! -- clang!

The tourists' mouths are open. "What are they trying to fix?" one man asks. "Is something broke?"

"Hey," a sailor finally cries. "What are you doing up there? Get down!"

"Look at that! Why, that's a federal offense."

"Security! Security! What the {expletive} do you think you're doing? Do you know what you're doing? Stop, you {expletive} !" An off-duty Marine in street clothes rips the hammer from his hands, waves it wildly above the watchman's head. Suddenly there are seamen on the run brandishing pistols, Marines in helmets pointing automatic rifles. "Get on your knees, you {expletive} , right now! Hands against the wall! Get on your knees, or I'll cut you down!"

"Mommy, what's going on?"

"Look what they did. Is that paint?"

"I think it's blood."

"Is someone shot?"

"Please move back, ladies and gentlemen. This is not a show. Jesus Christ, is it ever not a show."

"Throw them overboard. Mom, don't you think they should throw them overboard for that?"

"Don't worry, they're dead suckers now."

"Ladies and gentlemen, please clear the ship immediately."

"I'm just glad we live in a country where people can express their opinions."

"Not like that. Not like that."

"Well, at least we got our USS Iowa hats this time. Last time we came it was closed."

"I think it's going to rain."

"I do believe you're right." FLOORBOARDS CREAK IN THE OLD brick Baltimore row house. It's the Monday morning after Easter. Up the cellar stairs comes Frida. A pair of red suspenders hold up her father's green painting pants, bunching them halfway up her chest. She will paint in place of him today. "Ta-da!" she says, her braces flashing as she grins.

Then come Katy and Jerry. They eat breakfast and fall silent. "I hope Daddy comes home today," says Katy. She looks at Jerry. Jerry stares at the wall and says nothing.

Their mother comes up from the basement and claps her hands. "Let's go, everybody. Goodbye, Frida. Don't worry, you look terrific . . . Kate, old girl, go brush your teeth . . . Jer-Bear, you got that report to do, right?" ON APRIL 4, THE CHARGE AGAINST PHIL Berrigan -- destruction of government property, a felony -- was reduced to trespassing, a misdemeanor. The government told him he was free to leave on his own recognizance, but he refused and remained in jail. Six weeks later, on May 19, he stood before a magistrate. No jury listened, no argument sufficed. The verdict was guilty. The sentence, scheduled to be handed down next month, would likely be no more than a few months, perhaps no time at all. Phil Berrigan would soon walk outside. His family would hug him. The door would close behind him.

Freedom . . . ::

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