Now, we wonder how our vineyard doors were locked.

How did the light fade from the roofs and trees?

Who dares tell why half are found beneath the soil,

the other half locked in iron...

On the threshing floors where one night the brave ones danced

the olive pits remain

and the crusted blood of the moon

and the epic fifteen syllables of their guns.

The Cypress remains. And the laurel. --from Romiossini   by Yiannis Ritsos

IT IS A country of few people, sprung from a harsh red earth that has nurtured pure beauty in twisted forms for eons. The Greek land is adamantine and you might expect it to be forbidding. But you are startled as you walk over stone and dry earth carpeted with pungent herb, faded green leaves and bleached purple flowers, because the land exhales the tolerance and beauty of what endures. Little rain falls, the earth is riddled with rocks that men have been heaving into meandering low walls for generations; the olive trees are strong and timeless but can't escape the battering winds and sigh and hunch towards the ground. Still there are cypress that tower slender in clans of two or three, and there is sweet honey in the hives that range the mountains. Greek people honor the simplicity of their land--they build white houses with pure geometric lines and they accept the bread and wine and olives it offers with pleasure, and respect.

The country is old and proud. You finds dignity compressed in the ancient marble of a limbless torso; you gaze at the opaque eyes of a statue and know its vision penetrates eternity, and remember tales of heroes. There is suffering etched deep in the skin of an old woman's face. Even a child's eyes seem to recall the glory and struggle of centuries past. You ache to think that people so fiercely proud and persistent are being brutally trampled underfoot. For now the heels of marching boots crush a people against the hard earth of their fathers.

* * *

NEITHER TIME NOR PLACE binds the struggle that wracks Greece, although it might seem remote and local to Americans. The conflict is actually of a very general nature: It is an instance of opposition between a will for freedom and a force of mindless suppression. On April 21, 1967, Greece was seized by a military junta. In the first hours of the morning, Brigadier General Stylianos Pattakos maneuvered tanks--Sherman and Patton M-47's, supplied to NATO countries by the United States--into the streets of Athens. The same night, Colonel John Ladas was commanding an operation called "Arrests of Dangerous Elements;" over 10,000 Athenians were awakened and transported by trucks to "reception centers" where the uncharged captives were beaten, and several killed.

The coup installed Colonel George Papadopoulos as premier of Greece only a month before the national elections scheduled for May 28. His reason for stymieing the elections echoed a familiar sort of paranoia--he was simply trying to remove the "communist threat." Oddly enough, contemporary polls predicted that the political Left would control only 10 per cent of the vote; it was the Center Union party, led by liberal former Prime Minister George Papandreou, which seemed on the verge of an easy victory. Three years later, Papadopoulos betrayed his own rationale in an interview with a British journalist, who reported that the premier "made the interesting admission that in the years before his seizure of power, democracy in Greece had not been in danger of being overthrown through the direct activities of Communism."

In April of 1967 the American State Department was one of the few organs willing to lend credence to Papadopoulos's fears, While most countries reacted to the news of impending communist revolution disdainfully, Turkey and Portugal were the only NATO nations that viewed matters from the same perspective as the U.S. The United States claimed to be interested in the security of NATO. Yet NATO is ostensibly designed to safeguard freedom and democracy, concepts that didn't jibe with the interests of a totalitarian regime. The coup violated both NATO's humanitarian principles and its strategic military commitments. The defense of its Mediterranean wing certainly wasn't bolstered in 1967, when one fourth of the Greek armed forces was purged by the Colonels.