Charleston was enjoying a peaceful, hurricane free Saturday when a dozen local peace advocates assembled in front of the U.S. Customs House for a monthly peace march through the old city. They brought a few handbills, an American flag and a peace banner. Most of the participants were in their 50's or older.

About 11:30 a.m., the gathering moved out. It wasn't large enough to need a permit or big enough to justify closing the streets so the activists just walked on the sidewalk, through the market area.

About halfway through the market, they ran into the police, who tried to figure out something to do to stop them. Downtown it's hard for most people to recognize the difference between the tourist district of a city and Disneyworld (where the first amendment doesn't apply). We explained to the officer that the peace march wasn't big enough or loud enough to violate the city's ordinances and didn't, as a consequence, need a permit.

In South Carolina, where the culture of dissent has always been marginalized by a worldview where solidarity against external and internal threats is highly valued, most people just want everyone to shut up, say the pledge of allegiance and do whatever some trusted authority figure says.

After some haggling, we managed to talk the police out of stopping the march and the hotheads out of getting arrested. They both seemed a bit disappointed, but that is the sort of de-escalation they teach you at peace seminars. Such efforts aren't very dramatic, but they save lives and property around the world. It also allows lawyers like me to sleep in on Sunday morning when they hold weekend bond court.

The march wound up on Marion Square, where some of the participants turned around for the march back and others disbursed.

I have watched the local peace movement maintain its modest witness in Charleston for more than 25 years. Charleston is the only American city to have started a major war, except for Boston. The Lowcountry has a large active military presence at the Air Force Base and other facilities, The Citadel, several major defense contractors and many conservative retired veterans.

To the participants in those larger gatherings, the dozen peace advocates marching through Charleston on Saturday are an irritant, an obstacle to the final, complete victory over America's opposition which they're certain could be obtained if everyone would just shut up and salute the parade. In ten days, we shall mark that black moment when the bright hopes of the millennium were shattered and the expensive mechanisms of conflict were thrown into gear around the world. The terrorists that attacked America weren't looking for surrender. They wanted a counter attack. What they needed, and what they obtained, has been a decade of warfare around the world with more ahead.

The last decade has not been Vietnam. One of the marchers Saturday had seen war up close in the army there. The most liberal among us recognized our fighting men and women are brave and are making often generously motivated sacrifices on the part of their country. Everyone supports the troops. It is also clear that in war people make mistakes. We've learned you can win without ending. We know that there are places in the world where some people appear to prefer the most miserable locally controlled squalor to the clean water, reliable electrical power and safe streets we attempt to give them. We have learned that neither gold nor lead will buy America reliable friends. We don't know if the president of Afghanistan's brother was a drug merchant, CIA operative, savvy politician, businessman or all four.

However on Saturday a few determined activists set out to remind everyone that peace is an alternative.

It will require accepting less than global capitulation to our most cherished values. It will be messier and less gratifying than watching the black and white film of the Japanese capitulating to Douglas McArthur on the deck of the battleship Missouri in Tokyo Bay in 1945. It will be easy to criticize as being weak and un-American. However, it could be a future we can survive and prosper in reached only at the end of a much longer and harder walk than the one from the Customs House to Marion Square.

(William Hamilton (www.wjhamilton.com) is an attorney who lives in I'OnVillage.