Nuclear Option. Dorothy Van Soest

Janice added. “We patrol the camp every night from midnight to six in the morning. If you like walkie-talkies, you can sign up to cover a shift.” Mary Lou grunted. I shook my head. Janice laughed again. “No worries. There are other chores you can do. The sign-up list is next to the fridge on the kitchen wall in the farmhouse. Breakfast is ready at six, put away at nine. If you’re hungry now, there are snacks in the house. But first, we’ll help you set up your tents and get you settled in. Every morning at ten we meet to plan the day’s action at the depot.”

      I set up my little two-person camping tent next to the palatial tent belonging to the sister nuns Rhona, Char, and Anita, the funniest women I’d ever known. I’d shared a jail cell with them after the Good Friday protest, and they’d had me laughing for hours with their stories. My favorite was the one about the first time Char was arrested at Nectaral headquarters.

      “So there’s Char,” Rhona laughed, “the one who’s always preaching about nonviolence, and what’s the first thing she does when the officer approaches her?”

      “She knees him!” Rhona and Anita said in unison, to peals of laughter.

      “I’ll be doing penance the rest of my life for that one,” Char said. Then she laughed louder and longer than anyone.

      My tent was just wide enough for me to walk along one side of my sleeping bag, long enough for my knapsack to fit at its end, and tall enough for me to stand up bent over. I changed into the extra-large T-shirt that I’d brought along as pajamas, but instead of going to bed, I was lured outside by angry voices. A dozen or so women were sitting around a fire pit in the middle of our circle of tents.

      “This isn’t what I signed up for.” Maddie’s slightly plump body was hunched over with a flashlight pointed at her lap. “I sure wish I’d seen this handbook before. I thought the camp was supposed to be about creating a nuclear-free world, not a woman-focused one. Have you noticed how everything around here is in a circle? It says here the circle symbolizes our wombs.” Her angry finger tapped on the page. “Like it’s gospel or something.”

      “You knew it was a women-only camp when you signed up,” someone said.

      Maddie’s huff emphasized what most of us already knew, that she did not like to be challenged. “I didn’t know it was an exclusionary, feminist-only one,” she said. “It says here that no male over the age of twelve is allowed onto the main grounds.”

      “Really?” Mary Lou’s voice was strained from exhaustion. “What about my grandson? He’s just as firm a believer in the anti-nuclear cause as I am.”

      “Well, if women are going to be running around naked, you wouldn’t want him here, would you?” Maddie’s negativity usually wasn’t contagious, but tonight, with everyone drained by the long trip, it snowballed into a string of complaints.

      “I don’t have any problem with lesbians, but I draw the line at public displays of affection.”

      “To each her own, I say, but I don’t want to see it.”

      “What’s with the macrobiotic food anyway?”

      My stomach grew queasy with worry. I hadn’t come here to sit around and talk about feelings or deal with lesbian/straight differences or work through my own personal issues. Or, for that matter, to build and maintain a community of women.

      Pam, our Quaker, stood and made her hands into two stop signs. The silver strands in her gray hair glowed in the light of the fire. “We’re having a bit of trouble adjusting, that’s all. It’s late and we’re tired.” Her voice was calm and conciliatory. “I suggest we go to bed and get some rest so we’re fresh for the action at the depot tomorrow.”

      “I was just trying to express my feelings,” Maddie grumbled. “Does that make me a bad person?”

      “Of course not,” Pam said.

      One by one, we headed for our tents. I tucked myself into my sleeping bag, but a string of worries kept me awake. Would Maddie’s attitude stir up conflict? Would we forget why we came? If we couldn’t live together in peace here, then what chance was there for peace in the world? And if we couldn’t work together, how the hell were we going to stop the deployment of cruise missiles and Pershing missiles to Europe? I longed for Norton, wished I could talk to him. Then I started worrying about him. The last time he told me he loved me, it was with such intensity that I’d wondered if he was thinking about leaving his wife. My heart fluttered at the thought, but I knew it was wrong to want that, wrong to even think that. I sat up and reached into the bottom of my duffel bag for the bottle of bourbon. I needed a nightcap.

      Nobody would know. It made no sense for the camp to have an alcohol-free policy anyway. I opened the bottle and took a swig. Then another. One more, and I shoved the bottle back in the bottom of the bag and fell into a deep sleep.

      At seven o’clock the next morning, I was startled awake by a helicopter hovering so low it shook my tent. Soon it sounded like several helicopters were circling the camp. I lay there, frozen, barely breathing. This couldn’t be normal. Something must have happened. I threw on the same T-shirt and shorts I’d worn for the past two days on the bus and stepped out of my tent. The camp was alive, buzzing with excitement. I grabbed the arm of the first person I ran into, a dark-skinned woman dressed in a purple Indian sari.

      “What’s going on?”

      Her eyes were as wide as golf balls. “Some women got into the Q zone at four o’clock this morning.”

      “Q zone?”

      “The highest security area inside the depot.” She stopped to catch her breath.

      “What’s in the Q zone?”

      “Sixty or seventy reinforced earth-covered bunkers and a twenty-eight-thousand-square-foot underground, temperature-controlled building for storing plutonium.”

      “Are they dead? Did the armed guards shoot them?”

      Her eyes opened wider. “They didn’t even notice. And the women were in there for at least twenty minutes! Can you believe it?” Her eyes widened even more.

      “How in the world did they even get in there?”

      “They climbed over three fences!”

      “Why? What did they do in there?”

      “They hung a banner with a clothesline of purple hearts on the innermost fence and sat there for a while. Praying, I guess. Then they climbed back out, over all three fences. They left a child’s stuffed lamb in front of the outside fence with a note attached that said And the lamb will lie down with the lion. And no one even noticed!”

      Just then a helicopter swooped down and sent everything flying in its wake. I fell to the ground with my hands covering the back of my neck, a perfect duck and cover. The woman helped me to my feet. “They’re probably looking for them,” she said. “I heard they came back to camp and went to bed.”

      Over breakfast there was talk of nothing but the women who got into the Q zone. How brave they were. How daring. What a coup it had been. No names were mentioned. The less we knew about who they were, the better. It was for their protection. They were young, someone said, which made me wonder if their action was a sign of courage or simply youthful foolhardiness.

      Butch-haircut-called-A puffed up her chest and chuckled. “A depot spokesman has publicly denied all rumors that security was breached. They sure don’t want anyone to know a bunch of women—girls, to them—got inside. Undetected.” She snorted, then laughed so hard she started to choke.

      Bertha Pickering sat down next to me on a kitchen bench. “Quite an exciting coup, hey?”

      “But if there’s no news coverage,” I said, “what do you think their action accomplished?”

      She shrugged her shoulders. “Maybe it was just something they had to do,” she said.

      There it was again. Do what you have to do. But what did