Risking Security

During a lunch break while Jim Wallis was giving a seminar in Lincoln, Nebraska, in March 1981, a man and a woman approached him and asked if they could join him for lunch. After they were seated, the man said, "I want to thank you for being our friend all these years."

Jim was surprised, since he had never met the couple before. "What do you mean?" he asked.

"For years all we had was your magazine [Sojourners] to interact with. It was almost like someone to talk to. We couldn't talk to other people because of my security clearance," the man replied.

"What was your job?"

"I was a SAC [Strategic Air Command] commander in Omaha. But now I've left that job, and I'm working in the peace movement," he said, smiling broadly.

Since that day, Jim Wallis and Sojourners Community have met with Ron and Jenna Coleman several times. When the editorial staff decided to initiate the "Changing Lives" feature, it seemed logical to begin with their story.
—The Editors

In 1962, a few months before his 21st birthday, Ron Coleman enlisted in the U.S. Air Force. He said he saw the military as "a nice, easy escape."

Coleman's motive was simple. "I was going to school and living at home. My parents controlled the purse strings. I wanted to get out on my own and also wanted to travel."

Fifteen years later, he was a captain at the Air Force's Strategic Air Command (SAC) headquarters near Omaha, Nebraska, and an experienced Titan missile crew commander. The Titan series of missiles are offensive nuclear weapons. They are part of SIOP, the Pentagon's "single integrated operational plan," begun in 1960 for retaliation in case of a nuclear attack.

His job made him one of a handful of people involved in plotting the hows and wheres of U.S. nuclear strategy. He was four years and seven months away from finishing the 20 years of military service that would net him an estimated quarter of a million dollars in retirement benefits. But he was about to step out the door.

Coleman did not come from a military family, but when he first enlisted, his brother was already in the Air Force. He recommended that Coleman apply for training in electronic communications and cryptography. But "one of the main things I had in mind at the time I went in was a program called the Airman Education and Commissioning Program," he explains.

Through the program, Coleman completed a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering at the University of Wisconsin and became a commissioned officer. After graduation he continued his studies, receiving a master's degree from the Air Force Institute of Technology at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base near Dayton, Ohio. The education was free, but it came with service obligations that meant Coleman would have to spend more than 15 total years in the Air Force.

"Basically it all boiled down to economic security," Coleman said. "The longer we stayed, the closer retirement got. We had a lot of plans that we'd made over the years about what we were going to do after I retired. Of course, none of those dreams are viable any longer."

During the time they spent at Wright-Patterson, Ron and his wife, Jenna, joined a small group formed by young couples in an American Baptist church in Dayton. Several members of the Bible study group had a profound influence on the Colemans. The couples who led the group "were really the first people I knew up close who were really willing to take a lot of risks in order to live out their faith," Coleman explains. Two of the couples had sold their homes and moved to poor neighborhoods seeking a simpler lifestyle.

One group member influenced him even more, says Coleman. "He worked as a civilian employee at Wright-Patterson and ended up resigning his job during the Vietnam War," because of his Christian commitment. Later the same friend sent him a book called The New Testament Basis for Pacifism. "Then when I was at SAC headquarters, he sent me a gift subscription to The Other Side," a Christian magazine that emphasizes peace and justice "rooted in discipleship." "That started to be our downfall," Coleman chuckles.

The friend also suggested that Coleman read Dietrich Bonhoeffer's book The Cost of Discipleship, in which Bonhoeffer elaborates on the theme of "costly grace." "I started reading it and got about halfway through it and got so disturbed that I ended up not finishing it," he recalls. "At that point I was not willing to pay that kind of cost," of taking the risk of following Christ more fully. "And looking around I didn't see any examples in church or know anybody else who was, either."

After his time at Wright-Patterson, Coleman was transferred to Davis-Monthan Air Force Base near Tucson, Arizona. He became a missile launch officer, in command of the crew in one of the 390th Strategic Missile Wing's 18 Titan II missile silos. Ron Coleman was one of two people assigned to turn the key that would send the missile on its fiery journey if the order were handed down to launch U.S. intercontinental nuclear missiles.

Officers in missile silos carry a pistol in a hip holster. They are under orders to shoot if another officer fails to obey the command to turn the key. Nevertheless, in an interview with Samuel Day, a contributing editor to The Progressive and former editor of The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Coleman later admitted that he felt "virtually certain" he would refuse to turn the key if the missile were targeted on a large city. Otherwise, he was "pretty sure" he would do it. He had the key, but he also had his faith and the doubts it raised about his work in the silo. Coleman kept those feelings to himself. "If there had been any doubt whether you'd turn a key, that would be sufficient for you to lose that job on the spot," he told Day.

He kept his missile job until late 1973, when he was transferred to SAC headquarters at Offut Air Force Base, near Omaha. Once there he became engrossed in problem-solving. He helped determine missile trajectories, firing schedules, bomber routes, and the details of SAC's weapons plan for the next 10 years. Coleman buried himself in systems analysis with all the calculations and pages of equations it required. Yet he could not escape the tension mounting between his faith and his work.

Jenna was then studying to be a social worker. "She was becoming radicalized," Coleman says. "If anything, during that time period, I had started to become a little more conservative. She led there for a while," in reading The Other Side and Sojourners and actively considering issues of justice and peace. They both began reading books on peace and Christian faith they ordered from the pages of the magazines.

Ron's reading included books on hunger. One work that had a "major impact" on him was written by Millard Fuller, a successful Georgia businessperson who changed his life "from a business, success, get-richer orientation to one of seeking to serve in Christ's name." Fuller gave up his business to found Habitat for Humanity, a missionary organization that builds low-cost housing for poor people in the Third World and the United States. Coleman says Fuller's influence was important "primarily because of his giving up his own financial security to do that."

Coleman became involved with Bread for the World, a Christian lobbying organization that focuses on hunger-related public policies. Eventually he became Nebraska state coordinator for the group.

Jenna and Ron Coleman continued to wrestle with the implications of their deepening commitment: "Once we reached a point that it started to be a concern, [leaving the Air Force] pretty much became inevitable." By the spring of 1977, they had decided to do just that.

Their main concern was money. They had three children, who were 7, 9, and 11 years old at the time. Ron's job not only meant a good salary, but also included medical care, commissary privileges, and other valuable benefits. They would have to give up all of these.

In the fall of 1977, Ron's formal obligation to the military ended. As he prepared to end his Air Force career, he explained his decision to his colleagues. "I felt that what I was doing was no longer compatible with my faith." His decision was simply explained, but living it out was a risk of faith. Coleman's entire adult life had been spent in the military. Suddenly, he was forced to start anew.

He took a job teaching mathematics at the University of Nebraska in Omaha. His income was sliced in half. Jenna, with her social work degree, brought in an additional income.

Six months after Ron Coleman left the Air Force, the family moved to a poor area in central Omaha. "We explained everything" to the children, he recalls, but "they ended up having a lot bigger adjustment to make." The youngsters encountered problems "being fairly innocent kids in a neighborhood where most of the kids were pretty street wise." Eventually the Colemans left that neighborhood for the sake of the children.

They continued to be deeply involved in Omaha's small justice and peace community, however. He remembers that "the same few faces" turned up in such groups as Pax Christi, Bread for the World, Nebraskans Against the Death Penalty, the food co-op, the peace association. Parents and children attended marches, rallies, and vigils, finding the support they needed for their lifestyle choices within the small circle of activists in the city.

Ron's search for a better job in his field led away from Omaha, however, to Portland, Oregon. The hunt for employment was difficult, he says, because "the things that interest me from a technical point of view are primarily military contractors. That was not an option." He managed to find his current position, as a software engineer, for a small company that largely serves private companies. Coleman appreciates the company's policy on military contracts. "If you don't want to work on these things, you don't have to. I've made it clear that I'm not interested."

Jenna works with the Children's Protective Services. The Colemans attend church, but they have not found the kind of supportive community they had in Omaha. Ron battles a sense of dissatisfaction with his current situation.

"Probably I ought to be serving somewhere, maybe in a soup kitchen—any number of things like that. I have a sense that the present situation is temporary," he says of his lingering dissatisfaction. "I'm sort of at a spiritual low point. All the convictions are still there, but there's no fire in the belly."

Does this mean he regrets the choice he made? "I really have no regrets at all," he declares without hesitation. "I not only have no regrets, I'm still very happy I did it. I would not change anything."

Liane Rozzell was an editorial assistant of Sojourners magazine when this article appeared.