THE LAST WORD
Miller, Marc S.
THE LAST WORD Marc S. Miller Dove Shoot A recent item in the Birmingham News caught my attention. The paper reported that some folks in Alabama had staged a $250-per-person dove shoot to raise...
...money, guns, and people to spread terror in Central America...
...It would be "an activist-type organization . . . selling to the American people the need for adequate defense spending...
...shotgun cases, which they carefully checked for the flight...
...But the Birmingham News story caught my eye because I had encountered a dove shoot once before...
...They said they were farm-equipment salesmen and executives from Thomasville, Georgia, and they were bound for southern Honduras, Marc S. Miller is a senior editor of Technology Review and the author of "The Irony of Victory, "published this year by the University of Illinois Press...
...The trip had been arranged, they told us, by Trek Safari of Jacksonville, Florida...
...We had to remind them to remain on board...
...Dove hunting, it appears, is high sport, and Honduras, they said, was the place to do it...
...From Wiwili in northern Nicaragua, an embattled city that had been bombed by Honduran planes, we canoed up the Rio Coco to Ban-acito, a refugee resettlement farm a few miles from Honduras...
...Aboard the aircraft, the members of this small army sat across the aisle from me, and we had a chance to talk...
...We, too, were traveling to the border...
...A dove shoot to promote war spending...
...I was with a group of about twenty Jews from all over the United States who were going to Nicaragua with Witness for Peace, an organization that has done much to document atrocities committed by the contras against the Nicaraguan people...
...It was last year, when I stood in a check-in line at Miami International Airport, waiting to board a flight to Honduras...
...The shoot included "a firepower exhibition featuring potent military weaponry in action...
...And they seemed to have no clear idea where they were going...
...That's bizarre enough in itself...
...From Tegucigalpa, a guide would lead them south to the region where the Rio Coco separates Honduras from Nicaragua...
...One of the sportsmen replied, "They got their guns and we have ours...
...Weren't they afraid, we wondered, to enter a war zone...
...that would be up to the guide who would meet the plane...
...According to Randy Wilhelm, executive director of the Defense Research Institute, proceeds of the dove shoot would go toward the $ 1.5 million needed to open an office in Washington, D.C., where the Institute would advocate "more bang for the buck...
...In going, I declared myself to be a dove—and became a target for U.S...
...The paper reported that some folks in Alabama had staged a $250-per-person dove shoot to raise funds for a new Defense Research Institute...
...hunters...
...We surely were...
...We suspected, of course, that our traveling companions were mercenaries off to join the contras, but I'm inclined to accept their story...
...For one thing, they got so drunk on dutyfree bourbon that they almost left the plane at a stop in San Pedro Sula...
...My trip to Central America was a personal protest against the use of U.S...
...Several other groups were waiting for that flight—a brigade of architecture students traveling to Nicaragua to help construct rural housing, a public-television crew flying to Honduras to film Mayan ruins, and eight large men carrying gun cases...
...We kept our eyes open for dove hunters, but we never saw any and the only shots we heard were fired at night...
...Whether they were mercenaries or weekend pleasure-seekers, they represent a side of America of which I am ashamed...
...Government bans direct travel to Nicaragua...
...Still, I can't forget the eight large men partying on the airplane...
...We were flying via Honduras because the U.S...
...They just didn't really fit the bill as conspiratorial soldiers of fortune...
...Representative Bill Dickinson of Alabama, the ranking Republican on the House Armed Services Committee and a backer of the Institute, explained that it would not be just another Washington think tank...
...He wrote "New Toys for Robocop Soldiers" in the July issue of The Progressive...
...where they would spend five days hunting doves...
Vol. 52 • November 1988 • No. 11
