Like many of us civilians here, early in my life I admired the life of a soldier.

As a little boy, I enjoyed my war toys at Christmas. I did mock wars with my little plastic toy soldiers, with the battery-powered tanks and the toy Armalite. Later, I enjoyed baril-barilan with the neighborhood boys, eventually graduating into a war with slingshots against boys in the next village, the open ground between both villages becoming our battlefield. We even tied a poor boy, our prisoner of war, to a post all afternoon for all his friends to see, until their leader came to negotiate for his release.

I even took the PMA entrance exam. But for a reason I could not understand, the proctor told me to get out of the room, saying I wasn't following instructions. He said I was not supposed to review my answers. I wanted to argue, "Hey, I could do that in the NCEE, in UPCAT and the rest of the entrance and scholarship exams that I took." But then, this was the military, and so this good soldier did not complain, and instead snappily rose to his feet, saluted, and said, "Permission to leave, sir!" End of my military aspirations.

But my disillusion with the military really began at the ROTC, when we noticed abuses by the officers. I was part of the core group that led cadets to boycott the Sunday formations, us bringing placards and protest streamers outside the campus instead of joining the drills. We succeeded, the story about the boycott even hitting the front pages of the local newspapers. The unauthorized monetary collections stopped, the fraternity-like initiation among first year cadets ended.

I went to college during the resurgence of the student movement, when Ninoy Aquino was shot in the tarmac, with the series of protest actions in the streets, the snap elections, leading to first People Power Revolt at Edsa. As they say, at that time, when you were in college and you were not an activist, what the heck were you doing?

I became president of the student council, led the university's first ever student barricade, and was at the frontlines of welgang bayans, confronting the police and the military in the streets.

As a young journalist in Manila covering the human rights beat, my very first assignment, I wrote about military abuses, about the violation of human rights. I remember sending some military and intelligence officers defending their asses at the Senate when I broke a story of a suspected NPA who was tortured in a military safehouse somewhere up north.

And when I came home to Mindanao, I had to go into hiding for six months because a brigade commander was so mad at me when my stories and pictures of a firing squad by the MILF hit the front pages of the Philippine Daily Inquirer and that newspaper run it for a week. For a while I thought I'd never go back to journalism.

I may not have the scary experiences of Ma'am Deng, of Abel Moya, of Datu Bruno in the hands of the military. But for several years of my life, I feared and loathed the men in uniform.

Imagine my surprise when I covered the gathering of high ranking SouthCom officials at Balay Mindanaw way back in August of 2006, with (Lt.) Gen. (Raymundo) Ferrer and (Maj.) Gen. (Benjamin) Dolorfino talking about their peace initiatives in their respective areas of responsibilities.

A few more coverages later of OP Kors (Operation Peace Course) trainings and roundtable discussions with officers, and I was sold to the idea that soldiers could be taught to work for peace.

Getting to know the soldiers up close, learning about their lives in the field, their fears, their joys, made me discover that soldiers are just human beings like me. Contrary to the image painted by some sectors, soldiers are not monsters to be feared. Talking to people in the communities and letting them express their thoughts about their experiences with the military, at least when talking about soldiers who have undergone OP Kors, further strengthened my belief that, yes, the military could change.

Interviewing the bishop and the nuns of Basilan shocked me, for it was my first time ever to hear the religious sector praising the military.

But, as we said in the book, it's still a long way for a total transformation of the military establishment. When you open the book and get inspired by the stories of the peacebuilding soldiers, you may be swayed into thinking that these stories are now as prevalent as we wish they are. But reality check will tell us otherwise.

We are all aware that it takes generations for change to take place. I'm confident that Balay Mindanaw and like-minded organizations will continue to work for peace, especially with the military. I'm just as confident that the military will keep up to the challenge. I'd love to see things unfold, and let's keep our fingers crossed that we'll live to see this total transformation in our lifetime.

I believe that nothing happens by chance. The convergence of the elements of Balay Mindanaw spearheading the Op Kors training, the military evolving and becoming ready for change, and the civil society and the media becoming open minded and steering away from steroetypes - these and other factors have made this book come to be. I'm hoping that with this book, I'm making my small contribution towards achieving peace, by inspiring other writers to do more peacebuilding stories, to also start looking for the good news instead of just the bad news we've all been writing about Mindanao. (Bobby Timonera, one of the editors at MindaNews, delivered this speech about  the book he authored, “Soldiers for Peace: A collection of peacebuilding stories in Mindanao,” at the February 19 launching at the Ateneo de Davao University).

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