Backstory/ Herstory
There was a time in the history of our resistance when womyn came together from around the world to encircle a first–strike nuclear weapons base. A time when 30,000 womyn tore through razor wire walls, regularly ripped down barbed wire fences, and trespassed in protest of nuclear weapons and war.
A time you’ve probably never heard about, that lasted a total of 19 remarkable years, and changed the way we imagine protest, and the way we imagine the power of womyn. Greenham Common Womyn’s Peace Camp has been mostly left out of mainstream histories, media coverage, and retrospective programs on the 20th century.
But.
Once upon a time, I lived with a tribe of womyn. We were wild and fearless and free. We were thoroughly disobedient and disloyal to civilization. A subversive, creative and ever-shifting clan, we broke the laws of men to live around a fire in the rain. Our surrounding landscape was a dystopian amalgam of ancient oak and beech forest, military traffic highways, and an American nuclear weapons base. We lived outside in Nature, pressed between the earth and the rain, in a culture of our own making. Without leaders to take us there, we went wild. Impossible beings, we lived an unchartered revolution where our daily business was to stop the business of war, to reclaim this land from military occupation, to bend men’s courts and their laws to earth with the weight of our disruption. I was there, and it changed my life, permanently.
In 1985, I was an anti-nuclear activist, twice arrested in the U.S. for protesting nuclear weapons. Ronald Reagan’s regime was sending non-violent nuns and priests to prisons for twenty years for their symbolic anti-war Ploughshares actions. When Reagan was re-elected, it was time to move. I’d heard delirious rumors of protest encirclements and on-going occupations at NATO nuclear bases far away in Europe. Those were my destination. After visiting camps in Italy, Switzerland, Germany and the Netherlands, I made it to Greenham.
In l1984, Greenham Common was nine miles of raped and ruined forestland, into which were shoved American weapons of war and three armies protecting the first 96 intermediate-range nuclear missiles based in Europe. They called this time The Cold War, a designation of those years spent threatening and preparing to launch a hot war.
On the outside, Greenham Common was also a womyn’s peace camp, radical shrine of the international womyn’s peace movement. Womyn came to Greenham to wage peace against the biggest, richest war machine the world had ever known. For 19 years, womyn squatted on reclaimed common land, brewing up a female warrior culture to cure 4,000 years of deranged masculinity. At the peace camp I found womyn dedicated to leaning into the blade of resistance and anarchy. Every night, we slept on straw on the cold, wet ground. Every day for years we were evicted. Weekly, we were arrested in continuous attempts to interrupt and sabotage the military’s preparations.
We’d cut tunnels through nested wire fences to feed the seed of insecurity that hides inside the concept of national security. Complexities brought us together, but there we got simple. Living outside on the earth between the highway and the nuclear base fence, we danced on the edge of the wedge of extinction. Our tents dripped, our boots were always wet, and our belongings regularly confiscated and destroyed in evictions. Our days flew by in an endless stream of storytelling, action planning, and continual civil disobedience, broken only by arrests and jail time.
Every month, the nuclear missiles would leave the base and drive in a hundred-vehicle convoy for 40 miles to play strategic holocaust games, and every month, our work was to stop them. Surrounded by 300 police, we’d stand eyeball to gunbarrel to blockade the gates of Greenham, build huge fires in the road, and sneak onto the stolen warfields of Salsbury Plain, past police and soldiers in the dark, to perform rituals against the military. Life on earth, no compromise, was our vow, through night times and prisons and steel fences coming down.
It’s true that womyns’ work is never done. We poured instant rice into radiators of jeeps and nuclear control vehicles, stuffed big English potatoes into the tailpipes of launchers, dropped ping pong balls into military truck gas lines. We super-glued door locks of police vehicles, jail cells, and airplane hatches. We sewed miles of banners, wove incessant messages into the fences, spray-painted every official sign for miles around, and we guarded our bolt cutters and spray paint in dilapidated baby carriages.
Our days spent laughing their fences down, our nights of dancing their missiles impotent. We sang songs, painted and knitted, learned astrology and guitar chords, played in creative, passionate resistance while toast burned on smoky fires. We visited, drank endless cups of tea, and turned slowly before the flames to dry ourselves.
Always a fire. Always a circle. Always the rain. We slept with hot stones in our bags, spray-painted bombs and runways, published newsletters and traveled around Europe speaking of our lives at the peace camp. We lay in the woods, and made love, and made art, and cooked soups, and quit looking in mirrors. We argued and processed and analyzed every possible political and social issue of the times, and we slept in the glare of the runway lights, the throb of generators, and the looming menace of Armageddon.
In response to our protest, the U.S. military began, in 1984, to “zap” the camps with electromagnetic weaponry. Designed to control and immobilize protesters, these frequency weapons caused nose and ear bleeds, headaches, nausea, epilepsy, sunburns, and debilitating psychological distress. The zapping increased during times of large actions, and whenever the convoy went out. I became quite sick from the zapping, and finally left the peace camp, crawled away to the countryside in Cornwall with a lover to nurse my wounds and heal and begin to write this book. (Now, in 2021, zapping is finally in the news—we hear it called Havana Syndrome, and military men are experiencing it. They say it damages the brain. The badass warrior men are taken to Walter Reed; they say they’ve never been so scared in their lives.) Symptoms of the zapping live on in me, still.
In 1991, an Intermediate Range Nuclear Weapons Treaty was signed by Mikael Gorbechev and Ronald Reagan. So began the process of removing the missiles, and de-constructing the entire base, tearing up runways and buildings, planting trees, and re-making the space into a Nature Preserve. Greenham women were responsible for the political and military defeat of these weapons, proving that the state is ultimately powerless against the persistent, creative actions of civilians determined to resist.
I lived at Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp from 1985-1988. The ordeals and transformation I experienced there generated a political, spiritual, physiological and emotional meltdown and reconstruction of my life that changed me and charged me, forever. My memoir—Trespassing—distills the raw reality of daily peace camp life as I experienced it.
I said farewell to Greenham after three years, but it never left me. The peace camp, and womyn's land shaped me, forevermore. After returning to the states, I lived for another 5 years on Womyn’s Lands throughout the U.S. These days, I have no respect for any patriarchal institution, and I find that I’m not afraid of anybody. Thirty-five years later, I still move through my life, indelibly marked by that miracle, forever awakened to my power, my rage and my love, and I circle strong on the courage of womyn as I live to tell the stories.
Getting arrested continues to be an act of profound love and power to call attention to a great injustice. It's an exceptional sacrifice that protectors make for all of life that's threatened.
I hope you enjoy this book, in the spirit of joyful defiance in which it’s offered. As a social service from a public dreamer, a public defender and retired barbarian, I welcome you into the hidden herstory of a mythic-real wasteland of the modern world’s most powerful military, and the women resisters/ protectors of Greenham Common, who dared to say NO.
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