Message from Compañero Brian Willson, Hero of Humanity: "I Lost the Fear of Being Afraid”
Special Session of the National Assembly in commemoration of the Day of the Internationalist Hero.
April 28th 2026
Address by Compañero Brian Willson
It’s an honor for me to be among Nicaragua’s heroe, to be with so many heroic people.
I came from a very small rural town in New York State. I had no ambition to do anything but play sports. But then I got drafted into the US military for Vietnam. I rally had no particular politics. It would never have occurred to me to avoid Vietnam if I was called, so I went.
Something happened when I was in Vietnam the first month or two. I was in a small village in the Mekong Delta and my job at that moment was to assess the success or failure of bombing missions. It never occurred to me that the target would be an inhabited village. I was a typically naïve, brainwashed US citizen. But I was with a Vietnamese who was my guide that day and he guided me as I was driving the jeep. He was guiding me to the first bombing target.
I was shocked to see everybody dead or almost dead. I walked as far as I could walk without stepping on bodies and then I couldn’t go any further because there were quite a few bodies packed in fornt of me on the ground. At my feet was a young Vietnamese woman holding on to three small children, I assume they were her children.
What was so striking to me was that the woman’s eyes were open and I was staring at her eyes, just kind of in shock and I realized that her eyelids had been burned off by the napalm. And it was obvious that she had been fleeing the bombing which apparently had happened about an hour earlier, trying to flee for safety, but there was no place that was safe from the bombs or the napalm.
It was inconceivable to me that we were specifically targeting what I was told were military targets but in fact they were just inhabited villages with no weapons they were just farmers or fisher people. I was crying and I didn’t know what to make of the whole situation. I was in shock and the Vietnamese guide asked me why I as crying. I was actually so shocked at his question that I felt I was in another world, which apparently I was, emotionally and psychically.
It was at that moment that I felt a lightning bolt had struck me and it was like I was looking at my sister. In other words, for the first time I really understood that we are all one on this planet and I had been raised as a typical lower working class, white male in a rural town thinking that we white people are superior to everybody else, which meant that disabled my capacity to think clearly about what I was seeing.
That day became the first day of a new life and I don’t really know what to call tit, now it would be called as a peace activist but at the time I just knew that the world, the real world was something I had never been faced with, because it was so easy growing up in the United States of America, because we’re “superior” to everybody.
So my life has not ever been the same since and one of the first things I did when I got back from the war was to study the history of what happened to Native Americans in the United States. And of course I had not been taught real history as most of us in the United States had not been taught real history. I discovered of course that we eurocentric people had committed huge atrocities and massacres against the Native Americans. And it wasn’t just Native Americans, it was Africans from Western Africa who were brought tot he hemisphere to be slaves so that the stolen land would be prosperous for the white settlers.
In 1986 I decided to come to Nicaragua to study both the war and the language, just to educate myself because I had been so naïve and so really brainwashed and I came to study in Estelí and the very first week in that school, Reagan’s terrorist Contras had attacked three farming cooperatives near Estelí and killed eleven campesinos.
It really deeply shocked me that I was witnessing the same behavior I had witnessed in Vietnam where virtually every village was considered a military target. I discovered that it was a war of body counts and that was so disgusting and so appalling that when I saw the eleven campesinos coming into the cemetery in Estelí in their coffins I realized this is exactly how the Western world was founded and sustained.
Later that year in the United States I met with a lot of veterans, US veterans who like me had become anti-war, anti-imperial and four of us, three Vietnam War veterans and one World War Two veteran, to go on an open-ended, water only fast on the steps of the Capitol, protesting Reagan’s terrorist wars in Nicaragua and El Salvador.
It was while we were preparing for our fast that we all prepared our wills because we really thought that there was no hope for the United States and that we would wind up fasting to our deaths and we were inspired by the Irish hunger strikers Bobby Sands and many other Irish men who were fighting for freedom from England.
So in effect, we had overcome our fear of death because we knew would probably n ot see any uprising in the United States against Reagan’s policies and so it was in that preparation that I lost my fear of death. In fact we fasted for 47 days on water only on the front steps of the US Capitol building and as of that moment, the doctor told us, the doctor that was kind of guiding us in the fast said to us that one of the other veterans was going to be near death if we didn’t start consuming calories.
So we had to discuss whether we were going to continue the open-ended fast or stop to save one of us who was near death. So at the end of the 47th day we began to eat but we also discovered that the FBI had investigated us as domestic terrorists, believe it or not.
So that was another experience of realizing what a sick and debased culture the United States of America had become. And that led to more actions in the United States against Reagan’s policies but three of us came to Nicaragua at the end of that fast and spent six weeks in Nicaragua in the fall and winter of 1986.
So those were some of the experiences that led to me and to other veterans to block munitions trains that were carrying munitions for Nicaragua and El Salvador, And it was at that time that I discovered that the FBI had considered us fasters as domestic terrorists, which explained why the train that was carrying the munitions was ordered not to stop. Another experience that of course changed my life even more deeply to basically join in solidarity with humanity everywhere and to speak out and work against US imperialism worldwide, not just in Latin America.
So I describe these experiences to help people understand why one would not feel heroic at all, but just simply following the empathy that I feel for other people and the suffering of other people. So the idea of being a hero never occurred to me and I was just doing what I thought a human being should do when they’ve been thrust into these experiences where all the suffering becomes so obvious.
It was a miracle that I survived being run over by the train. Again, I grew up in a small town in a lower class family very religious and it never occurred to me that I would become an activist or that I would become a lawyer. It’s not heroic. It’s following the empathy of your heart.
So to me the people of Nicaragua are heroic as are the people of Vietnam. It inspired me to join them in the struggle against Western imperialism led by the United States.
Of course my family back in this little town couldn’t possibly understand what I was thinking or what I was doing because it was just not anything anyone there would have thought of, excpet I was thinking about it because of my experiences.
So I cannot be thankful enough for the Nicaraguan Revolution because it was a beacon to the whole world and certainly in my world and certainly to many people in the United States so it’s kind of like I am joining Nicaraguans in the struggle against imperialism and I do it with great appreciation,
I actually didn’t have any idea that this was a special session of the Nicaraguan Assembly. I thought I was just going to come and witness one of the Assembly meetings, so I’m kind of in shock that this is all happening and that I am a guest. So thank you Nicaragua. Thank you very very much