SAN FRANCISCO, MARCH 20 – The Tijuana border was, as usual, teeming with sentient humanity the Friday afternoon I crossed south to north, disguised as a tipico day-tripping turista and armed only with a slim jim of Gusano Rojo mezcal and a frilly piñata to establish my identity as a U.S. citizen.

The post-Sept. 11 Tijuana border station is a bit more orderly and vigilant, but it remains the world's slipperiest crossing, with millions pinballing back and forth between first and third worlds each year at a rate of 35,000 a day (more on Fridays).

The lines trying to get into upper California snaked out the back door, inching inevitably toward the dread Migra checkpoint. There are more X-ray machines now, and people murmur fretfully to each other in Spanish as they wait on the cola – the crossing over always seemed like much more of a festive occasion before homeland security became the motif. A small knot fisted up inside my gut as I approached the U.S. Border Patrol window.

"U.S. citizen," I boasted, just as in the old days, without producing a shred of evidence to back up my claim.

"I believe you," the agent said, yawning, and waved me through into Bushwalandia.

My appearance on the Mexico-U.S. border was a necessary evasion of possible prosecution under the USA PATRIOT Act. I had just returned from three weeks as a human shield in Baghdad, a war crime according to Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, a war criminal himself. My return route flew me through Amman, Istanbul, London, and Mexico City, a circuitous sojourn that had me in terminal jet lag and running on empty.

At home in the old quarter of Mexico City, I had found a few minutes for café con leche around the counter at the La Blanca with the compañeros, all of whom had been tracking our star-crossed adventures as shields in Iraq through my dispatches to the left daily la Jornada. Lalo Miranda, my compadre and barber, trimmed my disheveled beard. He had it all figured. Saddam, who had just booted us out of Iraq, was like the PRI, the party the United States kept in power for seven decades in Mexico to safeguard Washington's longtime interests there.

The goal line for my cross-continental travels was a Saturday-afternoon antiwar rally on March 15 in the San Francisco Civic Center. Ever since five organizers of the Human Shield Action, including this poor sinner, were ushered out of Iraq on March 7, I had set my eye on the prize of hooking up the sisters and brothers in Baghdad by the Bay (as moldy old Herb Caen used to slug it) with the Iraqi people and international volunteers we had left behind. Now I was speaking to a crowd that some calculate as 50,000 strong, and the words roared out of my throat as if my body was just a messenger.

"I bring you greetings and solidarity from the workers and 30 human shields on site at the Daura Oil Refinery in west Baghdad! Greetings and solidarity from the dozen shields on site at the Tajie Food Storage and 20 more at the Baghdad South Power Plant! Greetings from another score at Aldurah Power and 10 more down the road at the Water Treatment Plant, not to mention the 16 on the April 7th Water Treatment Facilities, all U.N.-certified civilian sites bombed by the first Bush! Over a hundred shields in Baghdad await his son's bombs! The blood will be on his hands!"

The dark facade of the San Francisco Federal Building a block away loomed over the jam-packed Civic Center like a malignant monolith. Thirty-nine years ago I was dragged off those premises in chains and driven south to serve a two-year sentence for refusing to report for induction in the U.S. Army, the first "Hell no, we won't go" to the coming genocide in Vietnam from the Bay Area to be sent to jail. I arrived at Terminal Island Federal Penitentiary in San Pedro on Aug. 3, 1964.

The next day, President Lyndon Johnson would lie to the American people, saying that two North Vietnamese patrol boats had attacked a U.S. battleship in the Gulf of Tonkin, a pretext for bombing the mainland and for ramming the Gulf of Tonkin resolution up Congress's butt-hole. The resolution would invest Johnson and his successor, Richard Nixon, with the God-given right to incinerate three million Vietnamese. In the same spirit of pathological spinelessness, Congress long ago bestowed on President George W. Bush the instruments of the Iraqi people's genocide.

When I went to jail that long-ago summer, there was no one in the streets to say no to war. This time around, millions marched even before the bombs had begun to drop.

On the march through the Fillmore this past luminous Saturday. I stood at the foot of Oak Street hill, a route the old Mobes and Moratoriums who once sought to staunch the slaughter in Nam would take each spring and fall, and watched our numbers swell above, visceral evidence of how strong we are becoming.

All over the planet, that strength has been gathering for months. What we measure here as the most significant antiwar thrust since the 1960s is dwarfed by the exponential growth of the European numbers, more than three million on the streets of Spain alone on Feb. 15. Two percent of the Spanish people support the Yanqui war, yet that nation's Franco-friendly, peewee poodle prime minister, Jose Maria Aznar, has reveled in becoming Bush's most ardent acolyte of Iraqi annihilation.

Exhibiting astonishing arrogance and turning a deaf ear to the stentorian clamor of the world's people, Bush, Aznar, and Tony Blair gathered on an atoll in the eastern Atlantic last Sunday to escape the peace mobs in the streets and formulate their aggression.

Bush's ultimatum was shockingly cowboy. He speaks of his "hold card, an old Texas expression" as if he's playing five-card stud in the town saloon, and he orders Saddam Hussein and his sons to be out of Dodge before sundown as if the contemplated extermination of the Iraqi people were a fucking remake of High Noon. Why the president would consider cowboy shtick as a communication strategy to damage-control the shitstorm of world hatred that is about to break over the U.S. ship of state is a poignant indication of the impossible corner into which he and his henchmen have painted this country.

I audited the Bush ultimatum during a vigil at the Israeli consulate to commemorate the life of Rachel Corrie, the 23-year-old Evergreen college activist killed by Israeli army bulldozers while trying to stop a home demolition in Rafah camp, Gaza. The bulldozer, which rolled over Rachel twice, was paid for by U.S. tax dollars.

While the fraudulently elected U.S. president bushwhacked the world with his gunslinger palaver, a few hundred disheartened souls sought unsuccessfully to keep their candles flickering in the gathering dusk.

Corrie's face hung from the fence at the 24th Street BART station for two days after that, whipped by the sharp spring wind and accompanied by two bunches of yellowing flowers. Rachel was the best of them, the young and the old and the not-so-old who have come to put their bodies in the line of fire – "peace activists" they are called in Palestine, "human shields" in Baghdad.

Here are some of their names. Their fates are not yet clear:

Faith Fippinger heard about the human shields in a copy shop in north India while on a spiritual trek that had taken her to Tibet. In Baghdad she smuggled medical supplies to Christian hospitals during the day. At night she sleeps under Bush's bombs at the Daura refinery.

Eric Levy, 75, and Karl Dallas, a 72-year-old folksinger, are installed under the stacks at Daura and Aldurah Power, respectively. Not surprisingly, it is the grandfathers who understand most keenly what mortality is all about.

Then there's Angel O., a slim, tough Norwegian and failed boxer who grew up in power plants all over Scandinavia and has lived for weeks at the Baghdad South electricity distribution unit. Baghdad South was bombed in '91 with nine reported casualties. Now Angel's life hangs by a thread as Bush, obsessed with petroleum products and winning his father's approbation, lobs 3,000 missiles into the heart of Baghdad.

The movement will change radically in the dark days up ahead. Some will fall away, demoralized because we have not stopped Bush from launching his demonic pyrotechnics, but the commitment of others will deepen and take flight. Now we must fill the streets of the planet and bring down presidents who do not heed the voices of the people. We must take creative, emphatic mass action so costly to those who wage war that they will calculate an early truce.

The sandstorms are swirling out in the blighted desert, and the heat will fry the brains of the invaders, the oil fires will blaze, and the toxins will rise, and resistance will spread from block to block in the cities. The body bags will soon be returning home. In between, you will not hear a lot about the destruction your tax dollars have brought the Iraqi people. The news will be all "our boys," an invading army with 500 reporters "embedded" among the troops to spread the Big Lie and wave a flag that will forever be stained with the blood of the innocents. With Baghdad bereft of reporters on the ground, word of the inevitable and heroic resistance of the Iraqi people will never be written – at least by the living. I may never know what has happened to my compañeros at the refinery.

We cannot allow ourselves to be overwhelmed and demoralized by Bushwa's bombs away. We must keep lighting those candles up on Dolores Park hill no matter how strong the wind whistles (although next time a little less "America, the Beautiful" would be more appropriate). We have to keep building the marches and lying down in the streets with the likes of Father Looie, the Dominican brother who kept jumping up and down at the emergency meeting at St. Boniface the other night to declare, "I'm on fire! I'm on fire!"

On March 20th, the morning after the Bush death bombs began to rain down on Baghdad, thousands of demonstrators hit the streets of San Francisco, determined to shut this gleaming city down. All day we threw our bodies into downtown intersections and in front of freeway off-ramps, snarling traffic and impeding commerce. Hundreds of us descended on the Bechtel Corp., which has billion-buck contracts to reconstruct Iraq once Bush's bombers have deconstructed it. Father Looie was one of those arrested at the front door as he performed a Latin mass. My instant affinity group took the back doors, our arms locked to stop Bechtel from doing business as usual. By 10 a.m. management, frustrated by the blockade, had called the million-dollar-a-minute workday off.

I tell Father Looie that I am on fire too. I burn with shame at what the country on my passport has just done. I am on fire with rage and mourning for my comrades under Bush's bombs in Baghdad. And with pride, too, at the good work we have done. So far.