|
|
|||
|
|||
|
|
Soldier's Life Spared by Bible Barry Farber Two generic stories that have sprung generously out of every American war I remember have been strangely absent from the war in Iraq. Until now, that is. One of those stories just came through. The other is still AWOL. (Forgive this elitist condescending attitude, but do current people know what AWOL means? It means "absent without official leave," otherwise known as going "over the hill," "bugging out," "taking French leave," "not being there." The only other World War II translation you might need in this piece is "4F," meaning physically unfit for military service.) The missing story that just showed up is the one about the American soldiers' lives being saved because the enemy bullet was stopped by a Bible the soldier happened to be carrying in one of his shirt pockets. Maybe it's because I grew up in the Bible Belt, but I seem to recall so many stories from those earlier wars which ended, "And if it hadn't been for that Bible that bullet would have gone right through his heart!" I give you now the story of PFC Brendan Schweigart who was helping retrieve a tank in Iraq when he felt as if he'd been hit by a sledge hammer. It was a bullet from an enemy sniper. The bullet missed Schweigart's vital organs because over his heart was a Bible. I smiled, not merely because our soldier's life was spared, but because it reminded me of so many childhood narratives that ended with that dramatic, emphatic, "And if it hadn't been for that Bible that bullet would have gone straight through his heart." I think it was during the Korean War when an irreverent disc jockey in North Carolina delayed the next country-and-western song long enough to tell us about a man in rural Pennsylvania who did a lot of rifle practice and hunting in the nearby woods and who took the bus into Philadelphia one day to buy some fresh ammunition. Story Continues Below
At the sporting goods store one pack of bullets wouldn't fit into the pack with the rest of his purchase so he popped them into his shirt pocket and headed back to the bus station to return home. "And don't you know," said the disc jockey, "at that very moment a man who had just checked into a room on the 59 floor of one of those big new hotels couldn't start the air conditioning. He managed to get the window open, but it wouldn't stay open, so he took the Gideon Bible out of the bedside drawer and used it to prop the window open. To his dismay, the Bible slipped and fell out the window. The Bible became a missile plummeting fifty-nine floors down to earth gathering tremendous speed and it hit the sportsman right in the chest. He was knocked flat and had to be taken to a nearby hospital for observation. He was shortly released and returned to his rural Pennsylvania home. "But if it hadn't been for those bullets," concluded the jock, "that Bible would have gone straight through his heart!" The athiests must have roared with laughter, because I'm a believer and even I chuckled. (Out of respect for the demise of the Weekly World News tabloid this story will not be fact-checked. That's the paper that ran headlines like, "Blind Man Suddenly Regains Sight, Slugs Ugly Wife," "Starving Man Mistakes Dwarf For Chicken" and "Psychic's Head Explodes.") The other story that seems to have vanished from American's wartime culture is the "Dear John" letter, the letter from the good old girl-back-home who writes her fiance on the fighting front that she hates to tell him but she's out of love with him and into love with somebody else who she's going to marry. Today we read about soldiers everytwhere in the world exchanging instant e-mail with their girlfriends and video-conferencing at Thanksgiving from Baghdad and Ramadi. I don't recall a single "Dear John" story since the invasion of Iraq in 2003. Fret not, however. There's a "Dear John" story from World War II rich enough to last us throughout all time. It was a Pacific atoll featuring deadly and merciless fighting between Americans and Japanese at close quarters including a lot of hand-to-hand combat. An American soldier in the thick of the fighting there got a letter from the girl he was engaged to that said, "Dear John, This is so painful I'm going to make it short. I know we planned to get married after the war but the boy next door who's 4F [see above!] began coming over and we went to some movies together and, well, why stretch it out. We're in love and we're going to get married in October and I wish you would please send my picture back to me." The poor guy was so devastated he could hardly know, or care, who of the living figures moving around in that blur of his was American and who was Japanese. Word got around the island, however, and other men from his and other units came by and donated pictures of their girlfriends, their girlfriends' girlfriends, their girlfriends' sisters, their girlfriends' sisters' girlfriends, pin-up pictures from popular magazines, pictures of movie stars from newspaper ads, pictures of topless natives from National Geographic Magazine, dirty postcards from World War I and whatever other miscellaneous head-shots of attractive females could be found. Once they'd collected a nice bundle he inserted her picture squarely in the middle, wrapped everything up for mailing and put his personal note atop the beauteous pile. It said, "My dear Madame. Congratulations on your impending festivities. As I am having some difficulty recalling which one you are, would you kindly remove your picture and return the rest to me?"
Editor's note:
|
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||
Print Page 
Forward Page 
|
| All Rights Reserved © 2008 NewsMax.Com |