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violence against people, no. I wondered:
When is an act of sabotage also an act of love?
    My brother Rick’s activist odyssey included nonstop organizing, demonstrations, arrests, and the disruption of his induction physical. When they came for him to press him into the military, he ran to Canada, and this time I had the difficult task of explaining it all to our parents. There, he set up a station on the modern underground railroad, a halfway house for deserters escaping the war. After a couple of years, he convinced himself that his efforts were inadequate, and he returned to the United States and joined the army—now as an organizer for the banned and harassed American Servicemen’s Union. When he was busted, he deserted, and we spent a decade together on the run.
    A front page headline in the
New York Times
on March 7, 1970, declared: “Townhouse Razed by Blast and Fire; Man’s Body Found.” The story described an elegant four-story brick building in Greenwich Village destroyed by three large explosions and a raging fire “probably caused by leaking gas.”
    The body was later identified as belonging to twenty-three-year-old Ted Gold, a leader of the 1968 student strike at Columbia University, a teacher, and a member of what the
Times
would call a “militant faction of Students for a Democratic Society.” Over the next few days two more bodies were discovered: both Diana Oughton and Terry Robbins had been student leaders, civil rights and antiwar activists. By March 15 the
Times
reported that police had found “57 sticks of dynamite, four homemade pipe bombs and about 30 blasting caps in the rubble” and referred to the townhouse for the first time as a “bomb factory.” These three were our comrades, and Diana, my partner, lover, companion, and much more—all suddenly gone. Their deaths became our irreplaceable loss and our shared sorrow—my hands never entirely cleansed, the grieving never done. And this was where and when the Weather Underground was born.
    But that awful event also announced the existence of something weirdly original and brand new: a group of young, largely white, homegrown, “mother-country” Americans taking up arms in opposition to the war. Bernardine and I and a wider circle of partisans and fellow travelers were indicted by the Justice Department on two single-count conspiracies—we had crossed state lines, they charged, in order to foment civil disturbances and destroy government property. Bernardine was prominently placed on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted list, an inventory of J. Edgar Hoover’s evolving obsessions that was quickly changing right then from a rogues’ gallery of plug-uglies and terrifying gangsters to a catalog of appealing revolutionaries: Angela Davis, H. Rap Brown, and Bernardine. We were frightened, confused, and uncertain, to be sure, making it up as we went along, but we were also resolute and had no intention of reporting in federal or state court—too many other radicals, we thought at the time, got caught in a government trap that deflected their best efforts and reduced their political work to barricaded defense committees and occasional fund-raisers for legal fees. And so we took off and we lived on for more than a decade—on borrowed time, surely, and on the run from the law.
    It was a revelation to me that pain can fade and that living goes on, moving ever more rapidly away from the dead. Survival was mystifying, but I had survived, and I thought if I was to live at all, it would from now on be for those who did not.
    A few days after the townhouse explosion, Ralph Featherstone and William “Che” Payne, two “black militants” associated with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, according to
Time
magazine, “were killed when their car was blasted to bits” by a bomb police said was being transported to Washington, DC, to protest the prosecution of SNCC leader H. Rap Brown. Violent resistance to violence was as “American as cherry