CPTnet
10 April 2009
INDIAN SPRINGS, NV: Holy Week vigil at Creech Air Force Base.


by Gene Stoltzfus

[The following reflection by CPT Director Emeritus Gene Stoltzfus has been edited for length.  People wishing to see the original piece will find it at http://peaceprobe.wordpress.com/]

On Wednesday at Creech Air Force Base in Nevada, forty miles northwest of Las Vegas, the Reaper (technically referred to as the “MQ-9 Reaper Hunter/Killer UAV”) began practice runs at 7:06 a.m. taking off, circling, and landing every eighteen minutes throughout the morning.  I have joined a group this Holy Week to vigil and pray under the banner, “Ground the Drones.”  Unlike the first Predator, an earlier unmanned aerial vehicle armed with two Hellfire missiles, the Reaper is capable of carrying fourteen Hellfire missiles.  Flight crews of two, including a pilot and a technical support person called a sensor, sit here in rooms with several monitors and digitally guide these crafts as they move through their missions thousands of miles away in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iraq.  On Tuesday, U.S. Secretary of Defense Gates announced a 127% increase in funding for drones and other digitally guided military hardware.  

Our group has enjoyed almost a cordial welcome from base workers, pilots, officers, and enlisted people as they enter and depart the base, but one man shouted at me on Tuesday, “Do you have any idea how many American soldiers’ lives are saved every day by these aircraft?”  I told him I didn’t, and he advised me that the true number of saved service lives was twenty to thirty per day.  I have not been able to confirm these numbers from any scientific source but I did remind him that the drone aircrafts create enormous hostility in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Iraq that will take generations to overcome.  He was not impressed.

In the coming years the full implications of the U.S. military transformation to digital warfare will become apparent.  The outrage we now see in the countries where they are used and the signs of trauma now becoming visible among soldiers, designers, and victims will signal a new era of brokenness and anger.  

About three hundred yards down the road from the main entrance to Creech there is a small building set aside for two week training programs for military chaplains who are about to depart for duty in Afghanistan and Iraq.  We know that the military chaplain is one of the first to be contacted by soldiers who are disturbed and morally shaken by what they experience in combat.  Every month dozens seek a way out and often encounter enormous difficulty and little support even from chaplains, all of whom come from religious traditions that teach love and reverence for life.

Like the chaplains, all of us who claim faith must discern what our responses can be in this new age of digital warfare.  We will be further enabled to do this when our religious support structures—churches, denominations and institutions—also reach deep into the humanizing and peaceful resources of holy tradition.  The desert here in Indian Springs, Nevada where native people once came for water to sustain life is waiting for the transformation inherent in our faith.