Before dawn on Easter March 31, 1991 Phil Berrigan, Daniel Sicken, Barry Roth, Tom Lewis, and Kathy Boylan boarded the USS Gettysburg, an Aegis destroyer that was docked at Bath Iron Works in Maine. They hammered and poured blood on the missile hatches. It became a huge story in Maine. The charges were dropped the day before they were set to go to trial. On Friday, April 1 the surviving members (Daniel, Barry and Kathy) of the Aegis Plowshares held a 20th anniversary reunion vigil at BIW and then a pot luck supper at the Addams-Melman House in Bath. A severe snow storm that same day though hampered the turnout but still twenty hearty souls turned up for the vigil at the shipyard and the pot luck that followed. Then again this morning another vigil was held at the shipyard as the Saturday shift was getting out of work.
It was a wonderful reunion for the Aegis plowshares and their supporters.
The ships are outfitted with "missile defense" (MD) systems and are key components in the U.S first-strike attack system. Their job would be to knock out a given country's nuclear retaliatory forces after the initial U.S. attack.
One of these Aegis MD systems was used by the Pentagon to hit a falling U.S. military satellite in 2008 proving they also had the capability to serve as an anti-satellite weapon. Obama is now deploying these Aegis destroyers with their MD systems around Russia and China.
A very fine article about the reunion vigil appeared in our local newspaper yesterday. See it here
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