A Veteran I'd Love to Meet

I just finished a remarkable biography. It's called Unbroken. It's written by Laura Hillenbrand, and she recounts the life (so far) of Louie Zamperini. Louie grew up in Torrance, California during the Great Depression. He was not a good boy. He connived. He stole. He got into numerous fights. He and the police were on a first name basis. He was, as Hillenbrand described him, a "one-boy insurgency." If it hadn't been for patient parents and his older brother, Pete, who knows what would have become of Louie? It certainly wouldn't have been this story.

The only way Louie avoided a life of crime was his interest in running. Pete was a runner and he saw something in the way Louie ran that could lead to greatness. And did it ever! He set all the California high school records for the mile run. He went on to the University of Southern California and set all kinds of records there, winning the mile run in the NCAA meet. He was a natural.

He even set his sights on the 1936 Olympics. He was the youngest man in the field, and he didn't make it in the mile. Not to be deterred, however, he tried the two mile and miraculously made the Olympics in that race. You've heard of those Olympics, haven't you? Berlin. Jesse Owens. Adolf Hitler. Zamperini placed seventh in the two mile run and because of the way he went about his business, he even shook hands with Hitler. Louie knew he was a bit young to compete with all those young men in their prime, so he refocused his energies on making the 1940 Olympics which were to be in Tokyo. Of course, a world war erupted and those Olympics were cancelled.

To avoid the draft, Louie enlisted in the Air Corps and became a bombardier on a B-24. He was good at what he did. But he didn't get many missions under his belt because he and his crew were forced to fly an unsafe plane on a search mission. The engines gave out. The plane went down into the sea. Only three of the crew, including Louie, survived.

There would be no rescue either. Louie and two others drifted for almost seven weeks, fending off hunger, sharks, a Japanese attack, and storms. One of the three died during their weeks on the raft. And just when Louie and his friend thought they were about to make land, a Japanese patrol boat found them and took them prisoner.

The next couple of years were hell for Louie. The Japanese were vicious to American prisoners. You've heard of the Bataan death march and the conditions in which these men had to live. It wasn't any better on the Japanese mainland. The men, even the officers, were treated as slaves, denied basic medicines, adequate food, and Red Cross packages. And worst of all, they were unmercifully beaten on a whim by the guards. One guard in particular took a sadistic interest in Louie. They called him "the Bird." He beat Louie with a belt. He beat him with rods. He beat him with his fists and kicked him with his boots. The bird knew Louie was a famous Olympian and wanted to make an example out of him, wanted to break him. And even though the Bird got Louie in two different prison camps, he never quite could break Louie Zamperini.

Finally, with the war over, Louie returned home, and quite the hero. People thought him dead, so it was almost a resurrection story. Add his war experiences to his Olympic glory and everybody wanted to hear Louie's story. Louie told it. He seemed okay to those who didn't know him, but he was not okay. He couldn't sleep. He couldn't get the Bird out of his mind. Louie couldn't sleep for thinking of him. And when he did fall asleep he dreamed of the Bird. Louie was eaten up with bitterness and a desire for revenge. Many war criminals had been caught and tried in Japan but the Bird eluded capture. Louie used to dream of how he'd kill the Bird. Once, he was awaken by his wife's screams as he sat on top of her choking the life out of her, thinking she was the Bird. Add to these problems Louie's constant drinking to numb the pain, and he was as big a mess as he was as a boy.

Everybody was worried about him. His wife left him for a time but came back to him. She wanted to help him but didn't know how. Until one day in 1949 when this gangly, young evangelist from North Carolina set up a tent in Los Angeles to hold a crusade. His name was Billy Graham. Louie's wife heard him and was saved from her sins. She gave her heart to Jesus. She tried to get Louie to go. He fought it but finally gave in, only to run out when Graham gave the invitation to trust Christ. He said he'd never go back, but he did. And as Graham preached, God broke through to Louie's heart. Louie trusted Christ for his salvation and invited Jesus to come into his life, save him from his sins and give him the life that is really life. Jesus answered that prayer. Louie was saved, transformed in every way. 2 Corinthians 5:17 says, "If anyone be in Christ he is a new creature; old things pass away, all things become new." You could paste Louie's picture right next to that verse. He was a changed man. He gave up his drinking immediately. And even better, he never had one more dream or ill thought about the Bird—not one. Isn't Jesus a wonderful, merciful, glorious Savior?

Louie went on in life to found and work with boys in camp. He has lived a life that matters. God has used him to do far greater things than win races and survive the horrors of war. And all these years later, Louie has stayed active, skiing and skateboarding well into his 80s—not the 80s, his 80s. It's a remarkable story. I encourage you to get it and read it. I've spared the details that add so much color and tension to the story. It's a biography that reads like a novel.

Louie's story made an deep impact on me. While I was reading the sections that describe his imprisonment by the Japanese, I actually dreamed that I was shooting Japanese prison guards—and liking it. That's not me, but I dreamed it. Louie let go of his hatred, bitterness, and desire for revenge. I was having a hard time with that, I guess.

One of my key takes from the story is this: the answer to bitterness, hatred, and revenge is not found in war, not found continuing the cycle of killing and brutalizing one another. The answer is found in Jesus. That's where Louie found it. Even though I assume that verse in the prophets about God turning swords into plowshares and spears into pruning hooks and nations studying war no more probably reflects a time when Christ comes back to this sin-sick, war-sick world, it seems like we could get a start on that even now if we'd all turn to Jesus and follow Him with the same passion and commitment of Louie Zamperini.

Did I tell you Louie went back to Japan to meet with former prison guards? He wanted to see them and forgive them. He wanted to forgive the Bird too, but the Bird would have none of it. Too bad for the Bird. But good for Louie. The Bird continued to live by his hate-filled heart. Louie followed the path of his master Jesus who taught, "Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called the sons of God."

Oh, for more and more peacemakers like Louie in our war-torn world.

A View From the Wall

During my Sabbatical, Dayna and I visited Washington, DC. I’d visited the capitals of six other nations; it was time to visit my own. Being a history buff, I was very much looking forward to it. Soon as word got out that we were going, a lot of people who have been there had a story of “you’ve just got to see this.” We didn’t get to see everything during our day in DC, but we got to see a lot. All of it was impressive: Kennedy’s grave, the Lincoln Memorial, the Capitol, seeing Honest Abe’s top hat in the history museum, and seeing moon rocks in Air and Space. All very, very cool.

But I suppose the site that touched me most was the Vietnam Memorial—the black marble V inscribed with the names of every one of our soldiers who either died there or who are still missing in action. I was touched on several levels. Maybe part of it was because this was the war of my childhood and youth. I saw it played out on television news every night. I saw the helicopters whipping the tall jungle grass as body bags and wounded soldiers were loaded on them for evacuation. I heard it debated and discussed in school and on TV. I read about the protests in the newspaper and saw images of them on the news. Ours was a patriotic family. We supported our soldiers. For a time I planned on enlisting in the Marines so I could go do my part. My older brother did enlist in the Marines in 1971, but thankfully, by that time we were bringing troops home instead of sending more in. He never had to go. And I abandoned my interest in a military life. Maybe these memories are why the wall touched me so.

Or maybe it was because I have known a number of men who fought that war. I have listened to their stories, seen glimpses of their scars, and watched some of them fall apart in a variety of ways some years after the war—post-traumatic stress disorder, they call it. While many died in the war, others died because of the war some years later. I still remember one Wednesday night in the late 1980s as I was leading a Bible study, a ragged-looking man none of us knew came into the sanctuary and interrupted our study by asking a question about how a person like him could go to heaven after all the things he did in Vietnam, all the blood he said was on his hands. He had been drinking and the liquor perhaps had loosened both his tongue and his inhibitions. He broke down in tears, sobs (as I’m almost doing as I remember that man and write this story). I feebly tried to assure him that God loves and God forgives and that the grace of Christ is high enough and wide enough and deep enough to include him too. He wasn’t hearing it. A couple of our men took the initiative to go to him and help him from the sanctuary so they cold talk with him and pray for him. They didn’t get a name, and we never saw or heard from him again. I hope somewhere along the way he found the grace and the peace he was so desperately searching for.

But back to the wall. We walked the length of the wall that day in DC. We saw flowers at the base of some of the panels. We saw and read a couple of the notes and pictures left there too. And we saw two men working feverishly, pressing paper to a particular name on the wall, running the edge of a pencil across that name, hoping to capture its image on their page. I wanted to ask them who this person was to them: a brother, a dad, a classmate, a brother in their platoon? But I didn’t ask. Didn’t want to interrupt the moment. Didn’t want to intrude. I did take a picture as you can see. I felt a little guilty about doing even that, but they were so involved in their mission that they didn’t even notice.

In watching these men painstakingly work with that name, it struck me that the more than 58,000 names on that hallowed wall are more than names. They are somebody’s son, brother, father, husband, sister, friend. It reminded me of the day the twice-a-week newspaper in our small town reported that Branson, Missouri, had lost her first son (I think her only son) in the Vietnam War. For some reason, I desperately wanted to remember his name. I wanted to remember his name and find his name on that wall and trace my fingers across his name and connect my life to his even if the connection was no more than having gone to the same school, having fished in the same creek, and having ridden bikes on the same streets. But his name never came to me. I hadn’t thought about that young man in decades, but I thought about him at the wall. For the life of me, I couldn’t recall his name, but I knew his name was there.

It’s all those names that make this memorial so different from the statue of the seven flag-raisers at Iwo Jima and from most of the other war memorials scattered around our country. It’s the names. Some communities have etched the names of their fallen in their local war memorials, but the Vietnam Wall is a national memorial. It bears the name of every soldier who paid the highest price he could pay: young men (some of them boys really) from Kansas and Maine, New York and Tennessee, New Mexico and Montana, men from my state and from yours. By inscribing all the names, this memorial allows us to grieve not just as communities but as a nation, and to graphically remember the cost of war—a war that destroyed a lot of people in our country and in Vietnam, a war in which it wasn’t just the raw number of 58,195 American servicemen and women who were killed, it was Robert Dale Draper and Kelton Rena Turner and Sharon Ann Lane. It was the boy next door who used to mow your lawn, the young candy-striper at the local hospital, the young man who carried the groceries to your car. The wall reminds us that the cost of war is not just numbers; it’s names, it’s faces, it’s neighbors. The wall won’t let us forget that so many died, and it won’t let us forget just who they were. So many dead. And for what? You’d think we’d have learned from that experience, but subsequent history tells us we have not.

I will never forget the wall. Just as the names of the dead and missing are etched into the marble, that experience is etched into my heart. I knew none of those whose names are on the wall, but as we walked back to the tour bus I thought of their brothers-in-arms I do know—ones that made it out alive. I thought of the men I know—men now in their late 50s and 60s, men who still carry both the scars we can see and the scars we can’t. I thought of them. I thanked God for them, for their courage to do their duty, and for the fact that they lived to grow older and to live the life their brothers or sisters on the wall never got to live. I chose in those moments not to ponder the big questions about why some survived and others didn’t. I will leave that in the hands of God who makes all things right in the end. Instead, I will be content to give thanks for the ones that died and the ones that lived, and I will continue to live in the hope that we worship a God who in His good time will bring about that great day when nations will beat their spears into pruning hooks, their swords into plowshares, and will study war no more.

Casualties of War

Memorial Day has always been somewhat surreal for me. The day is set aside to remember our war dead and to reflect upon on the price of freedom. Many cemeteries line their driveways with American flags. Many communities will have a memorial service at a monument built for veterans. Such somber reminders. And yet many will spend this day playing on the lake or traveling home after a holiday weekend. Others will invite friends over for a cookout and conclude the evening by watching a fireworks display. Surreal. The very freedom that allows us to do such things is often the farthest thing from our minds. But who can blame us? It’s easier to play than to remember—to remember the human cost of war, the grief of those who get news their loved one was killed in battle, the kids who grow up without a father, knowing him mostly through a picture on the mantle next to a folded American flag. So, so many have died on fields of battle for their country, for their buddies, because somebody had to. It's right and good to remember them and their families.

But death is not the only casualty of war. You can’t visit a VA hospital without stepping aside for the man with one leg on his crutches and the man with no legs in his wheelchair. And then there’s the guy on the elevator wearing a shirt with an empty sleeve, and next to him is the man with a face scarred from burns sustained in combat. Death is not the only casualty of war.  Not every casualty comes home in a flag-draped box.

I think of two veterans today who have brought that truth home to me. The first is my father: a U.S. Navy Seabee in the South Pacific during World War II. It was bad enough getting shot at by Japanese snipers while trying to build an airfield, bad enough watching buddies picked off like ducks in a carnival shooting gallery. But then there was the letter—the one from his wife, the one that was supposed to cheer him up, give him hope, and remind him of what he had to look forward to if and when he ever got off those God-forsaken islands in the Solomons. “Mail call! McCallum, looks like you’ve got a letter from your wife.” I can hear his buddies whooping it up and giving him the business. And I can see him taking that letter, running it past his nose to check for the scent of perfume, then clutching it tightly while he found a quiet place to open it, to read and reread every word. Ahhhh! Just a little piece of home in that hell-hole in which he found himself in 1942. I can see him carefully opening it (my father was particular about such things), unfolding it, holding it up to good light, and reading the salutation. Well, what hit him next might as well have been a Japanese bullet. The name that followed “Dearest …” wasn’t my daddy’s name. Seems his wife had found a new lover and had mistakenly enclosed her love letter to him in my father’s envelope. Between his war experiences in the jungles of the Solomons and that letter, my father was never the same again. At least that’s what his family has told me. Like so many others who apparently came home in one piece from places like Tulagi, Normandy, Viet Nam, and Afghanistan, there were wounds we couldn’t see with our eyes, wounds that haunt them and hurt them for their rest of their lives. Casualites of war—body intact, soul in more fragments than the remnants of a mortar shell. So I think of my dad on Memorial Day.

And I think of another veteran named Steve. Steve grew up in a Christian family, volunteered for the Marine Corps, and ended up in Viet Nam. Steve was never the same after his experiences there. He was introduced to drugs while fighting that war, and except for a few years, never could quite kick the addiction when he came back home. That was tough enough. But I’ll never forget the day he told me about something he did in Viet Nam that was so heinous he had never told a soul until he told me, and then he made me swear I would never tell another soul either. He was hoping, I think, by confessing his sin that he would find some relief from the guilt he had carried for almost 20 years. I don’t think he did. He did get his life on track with Christ for a few years, but then when trouble once again battered down the door of his soul, he soon reverted back to the drug scene and died with a needle in his arm. Casualties of war. Many years passed between Steve’s tour of duty in Viet Nam and his death, but no one will ever convince me that the two were not somehow intertwined.

So on this Memorial Day 2010, I pause and give thanks for the brave men and women who died in battle for our freedoms. And I pause and give thanks for the brave men and women who are dying one day at a time from the internal scars of war. You’d think with all the destruction and the killing and the grieving war leaves in its wake that somehow we human beings would find better ways to solve our differences. Maybe the fact that we don’t and we won’t is the most surreal thing of all about a day like Memorial Day. But I am not without hope. It's just that I don't look outward for hope; I look upward—longing for the return of Jesus, His decisive destruction of evil, and the great vision of the prophet to come true: “He shall judge between nations and decide disputes for many peoples; and they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war anymore” (Isaiah 2:4).