Planning for Peace: Interview with John Fair

  (Editor’s Note: Today’s interview is with John Fair, a former Air Force officer who once worked in the Pentagon planning for war and who left that career to become a minister and peacemaker.  John’s ministry is focused on the need for planning for a sustainable peace. )

Life in the Air Force and Planning for War

Q: John, I understand that you were a career officer in the Air Force. Help me to understand what led you to eventually leave the Air Force to become a minister and then a peacemaker. How did the conviction that you must work for peace, not war, evolve inside you?

JF: I grew up in a church-going family.   I learned to fly at an early age. I became an Air Force fighter pilot and gradually began to see things on a larger scale.  I found it foolish chasing Russian bombers around the arctic icepack. Yet, I knew that those Russian crews were men who had families and looked forward to returning to base to toast vodka together.

It wasn’t until I went to the Pentagon that I began to question the wisdom of what was going on.  I found myself caught up in gaming for war with potential enemies who were not even on our enemy list. I was also beginning to wonder about the need to create the capability of planning for sustainable peace.

In 1980 my squadron was sent to Korea at a very tense time. I spent free time walking in the streets and enjoyed trying to communicate with children and shopkeepers. Several weeks later I was sitting in my jet ready to launch and realized those whom I was going to fight looked just like these lovely people.  Years later I had an encounter with a North Korean guard at the DMZ. I stood face to face with him. We looked into each other’s eyes.  I loved him.

Planning for War Gives Way to Dreams of Peace

I attended Seminary part-time while I was serving in the Pentagon. With a few hours of seminary work under my belt I took early retirement. Within the year I entered into the process of discernment for ordained sacramental ministry in the United Methodist Church.

Every day I prayed for peace. I prayed that the Balkans would not blow up and that war would be prevented. When it wasn’t I was deeply broken. I had a hand in the planning of the war over there and had to accept responsibility for what was happening.  Then I realized that God was saying to me “it is not sufficient to pray for peace unless you want to work for peace.”

Q:  How is this emphasis on planning for peace different from traditional peace activism?

JF: One of the roles of the traditional peace activist can be compared to that of the Biblical prophet. The primary role of the prophet is to awaken folks up to what’s wrong. Traditional peace activists do a great job with this first role. They also do a great job with what I call acts of compassion, that is, fixing up wounded people.  If this is all we do then we are missing the core of our task, working on the systemic level. 

Q: In this world of terrorism and asymmetrical warfare, what path to peace do you see when people are so afraid of an enemy they can’t even see or recognize?

JF:  I usually begin with a quote from Albert Einstein that goes: “The problems we face today cannot be solved by the same thinking we used when we created them.” We stand on the heads and shoulders of those who brought us to this place. The issue of terrorism is a fruit born out of their solutions to the issues facing them in their day. It seems that there is always a down side to every set of good intentions and the down side is that the visioning of past leaders resulted in making an abstraction of the many lives in the developing world.

Please visit John Fair’s blog at: http://www.planningforpeace.wordpress.com/ and his website http://www.p2planningforpeace.com/