We had the opportunity to meet with several officials of the security sector and several things stood out as remarkable to me after that meeting. The first was the fact that we, a group a college students from a foreign country would be granted access to officials. However, we were greeted with friendly gestures and were made to feel welcomed by officers and enlisted soldiers and marines of the headquarters element stationed on the base. This was a somewhat of a surprise to me as I anticipated a more distant and reserved atmosphere when university students and the armed forces mix for a question and answer session on military turf but this thankfully was not the case. The second point was the high level of official that stopped what he was doing at that moment and spent the next two and a half hours meeting with us and answering our questions. He was a career professional soldier that had served in conflict zones around the world and he was a fountain of knowledge. It was what he said during that meeting that struck me the most and that is he and his officers and men undergo peace building courses given by a third party NGO in order to mitigate the level and the amount of violence in future conflicts in the region. He stated that the conflict is essentially Filipino vs Filipino and in that context the violence must come to an end for the region to have a chance at sustainable peace. Instead of villianizing the enemy, he is advocating a more holistic approach by promoting that everyone in Mindanao must share the same land at the end of the day and that after forty years of war it is time for people engage with dialogue rather than with bullets.