Tribute to Peter DeMott
Marine, Army vet in one protest rammed a Trident sub rudder with
a pickup truck
by Jack Gilroy
VFP Binghamton NY Chapter
Our brother veteran, Peter DeMott, of Ithaca, New York died after falling from a tree he was trimming on February 19th, 2009. Peter, a Marine veteran who served in Vietnam (1969), later joined the US Army and completed a year study at the Army Language training school in Monterery, California. After four and half years in the Army, Peter returned home and completed his college degree.
By the late '70's, Peter had a transformation from his childhood and military indoctrination. He later noted that: "While in Vietnam, I attended Roman Catholic Mass regularly and on occasion would go to confession, as I had been brought up to do. As a dutiful young Marine who followed orders well. I had no idea that my work in Vietnam was helping to bring about the deaths of some two million people there, maim and displace countless others, and severely damage and degrade the local environment. That sad realization came to me only much later."
Peter discovered the Catholic Worker movement in Minnesota and his conversion process from militarism to pacifism began to take root.
He noted: "The Catholic Worker taught me many things I'd never heard before: pacifism, nonviolence, voluntary poverty, personal responsibility for contemporary injustice, and service to Christ in the person of the victims of military and corporate violence and greed. The Catholic Worker also introduced me to nonviolent civil disobedience and its history and practice in our country. A process of conversion had begun in me, as I began to question authority and realize the need to make myself as marginal to evil as possible. My arrest at an arms bazaar was the initial outward, visible act of my conversion."
At that arms bazaar that he met Fr. Roy Bourgeois. Their action at the Rosemont, Illinois Arms Bazaar in February of 1979, welded Roy and Peter. They became life long friends. Years later, Peter, deeply involved in Plowshare activism and working to support his family, still found time to join Roy in actions at the US Army School of the Americas at Ft. Benning, Georgia.
By the mid '80's, Peter had married Ellen Grady, another Plowshares activist, and was raising a family. Peter's brother in law, John Grady and others (including myself) were arrested in 1985 at the Seneca Army Depot for climbing the fence into the nuclear weapons depot to deliver petitions to workers to cease and desist in their cooperation with the evil behind the nuclear program. It was there that I first met Peter.
He told me about ramming a Trident Sub with a truck (Groton, Connecticut) a few years before. As a high school teacher, I very much wanted him to speak to my students. They were terrific kids but like Peter and most Americans, they had been indoctrinated in the goodness of United States weaponry and American wars.
I called Peter and asked him to come into my public high school social studies class. Peter and Ellen, parents of young children, had vowed to not be part of the tax support for American wars and weapon making. Financial survival was a bit easier in Ithaca where Paul Glover, a creative peace activist, had developed a money system for Ithaca residents called Ithaca Hours. Much of the work that Peter did roofing, painting, installing gutters, trimming and cutting down trees etc. was paid in Ithaca Hours, an actual home town currency that could be used in stores and for services.
The day Peter showed up at my classroom door he was a sight to behold. Peter, the loving and gentle rock of a man, had rugged features. To add to his stern look that morning was his well-worn attire of paint tainted cap, shirt, pants and boots. He cut quite a different figure from the usual corporate type speakers invited into classrooms.
I introduced him and briefly told the class he was opposed to nuclear weapons and war in general. Initially the students were quiet as they focused on this strange looking dude. To get things going, I asked Peter what he was doing to make known the dangers of nuclear weapons.
Peter answered with a question: "You live in a community that could be called mid sized, right? Well, the new Trident has 240 missiles that can be fired into 240 independently targeted cities anywhere in the world. Any mid sized city would be totally destroyed, all living things would be killed from the fireball, the falling rubble, the shock, the radiation."
"But that's the enemy" one boy called out.
The boy's response was what Peter expected. He used the session as a Socratic question and response time with the students posing questions and Peter allowing them to answer key questions themselves. One session didn't convert them from righteous Americans willing to obliterate the enemy of the month but Peter DeMott left them with a lot to reconsider. By the end of the class time, much more than statistics had been taught. It appeared that at least some of the students got the message loud and clear--nuclear weapons poised to kill millions of people are criminal and those who design and plan their use are the core crime makers.
When finally asked what he was going to do about nuclear weapons, Peter said he was a spiritual man and felt that prayer was his number one action, but that action sometimes speaks louder than prayer or just words. He told them how he went to Groton, CT in September of 1980 for the launching of another Trident ship of death. He felt he had to do something to make people more conscious of the evil and terror of nuclear weapons. So, when he saw a navy van with keys in the ignition and doors open, he got in, locked the doors, started the engine and proceeded to ram the rudder of the Trident. It was only after a number of smashes of the rudder that Navy Shore Patrol broke the windshield and pulled out Peter, the submarine disabler.
"Did you go to jail for that?" asked a student.
"Yes, I did for one year".
"Would you do it again?"
"I already did." said Peter. I helped disable a another Trident in 1982, along with the woman who is now my wife."
Since that classroom scene twenty four years ago, Peter DeMott did not stop; except for time in jail or prison. When the build up for our most recent war on the people of Iraq began in the fall of 2002, Peter and family attended marches, demonstrations, vigils.
Two days before the attack on Baghdad, Peter, two of Ellen's sisters, and a family friend poured vials of their own blood on military posters and a US flag at the Ithaca Army and Marine recruiting station. They were tried in Tompkins County Court and the result was a hung jury. However, the Federal Government indicted them, and the media now called them St. Pat's Four (their action was on March 17th). They went on trial a second time in Binghamton, NY. It was an amazing trial, the only one of its kind in the United States. All four defended themselves but had counsel (led by Loyola University Professor, Bill Quigley). The passionate, eloquent, logical and truthful testimony of the St Pat's Four prevailed by defeating the conspiracy charge of the US Government. They were found guilty of obstruction of justice (cost of blood clean up of floor and washing of flag--a claim by the government that there was $500 in damages, hence, a felony) and all four went to prison for four or more months.
Most years, Peter DeMott was full time busy doing laboring jobs to support his family. He could recite dozens of verses of Shakespeare by memory, sing songs of the Wobblies, the depression era, labor movement, civil rights movement, anti-war movement, but was not afraid of hard labor. He died in the process of supporting his loved ones, doing hard work in sub freezing temperatures high above the ground.
Peter and Ellen teamed to raise loving children--Kate, Marie, Nora, Saoirse. All have been and will continue to be embraced by blood relatives and their extended family from the peace city of Ithaca to Catholic Worker Houses around the world to Veterans For Peace friends, who, like Peter DeMott, learned long ago that war and violence does not work.