From Stars and Stripes

SYRACUSE, N.Y. — Strapped into the cockpit of an F-16   jet fighter, Air Force Col. Scott Brenton has dropped bombs over   Bosnia, screamed over the desert in Iraq and strafed Taliban fighters in Afghanistan.   But on a recent morning, Brenton flew his combat mission from a leather   easy chair in a low-slung cinder block building on the edge of   Syracuse.

Brenton’s unit, the 174th Fighter Wing of the New   York Air National Guard, traded in its fleet of F-16s for unmanned   Reaper drones two years ago. Since then, the reserve pilots have been   flying nearly around-the-clock combat operations over Afghanistan from a   base about five miles from this city’s nearest Wal-Mart.

Brenton, the wing’s full-time operations group   commander, spent a recent morning here with his finger on the trigger of   two 500-pound bombs and a rack of Hellfire missiles nearly 7,000 miles   away in Afghanistan.

But the new mission at Hancock Field has riled a   small and vocal community of antiwar activists in upstate New York. Over   the last two years, protesters have barricaded the base’s security   checkpoint, staged gruesome human tableaus meant to depict Afghan   civilians killed by an airstrike, dressed in black-hooded Grim Reaper   costumes, and delivered fake war crime indictments to the pilots flying   the Reaper missions.

“Jobs have become a justification for anything and   everything,” said Rae Kramer, a 65-year-old former healthcare   administrator, standing at a busy intersection in Syracuse last week   with 10 other protesters. She was shaking a piece of white poster board   that read: “Drones murder civilians.”

“The whole notion that the battlefield is no longer limited to Afghanistan and Pakistan and that rockets are being launched from right here concerns me — and the possibility of retaliation,” she said.