(09-01) 17:51 PDT Concord -- Brian Willson and about 100 of his friends, admirers and fellow activists stood in a circle Saturday around a vase of red roses that marked the spot where a munitions train 20 years earlier rolled over the 46-year-old Vietnam veteran and sheared off his legs.
"It's a metaphor for what happens if you get in the way of the Yankee train - it runs you over," Willson, standing firmly on artificial limbs, told the gathering that had come to remember a catalytic event in the peace movement of the 1980s.
Gray hair was abundant, along with other evidence of the passage of time.
The Concord Naval Weapons Station, which once shipped armaments to U.S.-backed forces in Central America, shut down eight years ago. A speaker read a list of the dead - protesters, friends and the engineer of the weapons train - prompting the ceremonial chant for "present" in Spanish, "Presente," after each name.
The once-robust police presence was replaced by an occasional passing Contra Costa County sheriff's patrol car and a lone officer who exchanged waves with the crowd and snapped photos from across the street.In contrast to the hostile atmosphere that participants recalled from the 1980s, peace signs and approving honks from passing motorists far outnumbered angry shouts and gestures Saturday.
But the remnants of the loose-knit organization that grew up around the Concord protests were looking to draw a connection between then and now.
"They didn't kill Brian and they didn't kill our movement," said David Hartsough, 67, who was knocked to the ground by the train that ran over Willson, then went to his friend's side and cradled his broken body. Hartsough arranged Saturday's commemoration in the name of Nuremberg Actions, the group that organized the 1980s protests, and ended it with an invitation to the monthly "die-in" this Thursday at the San Francisco Federal Building to protest the war in Iraq.
"We're still sending munitions to kill innocent people," said Duncan Murphy, 87, who was standing with Willson on the tracks as the train approached. Murphy - who said they had expected the train to stop - was able to jump onto the engine, cling to the cowcatcher, then leap clear.
Willson said the face of Murphy, standing over him and talking to him, is one of the last things he remembers before waking up in the hospital.
Charlie Liteky was then 3,000 miles away, beginning his second fasting vigil at the Capitol to protest U.S. military aid to Nicaragua's Contra rebels and El Salvador's rightist government. A year earlier, Liteky had taken the Medal of Honor he won for heroism as an Army chaplain in Vietnam and had left it at the Vietnam Wall along with a letter for President Ronald Reagan, whose policies he was protesting. Liteky and Willson, who had been an Air Force captain in Vietnam, then began a 47-day fast.
"The strongest statement you can make is with your life," said Liteky, 76, who now lives in San Francisco.
Movement icon Daniel Ellsberg also appeared and recalled how he had decided not to attend the Concord protest on Sept. 1, 1987 - to the relief of his wife, who reminded him that he had missed their son's first birthday while being arrested in an anti-nuclear demonstration. When they heard about Willson, Ellsberg said, they headed for the site the next day and saw the tracks covered with blood.
Willson is "a hero and a prophet," Ellsberg, who leaked the Pentagon Papers history of the Vietnam War to the press, told the gathering.
Claire Englander, 62, of Oakland carried a placard showing a photo of Dick Allen, "my college love," who was killed in Vietnam in November 1967.
"It's a reminder that many of us have sacrificed for this country more than George Bush or Dick Cheney ever did," she said.
E-mail Bob Egelko at begelko@sfchronicle.com.
