Close-up Of A U.s. 'peace Party

Who are the Greenpeacers? Robert F. Jones and photographer Heinz Kluetmeier covered a Greenpeace expedition last month. Here is Jones's report:

We met up with Greenpeace's Great Lakes raiding party at Midland, Mich. a few days after the sinking of Rainbow Warrior. Its members had already raised eyebrows and a little hell in Buffalo, where they had blocked waste pipes at the Occidental Chemical Co. Now they were zeroing in on Dow Chemical Co., whose 4,500-acre home plant dominates tidy Midland (pop. 73,578). The Greenpeacers had arrived in a 107-foot wooden-hulled ketch, the Fri (pronounced and meaning "free" in Danish), a former Baltic trading vessel that for the past 15 years has sailed the world in various causes. "This ship brought supplies to the Indians on Alcatraz in 1969 and '70," said David Moodie, 39, the Fri's owner and captain. "We sailed it to Mururoa in '73 in the flotilla with David McTaggart's Vega. Since then we've carried books to Namibia, peace messages to China and farm supplies to Nicaragua."

In its days as a Baltic trader, the Fri was manned by only three hands, but now it was carrying a crew of 13. Some were new hands, getting their first taste of life before the mast. A few were veterans of earlier Greenpeace adventures. All of them were uptight because of the Warrior's sinking. Moodie was posting watches all through the night. Despite the lookouts, someone did manage to spray-paint DOW KNOW HOW DOW on the Fri's black hull.

At Midland, the Greenpeace commandos ran up the Tittabawassee River (which carries the Dow plant's discharge into Saginaw Bay and thence to Lake Huron) in their inflatable rafts. The raiders then slogged for an hour through reeking shoals and plugged 15 diffuser pipes emanating from the main discharge duct. They used homemade wooden plugs 15 inches in diameter, painted red with white lettering—STOP. They bolted the plugs tight to the pipes' inner lips even though Dow had shut down the outflow before they arrived.

"We camped out for 4� days right beside the pipes," said Fri crewman Gary Crosslin, 29, of Freehold, N.J. "It was stinking, you got a headache just breathing that——." The discharge contains dioxins, phenols and benzene compounds. Dow maintains they are adequately treated to meet Michigan Department of Natural Resources regulations, and the DNR agrees. Greenpeace says any amount of toxins is too much. Crosslin isn't terribly interested in such arguments. In his non- Greenpeace existence, he heads a rock band out of Asbury Park, N.J., called Junior Smoots and the Disturbers. This was his sabbatical. Some sabbatical. "One of our divers had a leak in his dry suit, and his toenails turned purple for about three days," he said. A girl had her nail polish eaten off. Still, once we'd had the pipes plugged for a while, the river cleaned up nice."

But Dow decided enough was enough. Six security men swooped down on the pipes with bolt cutters and cleared them in a matter of minutes.

In the dead of night the 'Peacers sent two veteran raiders—Steve Loper, 30, and Ken Hollis, 26—into the Dow plant itself. They took 2� hours to crawl across a pipe bridge to the plant. They made their way inside, got to the bottom of a pair of 140-foot-tall production towers and began their climb. Their aim was to string a banner that read YOU DON'T KNOW WHAT YOU'VE GOT TILL IT'S GONE between the two towers. As dawn broke, Dow security men spotted them, and suddenly it was as if Libyan terrorists had invaded Michigan.

The chase was on. Hollis was caught at 6 a.m. and handcuffed to a railing. Loper managed to stay out of reach. This helped to guarantee just what Greenpeace wanted most: time for the press and television news crews to arrive at the scene. Loper finally came down on his own after nearly 10 hours aloft. He and Hollis were charged with trespass.

Meanwhile, back at the Tittabawassee, three other 'Peacers were busted for attempting to replug Dow's pipes. One was Steve McAllister, 36, Greenpeace USA's national campaign director. A lean, mustachioed veteran of combat in Vietnam and a former home construction worker in Vermont, he joined Greenpeace five years ago as a crewman on Rainbow Warrior. The other arrestees were Fri crew members Melissa Ortquist, 27, and Soren Pedersen, 22. The five were held on $2,000 bond each. The three repluggers pleaded not guilty and were ordered to trial in October. Loper and Hollis pleaded nolo contendere and were allowed to work off their sentences by cleaning up junk in a nearby state forest. So ended the great Dow confrontation—just as Greenpeace had hoped, with plenty of headlines.

That evening the raiders celebrated with a beer blast at the white clapboard farmhouse they had rented as their headquarters. It could have been a hippie commune of the '60s. There were rusted cars in the barnyard, and babies and kittens on the front porch. McAllister said, "This looks pretty casual and disorganized. But when we move on a target, I insist on military discipline. People move when and where they're told. Everyone knows his or her job by heart. Our enemies—the big companies, governments, the military—they're tough. We're not fighting the working stiffs. Sometimes, in my more cynical moments, I think Greenpeace ought to sell indulgences like the Catholic Church did in the days before Luther. Say, a $100 contribution to save the whales earns you three guilt-free days. For a thousand, a whole month without dreams of bashed baby seals. To me, though, the work is worth it by itself, even with the risk of something like the Rainbow Warrior happening. Either you do something with your life, or when you die finally, you regret every minute of it."