Last night at supper, Andy S. had volunteered to fix supper tonight. He said he was going to fix a big pot of dill pickle soup. I thought he was joking, but it turned out he was serious. He put in a couple of quarts of dill pickles, some cabbage, and a few other vegetables. True to its name, it tasted a lot like dill pickles, but most of it was eaten.

Bill had to leave after supper for a meeting regarding a lawsuit that was being brought against a local company. His specialty was industrial diseases. During his practice when the family had lived in Augusta before, he had noticed a high incidence of bladder cancer among employees of a certain factory.

He had brought this to the attention of the factory and other "responsible" authorities and thought no more of the matter until the family moved back to Augusta. Then he found nothing had been done to correct the situation: the employees were getting bladder cancer. Others in he community set up a group to study the situation and then brought suit against the company, charging that it knowingly exposed its employees to conditions causing bladder cancer.

   March 5, Rest day in Augusta #2
This was a day with no walking but plenty of talking.

Early in the morning we divided ourselves into three groups. One group went to talk to some high school classes, then went to a noon talk program at the local public radio station. The second went to the medical school at Augusta College. The third went to Paine College, a predominantly Black college. All were to meet at Paine College for an afternoon program, which was first scheduled for twenty minutes. But there were so many phoning in that it was expanded to an hour.

The second group took the photo display to the student lounge of the med school and talked with interested students.

We who visited Paine College were less well received. We talked to a freshman English class. The teacher had not told the students we would be there. In fact the teacher did not come but sent another teacher to introduce us. I guess he was sent also to insure that the students didn't leave before the fifty-minute class was over.

We sat in chairs at the front of the room. Each of us talked for about five minutes, to leave time for discussion afterward. About a third of the students were in ROTC and were wearing their army fatigues. I tried to make eye contact with them, but their minds seemed somewhere else.

One young man though was interested in what we were saying. He was from Cameroon, in Africa. He asked pointed questions on how we thought the Third World countries viewed the East-West arms race. Morishita could answer him from experience, having spent the last two years walking in India and Africa. He had walked along the Sahara and, while in Nigeria, Cameroon's northern neighbor, had met with leaders of the disarmament movement there. The Nigerian ambassador to the UN was a leading Third World voice for disarmament. Morishita said that the East-West conflict seemed ludicrous to most Third World people, whose problem was staying alive from one day to the next.

Next we held a program in a large auditorium. We were told that several large classes which met at this time had been dismissed so the students could hear us. We waited over ten minutes to start, but only one person came in -- the student registrar. She was interested in what we were doing; we gave our regular program.

After being treated to lunch by a professor, we went to the Paine student union with our photos and pamphlets. I talked with one youth describing himself as Rastafarian. He quoted from one of Bob Marley's songs, "The only solution is total destruction."

I asked why he chose this line, rather than the idea Marley put forth in his very last song. "Have no fear for atomic energy, cause none of them can stop the time."

   March 6, Augusta to SRP
About 20 people, including Ngoebaemba Samuel (the Cameroonian student) joined us for the walk through Augusta and to the Savannah River Plant. SRP was DuPont's plant to manufacture the plutonium and tritium used to make nuclear bombs. Our prayer vigil at SRP was one of the most emotional and powerful experiences of the entire walk.

First we walked twice through downtown Augusta with our chant echoing loudly from the stores. Some folks would stand with their backs to us until we had passed them on the sidewalk, then turn and stare. Leaving downtown, we walked along "Atomic Boulevard."

To cover the thirty miles to SRP by 3 o'clock we had to be driven fifteen, getting on foot again some ten miles out. During lunch, two cars of families pulled off the road to join us.

As we turned left to walk to DOE, our emotional intensity was at one of its highest levels ever. At the turn, we were near one of the principal components of the nuclear weapons industry. If this was not the "heart of the monster," it was at least one of the monster's vital organs. It's hard to describe our feelings,but clearly all of us felt the increased intensity of energy, as we prayed for the end of plutonium-making, that substance well-named after the god of hell.

There were frequent yellow signs on trees, warning that this was restricted government property; others warned of proximity to radioactive material. Now the Buddhist chant took on spiritual meaning. This really was a prayer for world peace, a prayer against "great evil." Before, the chant had helped keep my mind focused on what I was doing. The great beauty through which we walked, the people we saw, all was threatened with nuclear annihilation. The chant had always helped me walk more meditatively; it had helped me walk 15 to 20 miles a day, even in bad weather. But now it took on a significance of a higher level and, as Morishita had said in Louisiana, that meaning "not translatable, but deep. I myself do not think that I know its full meaning." Walking behind the monks, for these three last miles into SRP, was truly a pilgrimage. This day was more a pilgrimage than the day we arrived at the UN on June 7.

In the middle of this bright sunny afternoon, we arrived at the DoE administration office. The 30-odd of us lined up along the shoulder of the road. More than a hundred DOE employees came out and lined up facing us. Many were security people; most were just curious. After about ten minutes of chanting "Na Mu Myo Ho Ren Ge Kyo", the monks read a special prayer from the Lotus Sutra.

During the whole vigil a female security guard took everyone's picture, from every possible angle. She used an old camera with a flash attachment. The only time I'd seen a similar camera was in old RKO black and white movies. She went methodically down the line, stood about three feet from each of us and got mug shots. She even took pictures of our support vehicles; license plate numbers were written down.

   March 7, Rest day in Augusta #3
When we woke up, we found that the weather had changed again. The temperature was close to freezing, and it was raining and windy.

Although today was a rest day, there were important things to do.

The walkers had been invited to attend two different church services; one was Quaker, the other Unitarian. Most of us, including all the monks, attended the Quaker service. John, Bill, Mary, and I attended the Unitarian service.

The Unitarian Church in Augusta has speakers from their congregation speak on various topics. Several months ago, the schedule had been set for a nuclear physicist who had worked at the Savannah River Project to take his turn. His topic was "How do you justify that?" meaning how does a radical humanist justify making the most deadly substance known? How does he justify making nuclear weapons? Two weeks ago his topic was announced in the church bulletin. The physicist was aware that the peace walk was to hold a prayer vigil at SRP today. In the bulletin he had mentioned the vigil and stated that "our objectives are the same."

Barbara Wise, one of our Augusta hosts, was a member of the church. She invited us to attend and respond if our objectives were indeed the same. So we did, eager to hear how a bomb-maker justified his work within a humanist ideology.

However, we did not obtain this justification. He had worked at SRP for almost 30 years, making plutonium. At the start of his talk, he stated that each year he gave a similar sermon. He began by trying to give a "balanced" report on the disarmament movement in Europe; he gave no mention of that movement in the United States. But it wasn't a fair review though he did read briefly from the "New Yorker" series, Jonathan Schell's "The Fate of the Earth". He said people were afraid of nuclear war but these fears were manipulated by the Soviet Union into anti-American demonstrations. He would not -- or could not -- conceive that people were opposed to nuclear weapons altogether and that their opposition had nothing to do with how societies choose to organize themselves. After fifteen minutes of reading from press reports, he again stated that he was about to "justify that."

We sat attentively, waiting to hear the explanation. But we could not believe what he heard. He used the "Lord of the Rings" as an analogy. Since others had the "magic ring" for evil, then we must possess the "magic ring" for good. He neglected to point out that in the book Frodo's mission was to destroy the ring. It could not possibly be used for good. And this was the extent of his justification. In the beginning he had told us that all his friends and associates "consider me a fool." The people at work considered him too liberal because he attended the Unitarian Church. The people in the church considered him foolish for working at SRP.

He wished that the Baptist Church next door, as well as the other churches, believed in peace as Unitarians did. Then perhaps we would have a chance for peace. But alas -- only the Unitarians believed in peace -- and certainly not the Russians. Therefore we had to have the magic ring.

He had spoken 30 minutes. We asked for ten to reply, but were denied. We could only speak from the floor and ask questions like other members of the congregation. So Bill brought out the connection between the nuclear energy and nuclear weapons industries. I didn't want to debate the "magic ring" analogy, but spoke instead of the overkill ability of US and USSR, both. I pointed out too that nuclear weapons were already killing more people by depriving Third World countries of needed resources to feed the starving. Now, Augusta was the first place where we had been sponsored by traditional peace churches like the Friends and the Unitarians. Most of the time we had been sponsored by Baptists, Catholics, Lutherans, Methodists, etc.; so I knew they too were working for peace nowadays and had strong feelings when the physicist said the Unitarian was the only church working for peace.

I admired the pacifists in Augusta. If anyone had a reason to give up the faith and become cynical, they had. They had the bomb plant on one side, the military base on the other. Most of their neighbors worked at one of the two or had relatives who did.

To criticize SRP was definitely to take on the power structure in Augusta. Yet this pocket of resistance continued through the years -- and maintained enthusiasm.

Morishita decided we should have a meeting tonight since we had three new walkers. We wanted this to be a relaxed meeting in which we would get to know the new walkers a little better, and they us.

Shima and Ishiyama surprised most of us by announcing they would probably leave this march in two weeks to join the march originating from Montreal April l. The reason for this was that there were six Japanese on this walk and only one or two on that one. So now it seemed the core group would change again, after changing already this weekend. Now there were nine men and four women; three days ago the break-down was eleven and one. It was good to have walkers with new enthusiasm. Plus, it was good to get walkers who approached the disarmament issue from a feminist perspective. We now gathered the letters from Rick's eighth-grade class in Washington, and took turns reading them out loud. After finishing, we sent the letters ahead to our New York office for later presentation to the United Nations. Some were translated into other languages and published in a Southeast Asia magazine. go to page 22