The monks and Shima believed that the simple act of faith involved in walking and praying was sufficient. Carole and Mercury were of the Rainbow Tribe philosophy: they believed that the key to peace was changing the heart of the individual. Neils and Carster believed that peace came about as a result of working for social justice in the political sphere. This was Julia's first real political activity. She was first drawn to the peace march through the activity of her seventeen-year-old daughter. At this point, my views were closer to those of Neils and Carster. Most of us had our own personal reasons for working for peace. I had been awakened to the imminent threat of nuclear war just one year earlier. The government had conducted a series of workshops across the country, mainly to validate their civil defense manual. It was only accidental that I was asked to attend, as they needed one more person to reach the minimum number to run the class, which was held in the building where I worked.

At this workshop we learned how to become fallout shelter managers and how to interpret their shelter manual. My town was to be a host community. The evacuation procedure for the surrounding counties was also detailed. If the civil defense plan went exactly as planned in every city, the government employee told us that we would still have 80-l20 million civilians killed the first day of a US-SU nuclear war. For eight hours we listened to the effects of nuclear weapons, to evacuation plans, to what life would be like within the shelter, and then to what life would probably be like after the war. At the conclusion, all of the forty middle-class professionals at the workshop were stunned. The conductor thought that people did not understand the evacuation procedure. So he said, "Cheer up! The chances are we won't have this war until l985, so you have five years to develop the plan." An employee of the US government had just told us that perhaps we had five years before a nuclear war would occur. I refused to accept this and decided to devote myself fulltime to working for nuclear disarmament. The monks had decided to devote their entire lives to this objective. The major distinction between Nipponzan Myohoji and other sects of Nichiren Buddhists is that they work exclusively for peace.

Morishita, thirty-seven years old, had taken part in his first peace walk in l96l. He became a monk at the unusually young age of ten. This was possible because he was born in a temple. At his birth, his mother was chanting, "Na Mu Myo Ho Ren Ge Kyo." Nagase, thirty, had been a monk for four years. At one time, he had been a pro baseball player in Japan. Rumor had it that he was once a long-haired hippie.

Sakamaki, twenty, had been a monk for only a few years. He was the second youngest monk now in the order. Over the previous two years, the three had walked in different parts of the world in the World Peace March. Morishita had walked through India and Africa. Nagase had walked in eastern Europe and also in the Stockholm-to-Paris peace walk last summer. Sakamaki spent the last two years walking through Ireland and the Great Britain. The United States was the final stage of the World Peace March, a march that had crossed every inhabited continent. I felt a part of this chain of millions of people, each of us chanting, "Na Mu Myo Ho Ren Ge Kyo." This Buddhist prayer for peace was our shared language.

This morning we learned that the woman who had initially agreed to house us tonight in Evergreen had changed her mind. Tremendous pressures had been put on her by members of her church to withdraw her support for "the communists".. We did not know whether we had a place to spend the night. Finally a local minister, Joel Jones, agreed to host us out of Christian charity. He hated to see his "fellow ministers" sleeping along the side of the road in Evergreen.

About five miles from town, a friendly black Alabama state trooper arrived to serve as our escort. He told us not to hesitate to call upon the Alabama Highway Patrol for assistance if we ran into any trouble.

Diane and Jeannette passed us on to our new coordinator, Sister Ellen, who was at Joel's house to greet us. Joel soon involved Niels, Carster, and me in a debate about which side is the obstructor to peace: US or USSR. Joel thought that it was the USSR, while we thought that both governments shared blame, but the US was the more blameworthy.

We watched CBS evening news again, which led off by reporting on the opening of arms talks in Geneva, with Buddhist monks praying outside the meeting.

Joel and I talked for almost six hours, covering many topics. After midnight, Joel's wife interrupted us, saying she had asked Julia to leave Neils and Carster's room, but Julia had refused. I went to talk with Julia, but Joel beat me there and a big scene ensued. Joel asked for an apology from Julia; she refused; he ordered her out of the house. (She slept in the van outside.) Joel woke Ellen up talking excitedly about "free sex" and "desecration of his home."

Julia was not allowed to eat breakfast with us the next morning. Though the rest of us felt that Julia was in the right, we believed that the right to assert one's individuality in one's hosts' house should not override our objective of winning community support for disarmament; she should have apologized. We had done our cause damage in Evergreen.

    January 27, Evergreen to Georgiana
It was cold, but not so windy as yesterday. There were almost no houses or cars. Carster timed 25 minutes between cars at one point.

There was a positive aspect in the day's walk. In the afternoon, a young man stopped to talk with us. He had driven past three or four times before stopping. He said he had been UA (Unauthorized Absence) from the Navy for more than thirty days. He had been a Navy medic in the Philippines and left because of training in what he suspected to be chemical-biological weapons. The last few days, Carole had some problems with her knee. He gave her some medical advice. He wanted to join us but was reluctant because he knew that the FBI would watch us closely. This would increase his chances of the brig for UA.

After nineteen miles, we were driven to Greenville where we stayed with James Cook, an AME Zion minister and president of the local community college. go to page 13