God Found Me in the Vietnam War

A recent Mockingcast episode included an article on a Vietnam vet who wrestled with guilt and shame and then found forgiveness outside himself.

The piece prompted a memory of my own variation on that theme. I enlisted in the Marine Corps in the late 1960s (long story for another time) and was deployed to Vietnam. On February 23, 1969, two grenades were thrown into my foxhole by a North Vietnamese soldier. They wounded me, and they killed the fellow next to me.

I ended up at a Naval hospital in Da Nang.

As the initial shock wore off in the hospital, it was replaced by fear — a deep, strong fear I hadn’t known was possible. I felt utterly exposed to danger, and there was nowhere to hide. I felt like a baby lying on a beach with a tidal wave coming toward me, and I could do nothing to escape. The wave could do anything with me that it wanted.

An ammo dump a few miles away was “cooking off.” Every time there was an explosion, everyone on the ward would levitate off their bed.

Something else joined my fear: shame. I was ashamed of being afraid, and the shame had as much power as the fear. Marines don’t get afraid — they’re Marines. Christians don’t get afraid — God protects them. I was a relatively new Christian who professed to have a personal relationship with Jesus. But now, it just meant that Jesus was personally disappointed in me.

So I prayed. I prayed for safety and relief and strength and faith. But nothing happened. I felt my heart beating against my chest wall, twenty-four hours a day, and the shame joined the fear as my only reality. Until …

… down the aisle of the ward came Jesus, in the form of a chaplain whom I had known on the base chapel in 29 Palms, California. This was anything but a coincidence.

In 1969, there were over 100,000 Marines in Vietnam. There were thousands of chaplains. The 29 Palms base chapel was over 8,000 miles from the hospital in Da Nang. And in walked in a chaplain I knew and trusted. A familiar face amid my despair. An amazing God who conquered all those odds to find me. The chaplain recognized me, he gave me a little paperback Bible, and he prayed with me.

Paul Zahl talks about the one-way love of God. Boy, do I get it. In a quiet way, everything changed in that chaplain’s visit — and it came as pure gift, when I despaired of making it better on my own. The shame dissipated in the chaplain’s embrace. The fear continued, but now I had a hand taking hold of mine in the storm, the hand of Jesus. And that was enough.