I know there is a lot of reasons for my trips to Japan.   Someday I want to write about a conclusion or something that summarizes the experiences there.   But I am still going and it is still a work in progress.  Tomorrow I will be returning to Japan for two Weeks to attend the Memorial of the peace activist, citizen, Allen Nelson.   Mr. Nelson was a Vietnam veteran that went to Japan numerous times to speak about the importance of Article Nine.  We have a lot in common.

This is the outline to my new speech while in Japan

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My name is Ash Woolson, I am a husband and father, also a veteran of the Iraq War. I served 6 years in the military. I have come to Japan several times in the last couple years and everytime I come the reason is a little different but always the same. I come here to promote peace, Japan is one of the few countries in the world that has a constitution that emphasizes the need to use diplomacy over war, Article nine accomplishes this by making peace a constitutional right. I have read the preamble and article nine many times, the the message is now permanently in my heart and my thoughts. I understand and hope that most people here know intimately the implications of article nine and it’s importance as one of many tools to create sustainable global peace.

My first trip to Japan was with the Article Nine Peacewalk, we walked from Hiroshima to Makahari, a total of 1,600 km.. The peacewalk finished with the Article Nine International Peace conference. The purpose of the peacewalk, was to open dialogue about article nine and peace with the Japanese people, and then at the Article Nine peace conference we opened it to the world. We want to intigrate a similar statement like Article Nine in every countries constitution.

My partner (Seres) and I have been together for eight years, three years before I went to Iraq. She knew me well before I had left for the war, and had to re-meet me when I came back. It was a year that had a great impact on what is becoming the rest of my life. Some people believe that each person has two lifes, the life before their children and the life after their children. I think that the same goes to people that are involved in war, civilian or military. Luckily for me, Seres has been understanding, and adaptable to changes.

When I joined the military, I joined a state military that trains part-time(30 days a year) called the National Guard. The National Guard has the mission to be the last line of defense if the United States gets invaded, it is not usually deployed to over-seas combat. I knew that going to war was a possibility but since I joined in 1999 when the United States wasn’t openly engaging in large military operations. I didn’t think that it was likely that I would go to a war.

I deployed to Nicaragua in 2001, this was my first experience deployed to a foriegn country. Nicaragua was a humanitarian mission that lasted only a couple months, we built medical clinics, and we never carried guns. I have no regrets about my time in Nicaragua, except if you consider the back story to why the U.S. military is in Nicaragua.

I deployed to Iraq in 2003, a month after the U.S. invasion. It was a shock to take my first step off the plane when I landed in Kuwait, it was three in the morning and almost 30 degrees celsius, until that point I remember thinking that we would not actually go to Iraq where there was a war, but maybe my part-time national guard unit would go to Germany instead. Before I went to Iraq, I still believed that it was possible to have a good war, although I never believed the U.S. should have invaded Afghanistan or Iraq. I wasn’t against the United Nations getting involved. I believed that some wars were justifiable; children in America are taught that America fights only moral wars. The school system in the United States shows the U.S. military has a flawless record, history classes emphasize the Revolutionary War, Civil War, WW1 and WW2 as examples of this. Other wars like Vietnam, Korea, and the countless interventions and secret operations that the Pentagon is involved with aren’t covered in our education. Classes don’t talk about the real horrors of firebombing civilian populations like America did in Dresden and Tokyo, among many other Japanese and German cities. Later America used Atomic weapons, again on civilian populations. War cannnot be justified.

What I saw in Iraq changed me: war changes everybody. The situation I was in while in Iraq didn’t allow me to question what I was doing at that time. I was too afraid of dying to think if what I was doing was good for the people of Iraq, or for anyone. I became part of the war machine, I became another gear turning on time. It has taken me the last five years to start to realize what some of the things I did while I was in Iraq were for that one long year. I was there for only a year, but the Iraqi people have been living this hell since 2003, everyday.

War is de-human-izing, every war that I hear about has a word that the soldiers call the enemy. In WW2 American soldiers called Germans, Kieks, and Japanese called Americans Kitchukubayay, and Amercans called Japanese Japs. Now in Iraq and Afghanistan the locals are called Haji. This makes it easier to kill the enemy, there is less guilt when the person you kill is not a person. One of my jobs in Iraq was to guard supply trucks driving from Kuwait up to Baghdad………….

I joined the peacewalk without realizing my dream of peace, at the time of the peacewalk I only understood that the Iraq war was terribly wrong. I had gone to the war thinking that war could be necessary sometimes, but not as often as it is used. We walked for 72 days, I remember leaving Hiroshima and it was snowing, sometimes the weather was better than other times. Everyday after we walked we would have a meeting with the local towns people, and talk about article nine. People saw us everyday, and we handed them fliers, we were almost always in high spirits, and people could see this. I think that anger cannot make governments stop going to war. Everyday that we would walk with smiles and happiness, people would see our joy and want to partake. Many walkers originally wanted to walk only one or two days, but stayed for weeks, or until the end.

The origins of article nine are not important as far as I see, some people disagree with me on this. I believe that it is only how you look at the content of article nine and its affect on the world that is important. Article nine was born out of some of the worst civilian casaulties that war has ever created. I see article nine as the protector of the people. What is important is that article nine is kept, and we introduce it’s message to every country, and encourage the people to protect themselves by outlawing the use of military as a means of diplomacy.

What is important is that the government keeps the people in mind when making policies. I think that the Japanese preamble does a good job of exemplifying this it says,”…[Japanese people]do proclaim that sovereign power resides with the people and do firmly establish this Constitution. Government is a sacred trust of the people, the authority for which is derived from the people, the powers of which are exercised by the representatives of the people, and the benefits of which are enjoyed by the people. “

Where do we go now? These are questions that everyone should be having.

In history books the idea of war and peace is never fully explored, we are taught that to accept war as you accept human nature. This is a mistake in the worlds educational system- war can be erradicated from society. An idea that either came from or was repeated by Ghandi was that peace is the natural order, when we look at history it talks about war and some might think that it means war is the natural way for man, but our histories talk about war and don’t talk about the peace in between the wars, because the war broke the peace that is why history takes note.