Faith in the Military: Pumped About Prophecy on the East-West German Border

The year of America's bicentennial, I was a proud member of Brigade '76, a combat brigade sent to reinforce the East-West border at Fulda, West Germany:  right where the experts thought World War 3 would begin.  We flew to Germany from Fort Carson, Colorado, at the beginning of October.  Within two days we were in our tanks and on the border rolling past Soviet tanks on the other side of the fence.

While we drove past the fence, the Soviet tanks tracked us with their main guns.  We were not allowed to be provocative, so our guns were pointed away from the border.  Our mission was to hold the advancing 250,000 soldiers for 10 minutes to give tactical aircraft time to fly to our position and destroy the advancing enemy.  At one of the briefings when this was explained to us, a young soldier asked the Colonel on stage, "What do we do next?"  

The answer, "Nothin' son.  You'll be dead."

One the plane over to Germany I read Hal Lindsey's book "The Late Great Planet Earth."  I became one of those prophecy nuts.  I and many other believers in our unit were convinced World War 3 would happen before our three-year tour in Germany ended.  And in any case, the world was going to end by 1988.  In the field and in the barracks, many of us had long discussions about the significance of every sort of symbol in the books of Daniel and Revelation.  

It was very exciting to have this kind of inside knowledge about world events.  At that time, as now, the people who took Revelation literally also took Genesis literally.  If you thought the world was ending in 1988, you also thought it was created at about 4,000 B.C.

And it was this fact that eventually got me out of the swirling world of prophecy and back into fellowship with believers who were trying to live in faith in the present, not fixate on the future.  Over that first year in Germany, I came to see that those who took the ends of the Bible literally were not naive literalists, but very sophisticated in their literalism.  The same people preachers who push literal interpretations of Genesis and Revelation have very sophisticated reasons ready to hand about why the difficult teachings of Jesus need not be taken literally.  The same person who insists he takes the Bible literally will dodge in a nuanced way the story of the rich, young ruler in the Gospel of Luke, Ch. 18.

"That is for a specific person in a specific time," is the standard answer.  Really?  If literal is your claim, wouldn't it be better to do as Jesus says and risk suffering?  By diving in the deep end of the literal reading pool, I got to see just how incredibly selective literal reading was.  I never found anyone who would or could take the Bible completely literally.  And the rule turned out to be, the less the literal reading interfered with your life, the more literal you were likely to read that passage.    

The following year at annual tank gunnery, I read the Bible through in two weeks waiting for fog to clear on the tank gunnery range at Grafenwohr, West Germany.  This time I read the Living Bible.  The vast difference between the King James Bible and the Living Bible led me to ask about the original.  Where did the Bible come from.  I knew that the Old Testament was written in Hebrew and the New Testament was written in Greek.  But I did not know that the all of the New Testament except Luke and Acts were written by men who spoke Aramaic.  They spoke and wrote Greek as a second language.  

So the people who were so crazed about taking the Bible literally, were trying to be literal with words that were spoken in Aramaic and written in Greek by Aramaic speakers, then translated into English 1600 years later.  

It was at this point that Abel Lopez and I started talking Scripture rather than prophecy.  Abel was the commander of the tank next to mine.  We switched from literalism to the splits within the Church.  On post was both a Charismatic fellowship and a Bible Baptist fellowship.  The Baptists were sure the Charismatics were going to Hell.  The Charismatics just thought the Baptists were wrong.  Both sides wanted Abel and I to take sides.

We learned a lot over the next two years.

Faith in the Military: I Switched to the Army, and Believed in my Tank

By re-enlisting in the Army, I was running away from God, or at least running away from the people who said they knew Jesus loved them.

I volunteered for Armor and became the platoon guide (student leader) at Fort Knox, Kentucky.  From the first day at Fort Knox, I liked the Army so much better than the Air

Force.  I was finally in the military.  We marched, we ran the obstacle course, and we had classes in tanks in the sun in July and August. 

Since I came to faith in America, not in a Muslim or Communist country, I did not know that suffering is one of the definite promises of Scripture. The Lord and the Apostles said suffering is a mark of faith.  And their example is one of intense suffering. 

It would be another year before I would find out there was a “health and wealth Gospel” and a few more years before I understood this was a perverse twist on real faith.  But the Army and leadership in the Army were teaching me the lessons I missed by not playing sports in high school. 

I never stopped believing during the year that followed, but I stopped learning about the faith.  I started learning about tanks.  The first year I believed, in 1974, I read through the King James Bible.  My first year as a tank commander I read through entire operators manual for the M60A1 main battle tank.  As far as I know, I was the only tank commander in the battalion who read the entire 800-page manual.  It worked out well for me.  At annual gunnery my first year as a tank commander we fired in the top 10% of the battalion.  It’s like shooting Expert with a rifle or a pistol.

In September of 1976, then entire 4^th Brigade, 4^th Infantry Division relocated from Fort Carson, Colorado, to Wiesbaden, West Germany.  In Germany, my tank became my job and my faith became vivid again.

Faith in the Military: Which Church to Attend?

First I was blind.  Then I believed.  Then I got my sight back.  I should have quit smoking right at that moment.  It was soooooo hard to light cigarettes when the slightest flash was blinding.  I had to flick the lighter and look out of the corner of my eye to get the cigarettes lit.

As my sight and use of my fingers returned, I had to get to the practical matter of going to Church.  I knew enough about faith from Collin that Christianity was not a solitary faith.  I had to commit to a Church, or at least start attending one.  The base chapel was not an option.  Then as now, whatever the military blesses as faith is what the old soldiers believe.  In the 1970s, the military chapel system was run mostly by priests and pastors from Catholic and Mainline Protestant denominations.

In a later post, I will talk about today's chapel system, but for now, I was not going to the base chapel.

Since I was in Utah, the biggest Church was the Mormon Church.  I went to a Baptist Church just off post.  It was founded by non-Mormons who worked at Hill Air Force Base.  In fact, the pastor of this Church believed his main mission beyond leading the Church was to convert Mormons to Christianity.

This may seem strange, but before 1980, most Churches, especially those that were theologically conservative, had a statement of faith that was central to their mission and membership.  Christians actually believed doctrine was a matter of life and death, at least spiritually.  After I read the Bible (King James, of course) the next book the pastor gave me was Walter Martin's The Kingdom of the Cults.

This book was an encyclopedia of the beliefs of religions other than conservative protestantism and was clear that most of these religions were heretical.  Mormonism, Jehovah's Witnesses, the Bahai Faith, anything that used the name of Jesus, but departed from orthodox Christianity was a pathway to Hell.  Liberal Protestantism was also condemned as was Catholicism.  With this view of the world, more than 99% of the planet was a mission field.  Because pretty much everyone in the world was wrong.

Wow!!!  Being a Baptist was like walking down a slightly cone-shaped cave.  With every step the cave gets smaller.  By the time I finished The Kingdom of the Cults the number of believers in the world was huge, but the number of believers who knew the truth was tiny.  I, of course, was in the elect.  I was in a Baptist Church.

I could have settled in for a comfortable life of knowing I was one of the elect and most everyone else was not.  But then the cave got too narrow.  The pastor said Collin and all of his kind, Pentacostals and Charismatic believers were wrong too.  At that point, I did not know a lot, but if Collin my old roommate was not a Christian nobody was.

At that point I got out of the Air Force and my luminous faith went rather dim.

So I re-enlisted in the Army.

Faith in the Military: Having a Blast, Finding God

November 9, 1973, just after 9 a.m., I was connecting wires to detonators at a U.S. Air Force missile test site in Utah.  Someone turned on the power, and my world turned bright blue and white.  Several minutes later I was strapped in an all-terrain ambulance headed for the first of six eye operations that would eventually restore my sight.  Along with the eye operations, I had surgery to reattach two fingers on my right hand and to remove wires, screws and various pieces of metal from my face, arms and chest.

         
It was Friday.  I had planned to ride my motorcycle up into the mountains for the weekend.  My plans changed. On November 9, 1973, I woke up an agnostic.  

Before the day ended, I believed in God and a few months later, I went the whole way to become a Christian.  I would have preferred a smoother path to faith, but at 20 years old, I test-fired missiles for a day job and rode a motorcycle in mountains of Utah for recreation.  I was not inclined to listen to a still, small voice—blindness was the right size megaphone for God to announce His existence to me.

It would be a week before I could see again with one eye.  A month before both eyes could see again.

Faith in the Military: Belief Begins with Missiles

With Holy Week beginning in a couple of days, I decided to write about faith in the military.

In general, the military makes more clear the muddy world of faith most people live with in America.

I joined the Air Force in 1972 an agnostic, not because I had any informed idea of faith, but because I did not know or care if I believed in anything.  Neither of my parents practiced religion in any form.  My Dad was Jewish.  My Mom was Protestant.

Early in our childhoods, somewhere around three years old, both my sister and I got about a month of religion.  My sister went to Church.  I went to Temple.  Then we dropped out.  My main religious instruction was the puppet show "Davey and Goliath" which aired on Sunday morning.  I watched that show pretty much every Sunday morning while my parents slept in when I was four and five years old.

Although I knew a lot of kids who went to Catholic School growing up, I never met an overtly religious person.  In the fifth grade, I got beaten up by Catholic boys who said I killed Christ.  I did not know the story of the Crucifixion at the time, but the Gospels seem pretty clear that Roman Soldiers nailed The Lord to the Cross, not a skinny, 11-year-old Jewish kid.

On my 12th birthday, my Dad started talking about getting me a Bar Mitzvah.  The rabbi in the local synagogue would not allow boys to read a phonetic Torah, so I learned enough Hebrew to recite my Torah passage reading from the Hebrew.

Then religion was over for another seven years.

I enlisted at 18.  After Basic Training and an eight-month technical school, I went to my first permanent duty station at Hill Air Force Base, Utah.  My roommate, Collin, was a 20-year-old who did not drink, smoke or smoke dope and professed no interest in sex before marriage.  He read the Bible every day, prayed on his knees and was really a great roommate--clean, quiet and gone a lot.

Not only was Collin religious, he was Pentacostal.  One Wednesday evening I went to his Church.  Wow!  For a barely believing, barely Jewish Bostonian, Pentacostalism was a circus.  I wanted no part of Collin's faith, but I continued to admire him as a person.  He took a lot of shit from everyone else in the barracks.  But I did not want to be him.  Faith was for old people.

Then November 9, 1973, I rode my 750 Honda to the missile test range at Hill Air Force for work.  We were live-fire testing interstage detonators for the Minuteman Missile that day.  At 9:30 a.m. I started my journey of faith in the blast room where we connected the detonators to our test equipment.

And Just That Fast the Adoption is Over

Wow!!

I wrote earlier this week there was one final chance to adopt Xavier.  That hope fell through.

Here is the story well told by Miser Mom.

Homework After 10 p.m.

I am sitting between my sons at 10:35 p.m.  They are doing their math homework.  They are doing algebra now and will be studying for a social studies test after that.  J is demonstrably yawning.  But earlier in the day, I allowed J to go to they gym for an hour while N had squash. In a further indulgence, we all watched an episode of "Alias" the show our family is currently watching together when we can.

The boys are currently in 8th grade.  Next year the work will get harder.  I don't know how often we will be up this late, but they really don't like doing their school work.  

When I am home every night next school year, I will be able to sit with them and make sure the homework.  I suppose if they had more "normal" parents they would have an more sympathy.  But with a Dad who loads his iPhone with language apps to parse French verbs and study Greek vocabulary, they don't get much slack on studying.  And Mom stays up at night writing papers that advance the field of projective geometry.  They can't even whine about math or Mom might break into a five-minute explanation of how beautiful math is.  

Life Coming at me Fast--Faster Than I Thought

Maybe not THIS Fast. . ..

We got a message from Haiti tonight that it is possible (MAYBE) we can adopt Xavier after all.  All the indications up to now had been negative, but a ray of hope came through tonight in the form of an letter from a Haitian attorney who really seems to know what is going on with the case.

If we decide to retain her and make this one last attempt to adopt Xavier, I will be using some of my vacation in the next couple of weeks to travel to Harrisburg, New York and Washington to get the required paperwork notarized, apostiled (a special notarization) and certified by the Haitian consulate or embassy.

I had already planned to stop working full time and become a consultant/writer for my current employer.  That will mean I work a lot less, but more importantly I will work at home.  I will no longer be commuting to Philadelphia.  I will work at home and take care of the boys.  In addition, I may be doing whatever paperwork is necessary to get Xavier here to America.

I thought the change would begin June 5 when I go to Army Annual Training.  But it turns out I will need to use or lose my vacation and personal days before June 6, so I will be in Philadelphia much less than I thought while I use all the vacation I saved up to take care for the boys this summer.

Last week I thought my new life was coming slowly into focus.  Now it is happening a lot faster.
It should be interesting.

More Pictures of Friends at the Aviation Ball

April Burka and Chad Hummel.  

Chad supervised the motor pool in Iraq and is one of the full-time sergeants in Echo Company.

Capt. Carina Roselli, Chinook pilot, and Maj. Frank Tedeschi, Apache pilot.

They both served in Iraq in 2009-10.  Every drill I tell Maj. Tedeschi a stupid joke.  

He actually likes my jokes!!

 Sgt. 1st Class Wayne Perkins and his wife.  Wayne was in charge of the fuelers in Iraq and runs fueling operations here in the states for the Aviation Brigade.

Sgt. 1st Class Matt Vidas and his wife.  Matt is the full-time training sergeant for HHC 2-104th.

Col. Scott Perry and his wife Christy Perry.

Scott commander 2-104th Aviation in Iraq.  He is currently the U.S. Congress from the 4th District of PA and commander of Fort Indiantown Gap.  He came to Hershey Lodge for a charity event and found the Aviation Ball.

Aviation Ball Photos: Some of my friends from 28th Aviation.

Yesterday I got the memory chip back for my camera.  So now I have photos from the Aviation Ball.  I posted a lot of them on Facebook already.  Here's a few more.

Kate and CW4 Darren Dreher

 Every time I see Dreher he says, "There's my favorite Liberal."

Sgt. 1st Class Melanie McCracken and her friends.

She said our deployment to Iraq was, "All drama and no action."

1Lt. Andrea Magee and Staff Sgt. Mike Machinist.

Andrea and I worked in battalion headquarters in Iraq.  Mike was a Chinook flight engineer in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Sgt. Jordan Bannister, HHC

Led the Color Guard at the Aviation Ball, was PA NCO in Kuwait.

1st Sgt Eddie Beadle and Capt. Jason Lehr, commander and first sergeant on the most recent Chinook deployment.  Also served together in Iraq.

Capt. Hugh Denny, my current company commander, and his wife, and Capt. Israel Miller, my current boss, the brigade public affairs officer.

My Wife Says This Story is Creepy

WARNING:  My wife read this story and said it was too creepy for a family blog.  It is a story I wrote about what I thought might happen if our base was attacked.  It is fiction.
One way I will be making the transition out of the Army is to begin writing stories set in the places I served.  In this story, Camp Adder, Iraq, gets attacked, which never happened during the time I was there.
-----------------------------

I died happy.  The bullet tore through my neck, sliced my aorta, and severed my spine. I grabbed my neck and tried to scream, but the scream in my head was just gurgling in my throat.  The men around me just saw me slump to the ground.  No sound from me.  Just the single shot that ripped the air and the hollow thunk as the round tore through my throat and spiraled through my chest.

I stopped breathing right away with all the blood in my throat.  I was dead as soon as my body hit the ground and brain dead as I bled out on the Iraqi tarmac.  The AK-47 round broke the titanium plate that held my neck together.  The neurosurgeon that had put in the plate said if I got hit by a Humvee that plate would hold the last three vertebra in my neck together.  He didn’t say anything about an AK round.

My last tour ended when the Blackhawk crashed and I broke my neck.  I left that tour on a MEDEVAC to Germany.  This time I would go home in a body bag.  No agony this time.  If I have to die, I am glad it was fast.

My soul was on its way to Purgatory.  Would I be there in a second, a minute, hours, who knows?  Time was smearing. I am not supposed to believe in Purgatory; I am a Presbyterian. But belief makes no difference here.  We think we know who God is when he is far away, like a star light years away is just a shining circle in the sky.  Here you know there is someone in charge.  Someone powerful and real.  Someone close, but mysterious too. The corpse bleeding out at the Camp Adder west gate is starting to seem like someone I used to know.

I can’t say any more now.  The OPSEC rules are tight in eternity.  But I can see the place I died.  The gunner on our MRAP armored truck is swinging the turret looking for something, someone to light up.  The rest of the squad is down at the gate or behind the berm looking for the Hadji motherfucker who killed me. 

I can’t tell anybody, but the little bastard is 200 meters out buried in the dune.  He knew this would be a suicide mission.  His Momma in Nasariyah is getting $2000 for this. Now he is out there with his gun under belly, stone still having seventy-second thoughts about getting his virgins. 

The Apaches are up.  If the little fuck can stay still he might last till morning.  Sergeant Blewell is on the radio.  Major Tedesco is in the lead Apache.  Blewell is cold furious about me being dead.  Not like I am a teacher’s pet or anything but she trained us and she was waiting for us at the gate. Now this little fuck dropped one of her boys and there ain’t no way she will sit still for that.

The gunner on the MRAP sees something on the dune 200 meters southwest of the gate.  Tracers slam into the sand.  The Apaches swoop down from their scan toward the impact zone. 

Nothing.  Minutes pass.

Then fifty meters right of the MRAP gunners aiming point, Hadji loses his nerve and bolts.  Tedesco and the .50 cal gunner both see the kid jump.  Three steps later he is vaporized by 100 machine gun rounds, as many 30mm cannon shells from the lead Apache and the rounds from a half-dozen M4s. 

Sergeant Blewell emptied the magazine from her M4.  As soon as the Apaches pulled up Blewell started running toward the body—or the smear.  “There better not be a piece left of him bigger than an ant’s asshole,” she said as the nearest fire team looked at each other then ran after her. 

The three men grabbed her by the arms and the vest.  “You know you can’t go out there Sergeant Blewell,”  the team leader said.  “They’ll bust your ass to E-fuckin’-nothin’.”  She struggled, but she knew they were right.  And she was NOT going to get dragged back.  She turned and walked back to the gate in the last light of the dirty sunset.

I was gone.  I was being pulled up so high or far or something that I could not tell what was happening. 

Then I was on my face in the dirt.  I picked up my head and saw a brown face in front of me.  He was lying on his belly too.  By the look on his face he had no more idea where he was than I did.  I could swear I knew this guy, but he looked like an Arab GQ model.  How would I know a dude from an airbrushed magazine cover? 

Then I knew who he was.  He was the vaporized little fuck that killed me. 

And I knew at that moment that we whatever we were going through we were going to be partners.

Shit!!!

Going to heaven is supposed some kind of family reunion with rainbows and unicorns and shit. 

Fuck.  It means I have to love the little shitbag who shot me. I knew this eternity shit would have a catch.

He smiled weakly and reached toward me with a dark, open hand. 

We grabbed each other’s hands.  They were real hands.  We had bodies. 

A mountain loomed in front of us. I knew we had to go.  I think he did too. 

Review of The Intelligencer, a novel by Leslie Silbert

Christopher Marlowe, the playwright and spy for Her Majesty, was betrayed and murdered on May 30, 1597.  The story of Marlowe’s last month is told in parallel with a present-day tale of theft of Marlowe’s spy reports that leads to murder, betrayal, theft and deception in the delightful book The Intelligencer. 

This fast-moving thriller is the first novel by a woman whose background includes Renaissance scholar, private investigator and Harvard graduate.  I enjoyed the novel from the first page.  Silbert weaves the two stories together well, both in the way she moves from the present to the past and back and in bring the two tales together in the conclusion. 

While I enjoyed the whole book, the most memorable and vivid parts of the novel for me were the parts in Elizabethan England.  Silbert made me see and feel the vivid emotions of a world where death is always close at hand, and stench overwhelmed the senses. 

The modern scenes were intriguing, but less vivid.  One exception was the robbery gone wrong that is a bright thread that leads from the beginning to the end of the book.  While the robbery is set in the modern day, the robber is a baron gone bad with sensibilities that at least go back to Victoria if not all the way to Elizabeth. 

When I met the author on a train from Washington last month, she had three mystery novels she had just bought in Union Station.  She said she was doing competitive research.  I hope she writes another novel set partially or completely in Renaissance Europe.  I would recommend this book to anyone who likes a thriller, but particularly to readers who want a tale well told from a world lit by fire.