January-February 2002:
Nonviolent Resistance & Islam
A Journey to Pacifism
Reflections at Ground Zero
WRL Message Board
Dr. King’s Legacy
Letters
Activist News
Activist Reviews

Homepages:
War Resisters League
The Nonviolent Activist

From There to Here
A Journey to Pacifism

by Judith Mahoney Pasternak

eople ask me quite often how I got from there to here,” says Ellen Barfield. She stretches her arm wide, to take in both the Baltimore living room where she’s sitting next to her husband, Dr. Larry Egbert, and the life she and Larry lead there.

Photos: Judith Mahoney Pasternak.

Ellen is a member of the War Resisters League’s governing body, its National Committee, and a volunteer with the Baltimore chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union and other groups; Larry is an anesthesiologist, a teacher and an activist with Physicians for Social Responsibility and Doctors Without Borders. And “from there to here” means—to Ellen and to the people who ask her that question—from the U.S. Army to life as a peace and justice activist with more civil disobedience arrests under her belt than she can count. (“She loves getting arrested,” Larry says, getting an abashed giggle from Ellen. “I don’t,” he adds, although he probably does it as often as she does.)

“Here” is a long way from where Ellen started. “I’m originally from the deep South,” she says—Macon, GA, to be exact, where she was born to “very conservative parents.” Her family moved to Lubbock, TX, when Ellen was 13. She went to high school there, started college (as a theater major) and got engaged. She and her first husband Kurt got married after he enlisted in the U.S. Army. Then she enlisted—for the money to finish college.

“Having gotten married, I didn’t feel I had any more claim on my parents’ money,” she explains. Also, her husband Kurt was being sent to Korea. “I thought, if I join now I can get my training out of the way, and then we will be stationed together.”

It didn’t quite work out that way: “We lived together for the 16 months out of the 48 that I served.” She had to enlist for four years; that was “the minimum a woman could join for. There were two- and three-year enlistments for men, but those were combat positions.” She was sent to Korea, all right—but by then, Kurt had returned to the States.

Occupying Korea
In Korea, she almost saw combat herself. It was 1980, and “I was occupying the country along with 40,000 other U.S. troops.” She was working as a mechanic and about to become a sergeant, but “there were some pretty bad things happening” in South Korea. “There had been a coup in 1979 that was largely supported by the U.S. government, replacing someone they weren’t really happy with with someone they were happier with.” The middle-sized city of Kwangju, she says, “didn’t take the coup very kindly, and there was a lot of turmoil—the whole city had gone on a general strike.” The South Korean government—the one the U.S. supported—“mowed down” about 2,500 people. “So of course all 40,000 troops were instantly put on very high alert. Us being a mechanics company, we weren’t normally high on the list of who would respond if something happened. But that was a big deal, they didn’t know if the whole country was going to go up into flames.”

So the Army scheduled even noncombatant units for training in “riot suppression,” and the question arose as to whether women would participate in the training. A budding feminist—and not yet a budding pacifist—Ellen answered, “Yes.”

But the crisis blew over before her unit got trained, and Ellen used her remaining hitch—including a stint in Germany—to think about what she wanted to do with the rest of her life (she had decided she didn’t see much future for herself in theater). She concluded that after the Army, she’d finish college and then go to veterinary school.

That was what she set out to do a year or two later. She returned to Kurt and to Texas—at that point they were living in Amarillo—got her undergraduate degree on her GI benefits (the Army no longer foots the entire bill for GIs’ college education; at best, the Army puts in two dollars for every one the enlistee contributes) and applied to Texas A&M Veterinary School. She left for College Station and Texas A&M in the fall of 1984.

As she was packing, she read a story in the local newspaper about a “Peace Camp” being held by a group called the Red River Peace Network at the Pantex nuclear weapons plant near Amarillo. “They were Texas, New Mexico and Oklahoma organizers who were concerned about this nuclear weapons facility in the Texas panhandle, out in the middle of nowhere,” she says, and their courage “amazed” her. As it turned out, she would stay at Texas A&M for less than a semester; she would wind up with the Red River Peace Network for most of a decade.

It was harder than she had expected to be 700 miles from Kurt, who didn’t want to leave his job in Amarillo to go to College Station with her. As the semester wore on, she began to question the way vet school used animals for study and research. And finally—surprisingly—she was unhappy with the conservative atmosphere at the school: “It was 1984,” she remembers, “and everybody was all excited about Reagan running for re-election, and that was pretty obnoxious.” As she describes it now, “All those things came together, and I thought, ‘Hmm, I’ve changed, this isn’t what I want to do.’ So I dropped out of vet school, and went home.”

At the Peace Farm
In Amarillo, she started working for a local veterinary lab. But the next year, when the Red River Peace Network held its second Peace Camp outside the Pantex plant, she was there. “ ’Eighty-five was the 40th anniversary of Hiroshima,” she notes, “so the peace camp was 10 days long, and a thousand people came through over the 10 days. It was huge.”

It must have made a big impression. After the Peace Camp, Ellen started going to the monthly meetings held by Red River activists Cindy and Les Breeding. A year later, the Breedings had bought 20 acres of land adjacent to the Pantex plant to set up a permanent “Peace Farm” to investigate and raise local consciousness about the environmental damage and contamination caused by the plant.

Larry Egbert—at the time a teacher of anesthesiology at Texas State University in Dallas and a founder of the Dallas chapter of Physicians for Social Responsibility—was among the Red River activists who participated in the Peace Camps. In 1987, Ellen was asked to help plan that year’s camp, and that was when “Larry … and a lot of those other folks began to be more than just people I might have seen across a tent gathering.”

She was still married to Kurt, of course, but the marriage was fraying. She was spending more and more of her time with the Red River and Peace Camp folks, and less and less with Kurt. In the spring of 1988, there was a large civil disobedience action at the nuclear testing site in Nevada. The participants from the Red River Peace Network included Ellen and Larry. By the time the protest was over, Ellen had been arrested for the first time—and she and Larry had become close friends. In 1989, Ellen and Kurt “just kind of said, ‘We’ve had a good 14 years, looks like it’s over,’” and Ellen moved onto the Peace Farm.

A year later, the Peace Farm held a “truck watch” at Pantex, staking out all the exits and alerting a network of activists across the country when trucks carrying nuclear waste moved out onto the Texas highways. (Two other participants in the truck watch that year were the late Wisconsin activist-journalist Sam Day [see NVA, March-April 2001], and future War Resisters League National Office Director Melissa Jameson.) Larry and Ellen were assigned an overnight watch at the plant’s North Gate. Truck-wise, it was a slow night, leaving Ellen and Larry nothing to do but fall in love.

In 1991, Ellen left the Peace Farm (in the capable hands of long-time activist Mavis Belisle, who’s been there ever since) and moved to Dallas, where she and Larry married. She took volunteer jobs at a “melange” of organizations: the Dallas Peace Center, the Dallas ACLU and a local AIDS hotline.

More recently, they moved to Baltimore—where Larry had taught at Johns Hopkins before he moved to Dallas—in. Between civil disobedience actions and other protests, Ellen spends her time volunteering with Baltimore peace and justice groups. What’s interesting about her story, I tell her, is that she doesn’t seem to have had a sudden conversion.

No, she says. “It wasn’t sudden at all.”

So what happened? I ask her.

She thinks for a moment. Then she says, “That thing in Korea was probably a large portion of it—that was the closest I got to doing what it is soldiers do.” Then she adds, “It’s funny—I look back and realize that, as politically different as my father and I are, he and I both have a real strong sense of fairness. I can remember as a child saying something wasn’t fair, and my mother was saying, ‘Nobody ever told you life was going to be fair.’ But my dad thinks it ought to be and so do I.”

What does fairness have to do with it? I ask.

She doesn’t have to think about that one. “It’s not fair,” she says, “for the United States or anybody else to [make demands] and harming and killing people when they don’t do what’s demanded of them. It’s not fair to manipulate the world the way our country does. And it’s not fair for anybody, this country or any other, to threaten the world with annihilation. So that’s my bottom line: It’s not fair and I don’t want it to happen.”

She’s doing all she can to stop it.

Journalist and writer Judith Mahoney Pasternak is the editor of the Nonviolent Activist.