THE PRIEST WHO WAGED A WAR.

COLUMBUS, Ga.--The dead man's voice roared out of the pine trees and
drifted into the barracks where the soldiers lay in their beds.

The barracks were at Fort Benning. The soldiers were Salvadorans. The
voice belonged to Oscar Romero, the Salvadoran archbishop who'd been
shot dead while saying Mass three years earlier. Now his voice
infiltrated the barracks, imploring the soldiers to stop killing their
countrymen. Shocked, the soldiers rose from their bunks and ran into
the night.

Out there in the dark, the Rev. Roy Bourgeois, a Vietnam veteran and
Maryknoll missionary priest, was perched in a pine tree. He had walked
onto the base wearing a uniform purchased at an Army surplus store.
He'd climbed the tree, hauled a boombox up on a rope and, when the
lights in the barracks went out, hit the button that sent Romero's
sermon blaring into the night.

"It was one of those sacred moments," he says, smiling at the
memory.

It didn't last long. Soon sirens drowned out the recording and MPs
busted Bourgeois. Convicted of trespassing and impersonating an
officer, he served 18 months in a federal prison in Minnesota -- hard
time in a cold place.

That was 15 years ago. Since then, Bourgeois, 59, has been arrested in
three more protests at the base and served three more sentences -- a
total of nearly four years in prison. The object of his anger is the
School of the Americas at Fort Benning, where the Army trains soldiers
from Latin America. It's a 50-year-old institution whose 60,000 alumni
include many of the hemisphere's most notorious dictators, drug
dealers and war criminals -- among them Manuel Noriega, the Panamanian
strongman now serving 40 years in Miami for drug trafficking; Leopoldo
Galtieri, the Argentine general who invaded the Falkland Islands; and
Roberto D'Aubuisson, the leader of the Salvadoran death squad that
killed Romero the day after he delivered the sermon that Bourgeois
blared from the treetops.

Famous in Latin America, the school was virtually unknown in the
United States until Bourgeois began his crusade against it. Now,
thanks largely to his obsessive efforts, it is the focus of intense
controversy and congressional debate. Defenders say it teaches Latin
American soldiers the ideals of democracy and human rights. Critics
say it trains them to torture and kill their own people.

On Sept. 18 -- the day Bourgeois was released from his most recent
sentence for trespassing in a protest at Fort Benning -- congressional
critics came within 11 votes of cutting off funds for the school. The
bill was sponsored by Rep. Joseph Kennedy (D-Mass.), who had never
heard of the institution until he met Bourgeois in the early '90s. The
meeting occurred on the Capitol steps, where Bourgeois and others were
protesting the school by fasting for 40 days. Kennedy stopped to talk
and came away impressed.

"Father Roy is one of the most decent, committed individuals I've ever
met," the lawmaker says. "He is not a nut. He's a solid individual
with a great sense of humor, a great smile and a sense of perspective
about himself. And deep down, he's a rock of integrity."

At first, Bourgeois was alone in his crusade. But over the past nine
years, he has built a grass-roots movement, speaking in churches and
colleges across the country, charming audiences with his Cajun drawl,
his bright blue eyes and what the Columbus Ledger-Enquirer has
described as "an impish grin," which gives his face the boyish
mischievousness of Danny Kaye or Harpo Marx.

Last Sunday, Bourgeois saw just how big his movement had grown. He
stood at the gates of Fort Benning and gazed out at some 7,000 people
who'd come to protest against the school -- nuns with gray hair and
crucifixes mingling with college kids with green hair and pierced noses.

"Looks like we poked a beehive," he said, flashing that impish
grin.

Tour of Duty

For Roy Bourgeois, the road to Columbus ran through Vietnam, Bolivia
and El Salvador.

He grew up in Lutcher, La., the son of an electrician, and spent a
Huck Finn boyhood fishing on the Mississippi. He played halfback on
the high school team and took a cheerleader to the senior prom. At the
University of Southern Louisiana, he majored in geology, hoping to
make a killing in the oil business. After graduation, he joined the
Navy and shipped out to Athens.

"I loved it," he says. "The parties, the ouzo -- it was a good life
for a bachelor."

By then it was the mid-'60s, the war in Vietnam was heating up and
Bourgeois volunteered for duty there. "I really believed what McNamara
was saying, that we were there to stop communism," he says. "I said,
'I gotta go, my country needs me.'"

One night as he slept in a Navy barracks in Saigon, a Viet Cong
suicide bomber drove an truck laden with explosives into the building,
killing more than a dozen Americans. Bourgeois escaped with what he
calls "cuts and bruises" but was awarded a Purple Heart.

"I kind of got religion in Vietnam," he says. "Death was very close.
You see that and it makes you think: If I make it out of here, what
should I do?"

His question was answered when he began spending his free time
volunteering at an orphanage run by a Canadian priest. "In the midst
of all this violence, he was a peacemaker. I thought, 'What a
wonderful way to spend your life.' "

Bourgeois told a Catholic chaplain that he wanted to become a
missionary, and the chaplain recommended the Maryknoll order. "They're
the Marines of the Catholic Church," he told Bourgeois. "They go to
the toughest places."

That sounded good. When he got out of the Navy, Bourgeois entered a
Maryknoll seminary. Ordained in 1972, he was sent to Bolivia. He moved
into a slum on the outskirts of La Paz and rented a room for $13 a
month -- no running water and just enough space for a bed, a hot plate
and a desk. At first he was wracked with dysentery, the disease that
kills so many of the children of Latin America's poor. Slowly he got
stronger, his Spanish improved and he began to feel at home.

"I'd say Mass in a vacant lot," he says. "I loved that. A dog would
put his head on your lap. There'd be Indian women in their colorful
shawls with their babies on the backs. Oh boy, that beat the
cathedral. I thought, 'This is where I belong.' "

He helped organize a health clinic, a day care center and a literacy
program. He also learned about life under a military dictatorship. He
saw soldiers haul away union activists and dissident students. When he
began working with the families of political prisoners, the soldiers
came and hauled him away. They roughed him up a little, took him to a
cemetery in the dead of night, scared the hell out of him.

Ultimately, Bolivian officials warned him that they could no longer
guarantee his safety. He translated that to mean: Leave or die. He
left.

He was working at a Maryknoll center in Chicago in 1980 when the news
came that four Catholic churchwomen had been raped and murdered by
Salvadoran soldiers. He knew two of them -- Maryknoll nuns Ita Ford
and Maura Clarke. "Ita and I were in language school together," he
says. "She was a gentle soul. She helped me with my Spanish."

Bourgeois talked his way into a job as a translator for a TV crew
heading to El Salvador. It was the heyday of the right-wing death
squads, when vultures dined on fresh corpses daily. Many of the
victims were Catholic clergy and laity who advocated "liberation
theology" -- a radical egalitarian school of Christianity that was
popular with Maryknollers but not with the Salvadoran military.

Bourgeois traveled the country, interviewing witnesses to atrocities
and relatives of the victims. In April 1981, he hiked into the
mountains controlled by leftist guerrillas, leaving behind a letter
saying, "I have decided to join the poor of El Salvador in their
struggle," though adding, "I personally will not and cannot bear arms."

For nearly two weeks, U.S. Embassy officials and his friends worried
that he was dead. He returned to San Salvador in fine health,
denouncing U.S. support of the military junta.

Then embassy officials informed Bourgeois that he, too, was now a target of
the death squads. He flew back home, his soul tortured by what he'd seen.
He became obsessed with El Salvador: "I couldn't shut up."

For the next few years, he'd spend months at a time speaking on the
subject to any group that would listen. Then he'd disappear into a
Trappist monastery, seeking the solace of silence, before heading out
to speak again.

One night in November 1989, Salvadoran soldiers hauled six Jesuit
priests, their cook and her daughter out of their beds at Central
American University and executed them. When Bourgeois learned that
many of the soldiers had been trained at the School of the Americas,
he drove to Columbus and rented a tiny apartment across the street
from the entrance to Fort Benning.

He's still there. He says he'll stay until the school is shut
down.

Disobedient Servant

"Every movement for justice needs people in jail to inspire people,"
Bourgeois says. "Having people in prison in the civil rights movement,
having Nelson Mandela in prison in South Africa -- that did something
to people. It's the power of the human spirit."

It's the eve of the protest rally and the priest sits in his kitchen
talking about why he keeps going to prison for a cause that many
Americans would see as a relic of the 1980s. His tiny apartment serves
as both home and office, so two bullhorns sit at the foot of his bed
and a box of fax paper shares a shelf with a box of Cheerios.

"You can give just so many sermons and talks," he says. "To hold on to
my integrity, I've got to do something more. I wanted to leave the
comfort of the pulpit and the security of the classroom."

He regards the movement to close the School of the Americas as his
ministry, and his Maryknoll superiors agree. The order, which
ministers to the world's poor, is among the more radical organizations
in the Catholic Church and it supports Bourgeois's single-minded
crusade by keeping him on its payroll and by producing anti-SOA books
and videotapes.

These days, Bourgeois says, he thinks of federal prisons the way he
once thought of monasteries -- as places to pray and meditate.

"Prison is a hard and lonely place, but I try to see it as a retreat,"
he says. "When I'm in prison, I read the mystics: Saint John of the
Cross and Thomas Merton. Some of my best spiritual insights I've had
in prison, and for that I'm grateful."

Listening to him, you could get the impression that he kind of enjoys
incarceration. For one thing, he says, it reduces the confusing
complexities of Latin America to simple black and white: "In prison,
it all becomes so clear. This issue is about life and death. It's
about bullies -- men with guns trying to keep that wall between the
rich and the poor."

There's a knock at the door. Becky Carter, owner of a local catfish
restaurant, walks in with a bagful of her wares -- dinner for
Bourgeois and other volunteers. Carter was closing her restaurant for

the weekend and turning it into a temporary crash pad for a busload of
Sioux Indians who'd driven from South Dakota for the rally.

"Man, this woman inspires me!" Bourgeois says.

The food smells delicious, and it reminds him of another day and
another aromatic meal. He was fasting at the gates of Fort Benning
with a small group of protesters, including Charlie Liteky, a former
priest who won the Medal of Honor in Vietnam and now devotes his life
to peace work.

"It was two weeks into the fast and we were hungry," Bourgeois
recalls. "My God, we were hungry! And this officer from the base came
upwind from us and he started to barbecue about 15 yards away. There
was a breeze blowing toward us and he had all these nice things
cooking on the grill. He didn't say a word. He just looked at us and
ate."

Bourgeois, connoisseur of the silent gesture that speaks volumes,
recognized his opponent's artistry. "He was great!" he says, laughing.
"I thought, 'You gotta like this guy!' "

Naming Names

Little was generally known about the School of the Americas when
Bourgeois began his crusade. Much of the information that has come out
since then has been unflattering.

First, Bourgeois's group obtained a list of the school's graduates
through the Freedom of Information Act. Over the SOA's 50-year
history, the list revealed, the largest number of graduates had come
from the most repressive countries: El Salvador, Nicaragua, Colombia,
Bolivia, Guatemala.

Then a volunteer compared the list with one of Latin American human
rights violators compiled by a U.N. task force and other international
groups. There was a lot of overlap: Two of the three men involved in
the assassination of Archbishop Romero were graduates. So were three
of the five accused of murdering the four churchwomen -- and 10 of the
12 officers held responsible for the massacre of hundreds of civilians
in the Salvadoran village of El Mozote. Also, three Peruvian army
officers convicted of murdering nine college students and a professor
. . . and four of the five Honduran officers named by Americas Watch
as organizers of a notorious death squad . . . and 105 of 246
Colombian army officers accused of atrocities by an international
human rights group.

The list went on and on.

School officials responded that they weren't responsible for the
actions of graduates who had failed to embrace the school's human
rights curriculum. But then, in September 1996, the Pentagon
declassified a report revealing that manuals used at the school in the
1980s had advocated such unsavory tactics as "payment of bounties for
enemy dead, beatings, false imprisonment, executions and the use of
truth serum." The revelations gave ammunition to critics who charged
that the school was an academy of torture.

"The school has never taught torture and never will," says Col. Glenn
R. Weidner, its commandant. "We still do military training, but this
is not the torture training that Father Bourgeois would have you believe."

At a news conference on the eve of the protest last weekend, Weidner
delivered a three-hour lecture on the school, complete with slide
show. The controversial training manuals there were only "a tiny part
of the curriculum," he said, and they'd been distributed to only 40
students. And out of 60,000 graduates, he said, only 300 had been
cited for human rights abuses. "That's a very small
percentage."

Latin America has changed since the "the bad old '80s," he added. Most
of the region's military dictatorships have become democracies, at
least on paper. And the School of the Americas has changed, too, he
said, providing more human rights training as well as courses on
peacekeeping and disaster relief.

But one thing hadn't changed, he warned. Military police would still
arrest any protesters who trespassed at Fort Benning, despite the fact
that they'd never get within two miles of the school itself.

"The sanctity of the base," he said, "will be protected."

Crossing The Line

Four abreast, the protesters marched past a warning sign and onto the
base, row after row after row, each marcher carrying a white cross
bearing the name of one of the victims of Latin America's dirty wars.

Bourgeois stood and watched, shaking hands, slapping shoulders,
occasionally hugging old friends like actor-activist Martin Sheen.
Fresh out of prison after serving six months for trespassing in last
year's demonstration, Bourgeois had decided to stay legal this time.

In 1997 the rally had attracted 2,000 protesters, 60l of whom were
arrested for marching on the base. Most had merely been served with a
letter barring them from Fort Benning, but 25 people -- those who'd
been busted before -- were sentenced to six months in prison. This
year, some 70 second-timers were leading thousands of newcomers across
the line. Bourgeois watched them march past for many minutes, a smile
on his face and tears in his eyes.

When the long line passed, the woman who'd been counting the marchers
handed him a piece of yellow legal paper with the tally of those who'd
crossed the line: 2,319. He hopped on the stage and held it aloft,
doing an impromptu victory dance as the crowd cheered.

He was thrilled with the unexpected turnout and even more elated an
hour later, when he learned that Fort Benning officials were so
overwhelmed with protesters that they were releasing them all without
arrest.

"They're cutting them loose!" he informed the crowd. "There were so
many, they didn't have enough MPs to take their names!"

At the foot of the stage, he was mobbed by admirers who wanted to
shake his hand, or hug him, or pose for a picture. He was at least as
popular with this crowd as Sheen was.

A freckle-faced 15-year-old with bright red hair approached him
tentatively. Her name was Kate Mitchell. She'd learned about the
School of the Americas in her Episcopal Sunday school class in
Hayesville, N.C., then read about Bourgeois on the Internet.

"I just want to say that your work inspires me," she said shyly.
"Maybe next year, my parents will let me cross the line."