Are you are interested in what is really happening in Ukraine?  I get intelligence from sources that you probably have no access to.  So I wanted to share with you how the Ukrainian Military is really stopping the Russians, and killing thousands of them.  It is not coming from the shoulder fired tank busting missals we sent, though they are helping a little.  The shoulder fired missals that the Japanese have sent them which totally envelope a tank in flames seem to be better, though both require fairly close contact with the tanks..

The Turks furnished the Ukraine military with 20 TB-2 drones.  Each one weighs 1,400 pounds and is propeller driven with a 40 foot wingspans.  They go out over 100 miles and circle around for 24 hours if necessary until they spot a likely target.  Each one carries what the Turks call an “MAM”.  These are 14 pound highly accurate guided missals.  The Russians have not been able to shoot the TB-2s down.  They fly low under the Russian radar, and are seldom even seen on radar when they are not flying low.  First thing, they destroyed most all of the Russian air defense capability, and many of the Russian’s SAM missals.  They are extremely effective at destroying tanks and trucks and even trains.  You may have heard how many Russian Generals have been killed.  These TB-2 drones diligently scope-out the Russian encampments and then target the command posts of Russian officers.  

These drones are manufactured in Turkey by the Bayraktar Company.  And it looks like that the Turks have given their latest models to the Ukrainians which use Turkish and US satellites for navigation.  And in the last week the Turks have sent more of them.

 Here is a picture of one below being rolled-out for duty:

Ron

Intelligence Report:

It was an open question, in the days leading up to Russia’s wider invasion of Ukraine on the night of Feb. 23, whether Ukraine’s small force of Turkish-made TB-2 drones even would survive the first volley of Russian missiles.

Nearly a month later, it’s apparent the TB-2s not only survived—they quickly flew into action. Today Ukraine’s killer-drone fleet arguably is its most potent force.

TB-2s belonging to the Ukrainian air force and navy in recent days have dismantled whole swathes of Russia’s front-line air-defense network and now relentlessly are smashing Russian tanks and supply trucks.

And with credible reports that Turkey has sent fresh shipments of drones, it’s possible Kyiv’s drone campaign is just beginning.

Back in 2020, Azerbaijan’s small fleet of TB-2s was instrumental in that country’s victory over Armenia in a short but violent territorial war. Drone history might be repeating itself in the much bigger war in Ukraine.

Ukraine acquired its first TB-2 in July 2021. By February this year the navy and air force reportedly possessed around 20 of the 40-foot-wingspan, 1,400-pound, propeller-driven drones armed with 14-pound, laser-guided Smart Micro Munition missiles, whose Turkish acronym is “MAM.”

It was unclear whether the TB-2s and their ground stations and operators would survive the air strikes and missile barrages that preceded the Russian ground offensive.

But they did. In fact, it seems the drone force suffered no major losses as it dispersed from its permanent bases, such as Mykolaiv in southern Ukraine, to smaller facilities likely concentrated in the country’s west.

It took a few days for the TB-2 operators to set up their gear and prep their drones for ops from austere sites, possibly including little-used civilian airstrips. Once they did, the drones opened an ever-widening aerial offensive. By March 20, foreign observers had confirmed—via photos and videos—nearly 60 tanks, air-defense systems, helicopters, supply trucks and trains that had fallen victim to TB-2 strikes.

In fact, the actual number of drone kills undoubtedly is much, much higher. We don’t know the real total because Ukraine doesn’t want us to know where and how often its drones are striking. “In an effort to attract as little attention to its operations as possible, very little footage of TB2 strikes over Ukraine has been released,” noted the analysts at Oryx blog, a leading source of open-source intelligence.

The drone campaign has expanded in stages. First, the TB-2s went after the short-range air-defense systems protecting Russian tank formations and supply convoys. The drones have plinked no fewer than 10 SAM launchers, including Buks, Tors and a Pantsir.

“Once they were free of Russian air-defenses, the Ukrainians … began deploying their TB-2s for their other two important tasks—for reconnaissance and for close-air-support,” wrote Tom Cooper, an author and expert on the Russian military. Stripped of their air-defenses, Russian tanks and supply trucks are easy pickings.

“In the Kyiv area, they have mauled many of Russian armored formations; in the south they have directed massive and precise artillery barrages on the Kherson airport and the [Russian] units besieging Mykolaiv.”

TB-2s also lobbed MAMs at several field headquarters. The effect on the Russians has been profound. “TB-2s are also wrecking the Russians’ nerves,” Cooper wrote. “We’ve seen several videos shown entire Russian [battalions] turning around and fleeing after losing only a few vehicles to TB-2s.”

There don’t seem to be major limitations on where the TB-2s can strike within the Ukraine war zone. Kyiv has released videos depicting drone strikes as far south as Kherson and as far north as the Kyiv suburbs.

The distance the drones are flying seems to hint that Turkey provided Ukraine with the latest version of the TB-2 with satellite-communications capability, as well as access to Turksat satellites. The alternative is line-of-sight radio, which can take a drone out to just 100 miles or so.

Russia’s longer-range SAMs—S-300s and S-400s—still are intact. But for a variety of reasons, they’re powerless to stop the TB-2s. For one, the TB-2 operators appear to be flying their drones at low altitude, below the horizon of long-range radars, until it’s time to attack.

Low flight prevents wide surveillance, of course. But the TB-2 appears usually to avoid detection even when it does fly high.

This makes sense. The TB-2’s small size and modest horsepower means it’s quiet, not overly hot on infrared sensors and also hard to detect for many radar operators. It is, in its own way, a stealth warplane. Flying mostly at night helps, too.

The same stealth qualities that protect a drone from air-defenses also allow it to loiter, undetected, over a stretch of highway for 24 hours at a time, silently waiting for the Russians to roll past.

The TB-2 isn’t invulnerable, of course. But unlike a 12-ton MiG-29 and its pilot, the drone is easy to replace. The Russians claim they’ve shot down lots of TB-2s, but there’s photographic evidence of just one wrecked drone.

In any event, Ukraine clearly still has most of the TB-2s it had at the start of the war, plus any additional airframes it got from Turkey in the last few weeks. The stable—or even growing—drone force, plus the steady degradation of Russian air-defenses, could mean that Ukraine’s drone campaign might actually escalate in coming weeks.

In a heady 44 days in late 2020, Azerbaijan’s 10 or so TB-2s knocked out no fewer than 567 Armenian tanks and other vehicles. It was a potentially decisive contribution to a winning campaign. Ukraine has even more TB-2s and has worked out highly effective tactics for them.

The doubt that hung over Kyiv’s nascent drone force on the eve of the Russian attack is gone. The TB-2 is a fearsome weapon. And in the hands of skilled and creative operators, it’s wreaking havoc on the Russian army in Ukraine.

Along the east coast of Central America there is a very unusual group of people.  There are over 300,000 of them and they are all black.  They live in villages’ right against the ocean.  There are some in Nicaragua , some in Guatemala , a few in Belize , but most live in Honduras .  They mostly live off of food from the sea…….fish, crabs, oysters and also cassava root.  And they have a most unusual language.  Many languages like Latin, Spanish, and even Arabic have male and female endings for their words.  However, in the Garifuna language the male and female are totally different words.  That makes it a really hard language to master. 

The history of these people is so interesting.  There were many tribes across West Africa over the centuries, but by far the fiercest were the Ashanti .  They lived deep in the forest in what is now central Ghana .  They were quite wealthy, deriving most of their wealth from raiding neighboring tribes and selling slaves to the Muslims. 

The British conquered and subdued all of the tribes across West Arica, but not the Ashanti .  They were so fierce that they were never scared or “cowed” by the British rifles or cannon.  The Ashanti were never conquered until the British were able to bring in modern machine guns in later years. 

Occasionally, though, from the early 1600’s to the middle 1600’s the slave ships would wind-up with a few groups of Ashanti on them.  They would be captured by Muslims coming around to that part of Africa and raiding inland to capture slaves.  But that is when certain slave ships “messed-up”.  Like I said, occasionally a ship would get some Ashanti on them.  Those Ashanti warriors would either take over the ship or die trying, and were apparently often successful.  They most all wound up in the islands off the coast of Venezuela, mostly on St. Vincent by sailing there or drifting there.  Those that were taken to Jamaica didn’t stay, not the Ashanti .  They captured boats and sailed or rowed west to the same islands. 

Most all slaves brought to the Caribbean on these ships were men.  The plantation owners wanted strong workers.  Thus the Ashanti who got to St. Vincent and surrounding islands were mostly all men.  So they just married the local, indigenous women.  That is how their language developed.  The men spoke one word for an object or action, and the indigenous women spoke another. 

For a time, the Afro-Caribbean Garifunas lived peacefully alongside French settlers who reached St. Vincent later in the 17^th century, until being exiled by British troops in 1796 and eventually shipped off to Roatan, one of the Honduras Bay Islands in the Caribbean Sea .  After successfully developing a healthy crop of cassava, a mainstay of traditional Garifuna diets, on Roatan, Garifunas branched out to the Caribbean mainland to establish fishing villages.  According to one source, the Spanish agreed to transfer the Garifunas from Roatan to the coastal mainland of Honduras , effectively consolidating their claim on Roatan and the other Honduras Bay Islands . 

Garifuna culture is closely identified with music and dance.  Garifuna music styles are known for their heavy use of percussion instruments and distinctive drumming, which combines the beats of primero (tenor) and segunda (bass) drums.  Garifuna drums are typically made from hollowed-out hardwoods such as mahogany or mayflower that are native to Central America .  

Punta, an evolved form of traditional music played using traditional instruments, is the most popular and well-known genre of Garifuna music and dance.  Punta lyrics are typically sung by Garifuna women and often relate to one gender or the other.  Energetic punta dancing has been described as “consciously competitive.” 

On one mission trip I did a one day clinic just for the Garifuna.  It was one of the most fun clinics that we have ever had.  They were so very grateful too, for the attention paid just to them. 

In a coastal town about and hour from San Pedro Sula where our medical teams often stayed I met a young missionary named, David.  He and his wife were originally from Arkansas .  He wandered around Central America for some time seeking what he thought God wanted him to do.  

When he encountered the Garifuna people he became intrigued that no one had ever learned their language.   There had been many Catholic missionaries in past years, but none had ever learned the language. 

So David decided that he should learn their language and be the first missionary that we know of to them other than the Catholics years ago.  When I met him, he had a new small church and was working on mastering their language.  He even had a radio show in their language.  It had a really large audience of Garifuna, mostly because they found it great fun to hear all the mistakes that he made trying to speak Garifuna on the radio show. 

David asked if he could show the Jesus Film in Spanish to the congregation in his new church.  It was on the same night that I had the electrical trouble with the old bob-tail truck, so I got there only at about the end of the showing. 

David and I visited afterward, mostly discussing these interesting people.  I asked him what would happen if we ever got the Jesus Film into their language.  He was overwhelmed at the thought.  He said thousands and thousands of them would find God and come to know Jesus and be saved into Heaven. 

I came back to the US and called Paul Eschelman about it.  As I mentioned earlier, up until that time we thought that the Jesus Film only had to be translated and produced into 89 languages.  However, Paul had discovered that words like “love” and “forgiveness” only have real meaning in a peoples’ heart language, not just the 89 trade languages that are mostly spoken around the world.  

Paul agreed to do it, and what was so interesting time wise, was that this would be the first making of the film into a “heart language”……….Garifuna.   

So we started making plans.  To save money it was decided to only lip-synch Jesus’ words in the film and have a narrator talk over the other parts.  They had done it that way before, and the way it turned-out, it really did not make that much difference.  So I really only needed to get two Garifuna speakers to California . 

David selected the two that he considered the most appropriate that could also speak fairly good English.  I went down to Houston to meet their plane to make sure that they got on the right flight to Los Angeles . 

We did real well until we got on the driverless rail train that circles the Houston Airport .  When that voice came on with no driver, I almost lost them, but finally got them on the plane to LAX. 

I had coached the folks at Campus Crusade who do the Jesus Film about how these Garifuna live mostly on a protein diet of fish and cassava.   We did not want them to get sick and delay the translation project, so the Campus Crusade folks had a diet all prepared for them.  

About two days later I got a call from California .  The Crusade people said that they had it all prepared what the two Garifuna speakers were to eat, but that all they wanted to eat was cheeseburgers.  I asked if they were doing OK on cheeseburgers, and the answer was “yes”.   So I said:   “Just give them cheeseburgers.”  

So, the Campus Crusade film team finished the Jesus Film in the Garifuna language.  It was now time to take it there for its Premiere.  

Paul Eshleman liked to go to as many premiers as he could manage, and he for sure wanted to go to this first one in the first Heart Language as he called it.  We coordinated with the young missionary down in Honduras and set a date.  I also recruited a really fine Christian oil man to go along with us too, Bob Foree, Jr.  His father had been on the Board of Dallas Baptist University with me when I was Chairman of the Board.  Uncle Bob, as we called him was one of the first Texas oil barons.  He was the one who drilled the well that off-set Dad Joiner’s that established the East Texas Oil Field. 

Previously when we were down in Honduras and speculating about getting the film into the Garifuna language, I had lamented to the young missionary, David, what a shame it was that we did not have a bible in their language to go along with the film.  David said, “Man, you can forget about that.  It is not even written”. 

In those days it was really hard to get a phone call back to the US from that part of Honduras .  David lived in the town of Tela on the east coast.   That was the town where United Fruit Company had once had its headquarters that I mentioned before.  To get a call out, you usually had to get an operator recruited to set up the call and then call you back when she had it all ready.  So, when you got a call from there it was usually to announce something really major……like someone had died or something. 

Three days before we left, I got a phone call from David.  I was so worried that he was calling to report some tragedy had happened.  Instead he said, “Ron, you won’t believe what has happened.  This lady has walked out of the jungle up in Guatemala and come down here with a bunch of bibles in the Garifuna language.”  I said, “How can that be”?  David explained that she had started with Wycliffe Bible Translators 27 years ago to put a bible into the Garifuna language.  With Wycliffe they had a rule that you are supposed to stop if you lose your partner, and even though she lost her’s, they let her stay on in their compound and finish.  I later learned from the Wycliffe people that if you can start with a language that has never been written, and put it into written form for the first time, you can use the phonetics of the language.  In this way, when it is done correctly, the speakers of that language can learn to read very easily. 

Just consider this timing.  This lady shows up with bibles she started on 27 years before, just one week before the premiere of the Jesus Film in that language.  You can call it a fortuitous coincidence.  I call it the amazing timing of God. 

David wanted the first showing to be in a Garifuna village down the coast from Tela.  Many Garifuna lived there, but it was so remote that it could only be reached by going over the mountains with great difficulty in a four wheeled drive vehicle with a very high center.  We loaded the generator and projector and film into a dugout canoe with an outboard motor and all piled in as a preferred way to go.  

We finally reached the village, and beached through the surf.   It was amazingly beautiful.  All the ground was covered with a vivid green grass that only grew about an inch high and appeared to be perfectly mowed in all directions.  The whole place was shaded by tall coconut palms, and there were beautiful little waterways meandering through the whole village. 

We rested in hammocks until it got dark.  We brought food for dinner, but one of the kids in the village caught a big iguana to roast for us. 

As was expected, they were just amazed to have a film in their heart language.  Like we did with the Hispanics, we showed it on a big white sheet so they could sit on both sides of the sheet for viewing.   You could just feel God’s Spirit there permeating the crowd. 

The lady from Maine who had spent 27 years translating for the Garifuna a Bible into their “heart language” wanted to be there for this first showing of the film in this very remote village.  David’s wife was able to get her there over the treacherous mountain roads in their 4-wheel drive jeep. 

There is that part in the film where Jesus has Peter throw out his net on the right side of the boat and Peter and his fellow fishermen bring in so many fish that the boat is just filled.   Wow!  That caused a huge commotion among those fish conscious Garifuna.  There is another place in the film where this cute little girl looks right into the camera and says some words.  The folks in California had her use a special idiom that is unique to the Garifulna language.  The crowd just couldn’t stop laughing at that. 

At the end when the film gives you a chance to ask Jesus into your heart and life, most all the crowd sincerely wanted to do so.  With one of the English speaking Graifuna translating, Paul Eshleman himself did the counseling, and those people were so filled with God’s Spirit that they did not want to stop.  They wanted to start a Christian church, right there.  David promised to come back and help them do exactly that.  

By now the surf and waves were much higher, but we managed to get back to Tela safely, although at some Campus Crusade meetings later, Paul accused me of trying to drown him that night. 

We showed the film several more times to different Garifuna groups, but the last showing in La Ceiba was the most dramatic.   La Ceiba is farther down the coast from San Pedro Sula and Tela, toward Nicaragua .  It has a port and limited commercial air service.  It also has a large Garifuna population, concentrated on its western side.

We arrived fairly early before dark and had plenty of time to set up the big white sheet/screen and get the projector and speakers well positioned.  We selected a big open soccer field for the showing. 

The lady who translated the bible into Garifuna went with us.  She brought a supply of those bibles. 

I was fascinated watching her visit with a large group of mostly Garifuna children.  She was teaching them to read their language right there.  But those kids kept looking at her mouth.  They just could not believe that their language was coming out of this very white lady’s mouth.  She was originally from the State of Maine , and she was very white from being closed-up inside all those years doing the translation. 

While waiting, I kept going over and over in my mind that she had started translating 27 years before, and here she was at what turned out to be a crowd of Garifunas at one of the premiere showings of the Jesus Film in their language with her just finished bibles.  This would be the primary place and optimum time for their distribution, and their printing had just been finished on time for this occasion after 27 years.  I just know that was God’s plan working as I mentioned before. 

The showing was a huge success with hundreds of children sitting right up front on both sides of the screen.  I don’t know how many prayed to accept Christ and come forward for counseling, but it was hundreds.   Paul and David handled the counseling.  The young man with the blue shades who spoke Jesus part in this version of the film was also there and helped with the counseling.  He had acquired these treasured blue sun-glasses while in California. He had gotten much closer to the Lord as one would expect after living those weeks in California with those wonderful Campus Crusade folks. 

As we were finishing up late that evening, I saw something that I had never seen before and have never seen since.  Paul Eschleman, standing out in that field, broke down in a wave of tears.  Sure, there had been a lot of pressure counseling all those people, but that was not why.  Later he told me. 

Paul had thought that the young man with the blue shades would go on and pastor some of the Garifuna groups.  He had expressed a desire to do so, but out in that field, in the dark, he had asked Paul how much money Paul was going to give him to do it.   Maybe it was because of the occasion and all those people accepting Christ, but that just devastated Paul.  Paul had assumed that the young man had higher or deeper motives in his heart. 

A year later I was back in Tela, two days in advance of another medical team.  With the help of the only local doctor we needed to select the optimum sites for the clinics.  That afternoon after the doctor and I had finished, I was walking back to that compound that had formerly been the headquarters for United Fruit.  It was now a hotel/resort on the beach where we stayed so many times and was great for housing the medical teams with its great food and contiguous beach as I have mentioned.

I hope Paul reads this.  I know he will be thrilled and gratified to find that this dude had “really come around” after all. 

But, unfortunately, there is more to this story.  Before we left for the States, I said to the group:  “We had better be careful.  We all know how powerful the Devil is.  He has had a strong hold on these people for many generations.  And here we are down here breaking his hold on them.”   He will not be pleased! 

Little did I know! 

When we arrived back in the Dallas airport Paul got the message that his daughter had been overcome by a strange infection and was dying.  It later took Billy Graham, his whole staff, Dr. Bill Bright and a host of Campus Crusade folks to pray that girl back from death. 

The fine Christian Dallas oil man had told us on the trip how thrilled he was that his wife had finally recently conquered years of alcoholism.  He had been praying for her for years.  But she was not there to meet him at the airport.  She was drunk again and passed-out on the floor at home. 

And my wife was not there to meet me.  She had run off with a homeopathic doctor to Oklahoma with our four children and filed for divorce. 

Welcome home from ministering to the Garifuna! 

If you would like to watch the Jesus Film also, get yourself all prepared to watch a full length movie, and then go to this site and be really blessed…………….. https://www.jesusfilm.org/watch/jesus.html/english.html

如果你也想看耶稣电影，让自己准备好看一部完整的电影，然后去这个网站，真的很幸运………. https://www.jesusfilm.org/watch/jesus.html/chinese-mandarin.html

The Take-up Reel

On about the third medical team trip down to Honduras, I got this neat idea.  After our labors in the heat and humidity all day and from the pressures of the mass of people, everyone is just exhausted at the end of each day.  However, as I have related several times, we want to show the Jesus Film on the night where we have had the clinic that day.  But like I related, everyone is so tired at that point.  I send them back to rest-up for the next day.  When we are staying at the old United Fruit compound in Tela, they can refresh in the nice clear waters of the Caribbean and they can get rehydrated with the great limeades they serve there made from the local limes. 

Since Onelia and I have to stay at the clinic site without all those amenities, I thought it would be a great idea to have someone like an electrician go with us on the trip and be in charge of getting all of the electricity set up, and other preparations for showing the film.  Then it would be great for him to run the projector and change the reels and keep the speakers working and set up the string of lights for the people to come out of the dark and stand under who wanted to make a decision to have God in their life.  So, before we left I called the pastor of the church that was to sponsor that trip, and asked him to recruit an electrician from his church or from his community.  I volunteered to pay his way.

The pastor understood and recruited what he said was just the right man.  I called back three different times before we left to ask if the man was bringing extra extension cords, extra wire to splice if necessary, adaptors in case we needed to go from 220v to 110v for the projector.  And I particularly wanted to know if the man had practiced with the projector we were to take and knew everything about running it and changing the reels.

The pastor assured me that it all had been taken care of.  On the third call, the pastor said in exasperation:  “Ronald, just don’t worry about it.  He is ready!”

On this trip we had a whole day to get everything ready for the clinics.  Everyone prepared for their assigned tasks.  A local carpenter had made nice reclining chairs for the dentists which worked great.  However, that morning the pastor and the electrician fellow came to me with this dark look on their faces.  After all the fellow’s preparation and my exhortations, he had forgotten to bring a take-up reel for the projector.

You can’t show the film without a take-up reel.  The 16mm film has four reels.  You run each reel onto the take-up reel and then run it back onto its original reel.  If you have only one take-up reel, you run it back right there and have 3 intermissions during the showing for the people to go to the bathroom or discuss what they have just seen.

I said that:  “You must find one!  Make one of you have to!  I have paid your way down here just for this!   Do something!  David has invited all the black Garifina people in this area to his church to see the film tonight in Spanish!  We have to show it!”

That afternoon I asked them if they had one.  They said they had scoured the whole town without success.  I had told them to check with the two local theaters, but they said that the equipment at the theaters was all 32mm and would not fit.  They said that they could not find anything to make one with.  I had suggested that they check with the manager of our hotel facility, but they found him of no help.

That was the afternoon I had promised the group of doctors and nurses and dentists that I would take them off to the village where our clinic was to be the next two days.  It was also the evening that the truck stopped in the village and miraculously started again.  So, before I left with those medical folks standing up in the back of the truck, I told the electrician:  “You have got to do something!”

Several hours later, when I got back to Tela, I drove straight to the new Garifuna church after dropping off the medical folks.  Mirabile dictu,  they were just finishing the film.

Of course, I was anxious to know what had happened, and this is what the young man related to me after the film was finished:  He said that as it was getting late in the afternoon and time to leave for the church; he still had no take-up reel.  I said: “But you were going anyway!”  He said: “Yes, but I was praying like I had never prayed in my life.”   He said that just as he was reaching down to the handle of the car door to open it, the manager of the hotel called to him from up at the office and motioned for him to come over.   He went over and the manager said:  “Tell me once more what you are talking about.”  So, the young man explained.  He said that the manager then got a chair and pushed it over to the counter where you check into the hotel.  The manger then crawled up onto the counter and stood up.  He reached along the wall, way up to the ceiling.  The young man said that there was a space between the edge of the ceiling and the wall. 

The manger reached up into that space on top of the ceiling and pulled out and old take-up reel all covered in dust and cobwebs.  It must have been left by the United Fruit people years ago.  The manager had been reaching up there for some reason long ago and had felt of it there.

You can say that this was a very fortuitous coincidence.  But the young man and I considered it and all the timing involved, an overt, miraculous act of God.

If you would like to watch the Jesus Film also, get yourself all prepared to watch a full length movie, and then go to this site and be really blessed…………….. https://www.jesusfilm.org/watch/jesus.html/english.html

如果你也想看耶稣电影，让自己准备好看一部完整的电影，然后去这个网站，真的很幸运………. https://www.jesusfilm.org/watch/jesus.html/chinese-mandarin.html

I first met Joanne at a big political function down in Austin.  Everyone who was “anyone” was there, including President Johnson.  She has always lived in Houston.  Her name was Joanne King then; though she later married the wealthy Bob Herring, Chairman of Houston Natural Gas, and became Joanne Herring.

Even at that early time she was already considered the “hostess with the mostess” in America, the ultimate hostess.  Men in Houston would bring their lunch to the office so that they could watch Joanne’s TV chat show at noon.  They just got uplifted by her incredible personality.

Her parties were already legendary, some lasting for several days with different events over the several days.

I was having a real struggle at that time.  I had already moved into that big house on the ranch; but needed to get a trust finished with US Trust Company of New York to obtain proper title to most all the rest of the 1,600 acres.  US Trust would not complete the trust unless I could acquire the mineral rights to the land that were in the name of another person.

That house and land had originally been put together by a gunfighter from out in west Texas named Jim Christal who got his leg shot off and had come to Denton to pursue a different profession.  He became quite successful and not only had that house and land; but built a fine house in town.  He bought sheep from Ireland which had gold colored hoofs, and named the Ranch, The Golden Hoof Ranch.

After he died, a very wealthy oil man from east Texas sold all his holding in east Texas and bought Jim Christal’s house and land and continued the name, Golden Hoof Ranch.  Before he died, this fellow and his black-haired daughter completely redid and expanded the house.  I heard many tales about her and her beautiful black-haired daughter.  They say that her husband went off on a trip to South America and was mysteriously killed, and that she immediately married the ranch manager.  

What I eventually found out was that this ranch manager was the one who still owned the mineral rights.  I heard all manner of tales about how mysterious and reclusive this fellow was; and he was no where to be found.  Not to be dramatic, but I really thought that God wanted me to have this place.  Yet, I had no idea how to find this fellow and try to get those mineral rights.

Right about this time, Joanne called and really wanted me to come to one of her “super parties” that she had planned.  I don’t know why, but I definitely felt compelled to go.

She had brought many of her friends over from Europe for it………like Princess Pia, and Princess Panatelli.  The Baroness Di Portanova was there and even Princess Barbara von Liechtenstein; of the family from which the Country of Liechtenstein gets its name.

The first function was a dance at a big home in Beaumont.  I did not stay at the hotel where most of the others were staying, so Joanne came by and picked me up at my hotel in her limousine.  She never received any money for her popular TV show.  Instead she asked for a permanent limousine and driver, and three trips to Europe per year.

A lovely black-haired lady named Julie Stienhagen was the owner of the home in Beaumont.  I was told that her husband controlled much of the gasoline trade on that part of the Texas coast, but that they were not real close. 

In fact, he never showed that whole weekend. 

That house had three stories plus a basement and a wine cellar below that.  The third floor was mostly a large dance floor, reached by elevator.  I dutifully visited with those people.  Some were quite interesting; but a most unusual thing happened. 

Julie took a small group of us on a tour of the house.  I know what déjà vu means, but what happened to me there on that night in that place was way more intense.  It was like the furniture and the pictures and certain other things in that house were totally familiar to me…….like I just knew them.   It was so intense that I called back to Dallas while I was there to try to explain it to two different friends, but it sounded so ridiculous that I just cut off the attempted conversation.

Finally, we headed back to Houston.  What I had never understood was that I was supposed to be Joanne’s date for the whole affair. 

The next day Barbara von Liechtenstein wanted me to take her through NASA.  She was right there in Houston and had heard so much about it.  So, I happily offered to take her there.  It is hard to describe how gorgeous that young lady was.  The guys who work at NASA have seen all manner of fancy folks….dignitaries, famous politicians, heads of governments, and a plethora of beautiful lady movie stars.  However, I don’t think they had ever seen a lady as gorgeous as Barbara.

Guys were walking into walls while looking back at her, dropping tools on their feet, and just staring at her.  She became quite a spectacle and caused quite a stir, but I am sure that she was used to it.

Then, that night, there was a dinner and a dance at a disco.  At that moment in history, a disco was really a quite new and novel thing.  I mostly sat-out the evening, for I had found a most interesting friend.  He had come over from Ireland and was the President of the Castle Preservation Society of Europe.  He was not nearly as boring as that title sounds.  He was really quite young for such a title and so much fun.  Also, he raised cattle and was very interested in the Santa Gertrudis cattle that I raised.

The disco wasn’t very large, and Julie Steinhagen was dancing right in front of us and kept motioning over and over for me to come join her.  I was having such a good time with my Irish friend that I didn’t go.  Finally, she came over and sat down right in front of me, and looked me straight in the eye and said:  “Please don’t think that I am being forward and that this is some kind of ‘come-on’, but there is something about you that is so unusually familiar that I just have to know why.”

She wanted to know all about me since she was feeling this strange “familiarity” with me.  She knew that we had never met, but she kept trying to understand why she felt this closeness to me.  We went through that I was from Texas, and near Denton, and when I finally got down to the exact location of that house where I now lived on the ranch.  Julie nearly fainted.  She was the black-haired daughter of the black-haired women who had previously owned the house.  The special room in the house’s upstairs with its big picture window that looked out across the country-side, the door out to an outside balcony, and the pink tiled bathroom with its special fixtures…..That had all been Julie’s room.

Now I found out the answer to the so strange déjà vu episode from the evening before in Julie’s home.  All that furniture and those pictures had all been her mother’s and had all once resided in my home on the ranch.  Also, maybe that explained why Julie felt such a familiarity to me.  Strange.

It turned out that Julie was the one person in the world who knew where her stepfather could be reached and who had leverage over him……..the guy who still owned the mineral rights that I needed to close on the land.   She said she would have him call me.   However, after two weeks I still had not heard from him.

I called Julie and told her that.  She said, very firmly:  “OK, he will call you!!!”  Very early the next morning he called.  He said that he would meet me at 6:30 AM the next morning in at motel on I-35.  We met, I gave him a check for $60,000 and had the mineral rights to the whole property.  It seemed like a waste of money at the time, for everybody knew that there was nothing under the land but a thick layer of very hard black shale rock.

Many years later, after my friend George Mitchell at Mitchell Energy showed the world how to frack that hard shale and get out hydrocarbons, $60,000 seemed like a bargain.

So, Joanne was not just a party girl and a TV darling.  Her father, who owned a big construction company and was the consummate outdoorsman, made sure that she learned to ride and shoot at an early age.  When it actually looked like our country may go Communist or had the threat of being taken over by the Communists, a large group was formed to oppose such.  They were called the Minute Men.  Then the Minute Women were formed and trained in gorilla tactics and how to handle automatic weapons.  Joanne became a Minute Woman.

She continued her “social activities” and  entertained people like……….arms dealer Adnan Khashoggi; the former president of Egypt, Anwar Sadat; King Hussein of Jordan; Princess Grace; and the Shah of Iran  and other “such” at her and Bob Herring’s 22-room mansion in Houston.

Later, the rulers of Pakistan wanted Bob Herring to come and drill for oil there.  They even wanted him to be their Consul in the US.  Since he did not wish for that job, he suggested that they give that job to his wife, Joanne.  That was rather awkward for Muslims to give a woman such responsibility, but they did it anyway because of their desire for Bob Herring’s help in drilling for oil.

She took the job quite seriously.  When General Zia (Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq) took over Pakistan by force, she went over to meet him.  He was so “taken with her” that she became his main foreign advisor.  They say that even when he was in an important Cabinet meeting, he would immediately stop to take a telephone call from Joanne. 

By now, Bob Herring had died, but she stayed very interested in that part of the world.  Her main motive was that she did not want the Russians to take over any of it.  Of course, this coincided with US interests also, and why the US kept giving so much aid to Pakistan.

Then the Russian army invaded Afghanistan and took over the whole country.  Afghanistan had always been a “little brother” to Pakistan.  No one in the US seemed to be doing anything about it.  This was “some disturbing” to Joanne.  She decided that she had to do something about it.

A whole bunch of really brave and tough Afghans moved across the border into Pakistan to try to oppose the Russians’ taking over their country.  I have a good friend in Afghanistan that I have stayed with two times who moved his whole family across the border.  He was not going to live under Russian rule.

That brave group called themselves The Mujahideen, and started their ten year war against the Russians.  I met three of them when they came to Dallas to try to raise money for their cause.  They showed us a graphic film of a group of them going all the way across Afghanistan, traveling by night, and blowing up the electric transmission towers outside Kabul.

Joanne went over there right away and met their leaders and pledged her help.  Of course, she would have charmed the socks off them just like she did General Zia, if they had worn socks.  But she charmed them anyway.

Right off the bat, she recognized their disadvantage.  No matter how brave and motivated they were, they only had small arms and a few mortars.  This was no match for the Russian tanks and ground strafing fighter planes and especially those awesome, fierce Russian attack helicopters.  Surely you have seen pictures of them.  In the last Rambo movie he captured one and used it back against the Russians.  In the scene that was supposed to be in Afghanistan in the movie, when all seemed lost, the Mujahideen came on horseback and rescued him.

Joanne tried all manner of her contacts in the US for help; but was getting no where.  Finally, she tried the “Wild Man” legislator in the US House of Representatives, Joe Wilson.  His district was in was East Texas.  He was considered, rather accurately, a boozer and a womanizer.  And he was no match for Joanne.

She conscripted him to actually go to Pakistan and meet the leaders of the Mujahideen.  They put him on horseback and took him all around and pleaded their cause.  Joanne succeeded.  Joe Wilson just became captivated by them and the just cause of their war against the Russian military.

If any of this seems familiar to you, then you have seen the recent Movie, “Charlie Wilson’s War”.   It is very historically accurate.  Julia Roberts had not made a movie in over 3 years, but she changed her hairdo to look like Joanne’s and played the part of Joanne in the movie.  I saw it a few years ago on a big 747 on a flight to Hong Kong.

Joanne and Charlie Wilson both knew what it would take for the Mujahideen to win and drive the Russians out of Afghanistan.  They had to be able to shoot down those strafing fighter planes and particularly those fierce attack helicopters.   The one, optimum weapon that would do it was the shoulder-fired Stinger heat-seeking missile in the US arsenal. 

Charlie went on what could only be called a crusade to get them for the Mujahideen.  He had no luck with our State Department or our military.  No one wanted to let those “get out of our hands” for fear they may be used by terrorists to shoot down airliners.  Charlie then tried pressure from the US Congress. 

It is a “long story”, but he finally succeeded.   The CIA helped him get them to the Mujahideen. 

When that first big, mean Russian helicopter was zooming straight in, firing rockets and 30 calibers attacking the Mujahideen, one of them bravely stood there out in the open.  That little rocket whooshed off his shoulder, headed straight for the front of that mean Russian helicopter.  It exploded and went down in flames, and as they say in East Texas:  “Those Russians just couldn’t stood that!!!”  As it got worse and worse for them, the Russians did leave Afghanistan for good.

And it really happened, just like in the last scene in the movie, the CIA gave Charlie Wilson one of those Stingers’ to hang on the wall above his desk in Washington, DC.  It was a commemorative, victory moment.

The last time I was with Joanne was years later in Houston at one of those Here’s Life meetings hosted by Bunker Hunt to raise big money for evangelism and to fund showing the Jesus Film in parts of Africa and India.  I sat between Joanne and her “tough” father at the first night’s dinner and program.   Last thing on the program was Dr. Bill Bright.  His staff only wanted him to make a sincere appeal for money.

I hosted a luncheon for Campus Crusade in Dallas where I had invited a bunch of Dallas businessmen.  Dr. Bright was the speaker, and his staff only wanted him to make a similar appeal for funds.  Not Dr. Bright.  If he was going to speak, he was going to present the Plan of Salvation and invite people to find the real God for their life.  In spite of his staff, he did, and asked all of the businessmen to leave one of their business cards on the table when they left, and to put a check mark on the card if they had “prayed that prayer”.

When we got back to my office, I was amazed at all the cards that had been checked.  And Dr. Bright exclaimed to his staff:  “See there; see those checked cards.  That’s my thing……..That’s what I do……That is what I live for!!!”

In Houston that night, he did the same thing; like only Bill Bright can present the Plan of Salvation.  And so help me, right there beside me, Joanne prayed to accept the Lord and ask Jesus into her heart.

In that movie, “Joe Wilson’s War”, in typical Hollywood fashion, they have Joanne “sleeping around”.  But let me tell you…….that was the Joanne before she became a real Christian!!!

One of the greatest heroes of WWII and the epitome of the Greatest Generation was Joe Foss.  He grew up really poor on a farm in South Dakota.  He learned to hunt and was quite the outdoorsman.  He did manage to enroll in the University of South Dakota and was big in all their athletic programs but had to drop out to go back and help his mother on the family farm.  However, he later enrolled again and graduated with a degree in Business in 1940.

He had seen Lindbergh at an airfield when he was younger and was determined to fly.  He had already scraped together enough money for flying lessons and had his civilian license, so he joined the Marine Reserves and went to flight school.  When Pearl Harbor was bombed, he was Officer of the Day at Pensacola and rode around the base on his bicycle looking for Jap planes.

He was not allowed to train as a fighter pilot as he desperately wanted.  They said at age 27 he was too old.  He was instead assigned to an aerial photographer’s squadron.  Joe just could not abide that, especially after he saw one of the new F4F Wildcats.  He put up such a ruckus that they finally assigned him to a squadron of Wildcats.

He and his plane were loaded onto an aircraft carrier and sent straight across the Pacific.  He arrived at just the time that we invaded Guadalcanal.  The Marines captured the Japanese airfield there and set up residence.  Joe’s carrier was sent straight there, and he was catapulted off for his only takeoff from a carrier.  He landed on the bomb-pocked field which the Marines had named Henderson Field and became part of the Cactus Air Force on Guadalcanal.

The Japanese were determined to push them off that island.  They mounted attack after attack by land, and mounted daily air strikes.  They came up what was called “The Slot” between the islands to shell them from the sea.  They even flew over at night to keep the guys from sleeping.  The Grumman F4F was no match for the agile Japanese Zeros, but Joe Foss was absolutely ferocious.  He led their daily flights and many times afternoon flights.  The Japanese bombed daily with their Betty Bombers protected by their Zeros.

Joe became an ace in only 5 days.  In only a few more days he had 11 kills but lost 4 Wildcats from getting shot-up because of his daring maneuvers.  Because they had so few planes and even less ammunition Joe learned to get in really close before firing.  The Japs made it hard to get fuel and ammunition and supplies into their base by patrolling up and down what became known as Iron Bottom Sound.  Joe even led his small squadrons out to strafe the Jap destroyers and shoot down the Zeros protecting them. 

Within the first 13 days, Joe had wracked-up 14 kills, and on October 25, 1942 he became the first Navy pilot to ace on enemy planes in one day.

The pilots would bathe in the river there and try to get some sleep.  The men there mostly slept in the daytime since the Jap night fighters made it so hard to sleep at night.  For sport, Joe and his pilot friends would roam in the jungle on afternoons they were not flying, hunting Japanese soldiers to kill.  But Colonel Bauer put a stop to that since they were too valuable as pilots to risk such hunting.

After 23 victories on Guadalcanal Joe caught malaria like so many others there.  Since he was so valuable, they flew him off to recuperate in Australia for a while.  But they couldn’t keep this ferocious South Dakota fighter away.  He went back and rejoined the Cactus Air Force and had 3 more kills for a total of 26. 

His most important mission resulted in no enemy kills at all.  The Japanese came with a big task force of ships and a huge contingent of Betty’s and Zeros.  Joe was credited with leading a daring performance.  He circled above the enemy aircraft and ships in such a way as to trick them into thinking he was leading an advance squadron of a much, much larger strike force of US planes.  It resulted in the Japanese calling off their whole mission without a shot being fired.

While the war was still young, Joe was called back to the States to rally morale and stump for the War Bond selling effort.  He traveled all over and was a huge success.

He already had a bunch of medals, but in May of 1943 received the Congressional Medal of Honor from President Roosevelt. 

In later years, Joe Foss became Governor of South Dakota.   He was the first Commissioner of the American Football League.  He even served as President of the National Rifle Association for 2 years.

Now to what I really wanted to tell you.    A few years ago, I had the privilege of spending several days and a weekend with Joe Foss and his good friend, Roy Rogers at a Here’s Life Meeting in Palm Springs.  I can attest that they are both not just strong Christians but are personally really close to the Lord.

I asked Roy Rogers if he was reared on a ranch as a cowboy out west.  He told me:  “Naw man, I am from Duck Run Missouri.  We were so poor; the road did not even go past our house.  It stopped at our house.”   I said “But you are a Hollywood cowboy that has blessed so many people”.   And he said,  “Well, I thought that was the best route to take.  My biggest step up the ladder was when I married Dale Evans, who was way farther up the ladder than I was.”  Then Dales Evans, who was standing right there with us, chimed in:  “Yea, and he almost lost me when I found out that he came together with all those hound dogs of his.”

Roy, and Joe Foss were big quail hunters.  But I got the chance to ask Roy if he had any other hobbies than hunting quail and chasing foxes with his hound dogs.  So, he told me all about his hobby of diligently collecting the songs that the early pioneers sang around their campfires at night on their wagon train trips to Oregon and California.   He has collected as many of those as he could before they were lost to posterity.

I asked Joe Foss when was the last time he and Roy went quail hunting.  He said last season. “When we almost lost Roy.”   Then he related how they were getting lots of quail one afternoon when they shot one quail that fell way across a creek.  So Roy said:   “Don’t worry I will go over and get that quail, because the dogs didn’t even see where it went down.”  However, Joe Foss said that Roy never came back.  He and their friend went down there and found Roy passed-out by the creek.  He had turned blue and really looked bad.  They got the pickup truck and loaded him in the back and headed for town.  Joe said they kept watching him through the back window.  They said he kept fishing around in his pocket with his finger and finally found his bottle of nitroglycerin pills and popped some in his mouth.  In a few minutes he was banging in the back window of the truck wanting to go back hunting.  But they took him on to the hospital.

Now let me get to the real point, and theme of this book.  I asked Joe Foss, “Governor Foss, (I could have said General Foss, for he was later promoted to Brigadier General in the Air National Guard, but he liked ‘Governor’) it is for sure that God protected you in the Pacific.  Time and again you were given up for lost, and here you would come back, walking out of the jungle with a stalk of bananas over your shoulder.   But is there one specific occasion when it was very obvious that God’s Spirit Power just came down and saved you when everything was totally lost and there was no way out”.  And he said, “Yes there was, Ronald, there certainly was”.   So, I asked him to tell me and my group of friends there about it.

So, Governor Foss said that late one evening off a strongly held Japanese island his plane got all shot-up.  His engine sputtered and quit.  He glided low way off the end of that island and ditched in the water.  He managed to get out and into his little yellow life raft just as it was getting dark.  He knew that the Japanese saw him go down and that, in the morning, they would be coming for him.  They knew who he was as flight leader on all those raids and air battles.  He had heard about their torture tactics.  He knew that they would not give him a quick death, but what was going to happen to him could be described as worse than death.  So, he floated there in the water dreading tomorrow morning.

Something else happened, though, as he splashed into the water just before dark.  Some natives on that island, who really hated the Japanese, saw him go down, also.  He was quite a way out there, but they rowed all the way out in their outrigger canoes and were able to find him in the total darkness.  They took him back and hid him, and then passed him along to other natives until he finally got back to his unit.

Governor Joe said you could consider that a fortuitous accident, but that he considered it a divine, lifesaving, intervention of God on his behalf.

I have already alluded to Dr. E.V. Hill’s insight into how God works. Remember, Dr. Hill said that God decided to do His work only through people. As Dr. Hill put it: That was the dumbest thing God could have ever done. Dr. Hill said: “That is God’s Plan A; he ain’t got no Plan B.”

In that context it is my contention that God used Dr. Teller’s brilliant mind and background to protect America and its people, even with all of Dr. Teller’s faults. He was born in Hungary to an affluent Jewish family. It was there where he was influenced for the rest of his life by the horrors he saw in Communist dictatorships. He then moved to Germany where he was also influenced for the rest of his life by the horrors he saw in Nazism, The National Socialists Party. He finally got to the United States. He was one of the first to sound the alarm over Germany’s work to produce an atomic bomb.

He drove the car for Leo Szilard, his boyhood friend in Hungary, when those two brilliant physicists went to Long Island to Albert Einstein’s cottage and secured the letter from Einstein to FDR that caused Roosevelt to initiate the Manhattan Project for the US to produce an atomic bomb first.

By the time the war started, he was a respected professor at George Washington University, but left in the spring of 1943 to move to Los Alamos where he was recruited to work on developing the atomic bomb.

All along, Dr. Teller saw the possibility of a much greater bomb by using atomic energy to compress and ignite a large mass of tritium or deuterium to cause fusion. He is thus considered the father of the Hydrogen Bomb even though the brilliant mathematician Stanislaw Ulam actually worked out the detailed calculations for it. Dr. Teller was obsessed that the US produce the hydrogen bomb before the Russians did at the start of the Cold War.

Dr. Teller’s mind was just amazing, and he managed to keep it very clear and active until he died at age 95 in 2003. He did this by getting hyperbaric oxygen treatments every month from a doctor in Dallas. I have studied hundreds of x-rays and their dates that prove that proper hyperbaric treatments will also cause bones to heal in a matter of days instead of weeks. It does the same for severe bruises and many other ailments. The National Football League finally started using it to heal their players more quickly.

On my lunch hour I used to go up to Dr. Maxfield’s clinic and visit. He would show me x rays of former patients, file after file. Their dates showed how bones healed amazingly fast. One that I remember vividly was of a high school student from Canada. He was the goalie on his school’s hockey team. They were to play for their Province’s championship game, but he broke his arm in their final playoff game. His father knew about Dr. Maxfield and hyperbaric treatments from his mining company. One of his father’s key foremen had a broken bone that just would not heal. The foreman was sent down to Dallas and the hyperbaric oxygen treatments healed the bone quickly.

So, the father sent his son down to Dallas for those treatments before their Championship game in two weeks. Dr. Maxfield told the boy’s mother that he thought the boy would be able to play. However, when she went into the doctor to have the boy’s cast cut off, the doctor said: “What in the world do you mean. I just put that cast on a few days ago!” She called back to Dallas to ask what to do. Dr. Maxfield told her to go down the street to another doctor, and not say anything other than to just cut the cast off.

The boy did play, though I did not hear whether they won the championship or not.

Another time I was there at the clinic and stopped to visit with this older woman. She was just fussing and fussing. I asked her what was wrong: “You are supposed to feel great when your treatment is finished.”

She said: “Oh, I do, my leg is completely healed.”

“So, what are you fussing about?”

Then I looked down and her other leg was completely gone. She was fussing because she would still have it if she had known about hyperbaric oxygen treatments. And I said: “You were smoking too much weren’t you.” She hung her head and said: “Yes.”

It consists of being in a chamber for about an hour at 2 ½ atmospheres of pressure in a pure oxygen environment. It just saturates the body and one’s brain with healing oxygen. Where the football players use a fairly large chamber, Dr. Maxfield used a glass tube just large enough to hold Dr. Teller’s prone body. My 2nd oldest son used to go with me when Dr. Teller was getting treatments. Raymond would bolt the end on the chamber down, and then unbolt it when Dr. Teller’s treatment was finished. They could have used much higher atmospheres of pressure, but it was found the 2 ½ was sufficient and that higher pressures caused no better results.

As I mentioned, his mind was just amazing. I would spend time with him at Dr. Maxfield’s place on Lake Kiowa near Gainesville. We would discuss different potential business projects that Dr. Teller had thought up that he wanted me to pursue.

On one occasion after his treatment he wanted a good hamburger. We decided to take him to a county club in Dallas where the chef made great ones. I had three books with me that I wanted Dr. Teller to read and give me a report on rhetorical physics and its implications on his next trip to Dallas for his treatments a month later. He went on up ahead with his doctor and my son and I followed along behind in my Suburban. Much to my amazement, when we arrived at the country club he had devoured all three books and gave me the analysis before lunch.

General Lemay kept our country safe during the Cold War with manned aircraft. As the age of rockets carrying nuclear bombs dawned, Lemay thought we should still keep some manned aircraft as a safeguard. We did with the B-1 bomber that flies under enemy radar and the new stealth bomber. But the Russians could still target every one of our ICBM rockets and every one of our aircraft on the ground, and all our ships with rockets, and every one of our aircraft carriers with a first strike by their rockets. I have been told by analysts at the CIA that they most likely would have done so except for one thing………our Trident Submarines.

The “cream of the crop” in our navy seeks to enter the Trident Program. They get their new Trident sub and then go out and shoot one Trident missile for practice. Then in a few days they submerge for 89 days and get totally lost. The Russians don’t have a clue where they are.

With the help of Dr. Teller and his friends I have been allowed to go down on those Tridents. You stand in the War Room and look down through that long sub with 12 Trident missiles on each side. The sailors sleep between the missiles. I have talked to the weapon’s officer. He said he could only tell me that each of the 24 missiles could travel over 10,000 miles. Each one has 7 to 8 independently targeted war heads. When I asked the weapon’s officer how he would deploy those war heads, he said that he could lay a star pattern over the whole Moscow area.

When I wanted to get some idea of just how destructive a hydrogen weapon would be, I was told that just one detonated at 2½ thousand feet would blow a hole in the ground 500 feet deep and 12 miles across, with all of that material blasted into the air with its deadly fallout. And not even counting the blast effects way on beyond the 12 miles. Yet, the Russians never dared touch us because of those Trident subs.

Each Trident has two devices that just barely fit into their torpedo tubes. One was sitting right there in the War Room since it was too big to fit most anywhere else. If the officers on the Trident think they may have been discovered, they can send out one of these devices. They are so designed to perfectly simulate a Trident sub. In this way the real sub can have a high chance of getting lost again.

To shoot their one practice missile before submerging for 89 days, they liked to do so in a few hours after the launch of one of our Space Shuttles. All the cameras and tracking devices are set-up down range to track the flight of the Shuttle. So, the tracking of the Trident missal can just be used by them, also.

Every sub has a tender or fairly large ship that stays on the surface in the general area of the sub’s location. It has all kinds of provisions and safety devices in case of an emergency on the sub. I have been on those tenders. I have never seen such elaborate showers as they have. They are to wash down any sailors who may have been exposed to the nuclear material that powers the sub.

Also, with the help of Dr. Teller and his friends, I was allowed to go out on the tender ship to observe a Trident shoot its one practice missile. That morning we were in the VIP area with the astronaut’s families and the technical officers for the Shuttle launch. It is an amazing sight.

Then that night after it was totally dark, we went out with the submerged sub.

Just off Cape Canaveral the Russians keep an observation ship permanently moored there. It is not huge, but it has all manner of electronic listening and observation devices all over it. As our tender went out, the Russian ship pulled up its anchors and went out with us.

The tender has a wide, curved bridge or war room almost the whole width of the ship. It was lit only with the eerie red light that they use for night operations. It is a great place to observe, but I wanted to get outside in the front on the main deck of the ship to watch. On that deck was one of the sophisticated camera cages from Hollywood where the photographer sits in the cage that tilts in any direction to film the missile launch and track it on camera.

It got quite tense as the time for the missal shot approached. It blasts from 300 feet down up into the air where it ignites and zooms off into space. I wanted to know if I would be able to get a picture of it; and was told not to worry. I would totally be able to. As the time approached for the shot, there were two helicopters sweeping the area to make sure there were no stray craft around. I was fascinated to see them shine their powerful search lights down onto the Russian ship and the Russian ship shine its powerful lights back up at the helicopters.

Just before the missal blasted out of the ocean, a sailor and I saw this little red streak shoot up from the Russian ship. Then we saw all these flairs going up from what appeared to be from the surface of the water. It was so dark that we could not tell for sure. We, along with most everyone else assumed the flairs were part of the operation.

Wow! That missal lit-up everything. Since there were no clouds, you could follow its bright glow far off into the distant sky.

Later we learned that one of the helicopters had gone down. It did not just crash; it had slowly settled down to the surface of the water in the pitch dark. Those flairs that the sailor and I saw were distress signals from the three officers in the helicopter. No one had taken notice of them since everyone was concentrating on the missile shot.

Eventually we went over and picked up the three officers who had been in the front of the helicopter. However, the three airmen who had been in the back of the helicopter were no-where to be found. We searched all around, but they were not found. Since the helicopter had settled down onto the water gently, we were sure they had not been injured.

We were supposed to go back to the port at Cape Canaveral, but we spent the whole rest of the night looking for them. We did find the helicopter floating just below the surface and pulled it onboard. We then spent the whole next day navigating in ever-widening squares searching for the three airmen.

I visited with an engineer from a contracting company who was onboard. His company made the covers or seals that covered the tops of the missals when their outside shields are opened. He was sad about not finding the airmen, but he was thrilled that we were able to recover the several pieces of those seals. He had never been able to retrieve them before. I helped him put them back together on the deck. They fit together like the slices of an orange.

That afternoon, the sailor and I were hauled in and admonished to never breathe a word of what we had seen just before the missal shot. We knew that those Russians had shot down the helicopter; and had for sure captured the three airmen. So far as I know, they were never heard from again.

Late that afternoon we finally went back into port. As we passed by that Russian observation ship which was anchored back there again as it always is, I had heavy mixed feelings.

Ella Graham lived west of Waco , west of Crawford right close to where George Bush’s ranch is now located.  She was a good family friend and totally blind.  She went blind when she was only 4 years of age.  She thought that she could remember colors but was not sure.  She was in her early 70’s and had been the first blind school teacher ever in Texas in the little Crawford high school. 

She was very cultured and very romantic.  Even at her age she was still a beautiful white-haired lady.  When she was a student at Baylor they say she was just gorgeous.  Though the young men just lined-up to read her lessons to her back then, she never married.  She said that she felt that being blind, she would have been too much of a burden on a husband. 

But she was such a romantic person that she had gotten her degree at Baylor in Browning.   You know, Elizabeth and Barrett Browning the famous poets who wrote all those romantic poems and that romantic prose. Surely you have read it or heard it…….. like Elizabeth ’s Sonnet 43 as she wrote to her lover, Robert………. 

“How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.   I love thee to the depth and breadth and height my soul can reach, when feeling out of sight for the ends of being and ideal grace.  I love thee to the level of every day’s most quiet need, by sun and candle-light.   I love thee freely, as men strive for right; I love thee purely, as they turn from praise.  I love thee with the passion put to use in my old griefs, and with my childhood’s faith.  I love thee with a love I seemed to lose with my lost saints. I love thee with the breath, smiles, tears, of all my life; and, if God choose, I shall but love thee better after death.” 

Wow!  Now that’s romantic!  And Robert Browning’s famous poem/song………Pippa Passes…….as innocent Pippa sings as she passes by……    

The year’s at the spring 
    And day’s at the morn; 
    Morning’s at seven; 
    The hillside’s dew-pearled; 
    The lark’s on the wing; 
    The snail’s on the thorn: 
    God’s in His heaven— 
    All’s right with the world!

The famous Browning Library at Baylor has a bronze statue of Pippa out in front of it, and inside it has all the memorabilia of the Brownings’…….most all of their complete works and even their actual desks from which their writings were done.

Yes, Miss Ella was such a romantic.  She wrote to me on an old typewriter with blue ink ribbon.  Her prose was like reading poetry.  I have kept all of her letters.   Many times when I would have a date with one of those beautiful Baylor girls, I would drive out to Crawford and take her along with us.  She would so enjoy it.  The girls would not mind as she lightly looked them over with her fingers.  She was always so interested in their hands.  She judged them some way or other by how their fingers were shaped.

She would particularly enjoy it when we would take her to the movies.  I think it was because this was something blind ladies never did. 

So, one time she was visiting our home at Rainbow Lake .  It was late in the afternoon.  We were sitting in front of that big picture window that looked down over the lake.  The other windows were wide open to let in the lovely Spring air.  And this daddy Cardinal was just singing his Springtime song at the top of his voice.

See, Miss Ella just loved Cardinals.  They would sing to her outside her bedroom windows near Crawford.  She would mention it sometimes in her letters as she was typing.  Her lovely stationary even had a picture of a red daddy Cardinal at the top of it.

Then, as we were listening to the bird’s song, Miss Ella said:  “Oh, Ronny, I do so wish that I could see a Cardinal!” 

And I must have just prayed, for I distinctly remember thinking:  “Lord, why can’t this lovely, Godly woman see a Cardinal?”

But I was jolted to attention, for my mother called to me to go out to the boat house and get some meat for supper out of the freezer.  I jumped-up and went out the kitchen door and opened the side door to the boat house.   Someone had left one of the big garage-type doors up off the floor for a few inches.  And this bird had gotten into the closed boat house.  There on the floor, right in front of the freezer was this gorgeous, scarlet Cardinal. 

He didn’t bolt up and fly against the glass windows as one would expect.  He just let me catch him.

Of course, I forgot about the meat and took him right back into the house.  Miss Ella got to carefully and lovingly see a real live Cardinal.  Her delicate fingers traced its whole body, especially that beautiful peak on its head from which it gets its name.

We eventually took it back outside and she let it go and it flew softly away.

Now you can say that was just a fortunate accident, but I know with the perfect timing and all, exactly where that bright red Cardinal really came from.   It was no accident for that bird to be right there at that exact moment just for Miss Ella to “see” it.

Rumsey Strickland was a wonderful friend.  He started and owned Strickland Motor Lines for many years before he sold it.  However, after the sale he kept an office in downtown Dallas.  While I was managing the investment portfolios for that big insurance group, he was on my investment committee that oversaw my activities.

When you are going north up Oak Lawn Street from Downtown Dallas, the road splits and the left split becomes Preston Road.  Right on the north side of that split, behind the trees is a most beautiful, Spanish Style house.  That was Mr. Strickland’s home.  Behind it, along Turtle Creek are all those beautiful azaleas which so many people come to admire each Spring.   Mr. Strickland’s wife planted them and kept them well fed and watered.  Jerry Jones, the owner of the Dallas Cowboys owns that house now.

All Mr. Strickland’s children had died.  It was quite tragic.  So, I would go up to his office and visit with him, since he always seemed so lonely.  He really seemed to appreciate it.  And eventually we started to buy tracts of land together when I would find one at a good price that seemed to have big potential.  Of course, we bought tracts individually also.

I remember when he bought this little field that was planted in cotton.  I said:  “Mr. Strickland, why in the world would you buy a cotton field and pay $1.25 per square foot for it?”  He claimed that he figured it had great potential in spite of the price.  That tract is now the southeast quadrant of LBJ Freeway and the Dallas North Tollway that has all those big, tall, shiny buildings on it.  He had a great feel for real estate.

Later he bought a big ranch about 12 miles west of Ponder, Texas.  He wanted me to run cattle there and for us to be partners in the cattle heard.  I got a fairly large herd of Santa Gertrudis cattle from the big Callan Ranch at Lorena, Texas and located them there.  Since it had a nice little house, I got a cowboy to move there with his family to watch the cattle. 

When the cattle needed working, or spraying for flies, I would go there and help the cowboy.  It was a big place with lots of quail and good grass and water.  Since we kept spare horses there, I would just put my saddle and saddle blanket in the back of the pick-up to go help work the cattle.

At Texas A&M the professors say that the coyotes that came up from deep south Texas mixed with the red prairie wolves that lived on the north Texas prairies.  That hybrid was very vigorous and spread all across north Texas and beyond. 

The cowboy that lived on that ranch had noticed that one of those mother critters had a den along a small creek on the big pasture on the east side of that ranch.  When I had finished working there late one afternoon, I went down to that little creek and found that den.  I took the shovel and made a hole a little way back from the entrance to the den.  I could hear the pups making noise down there.  I knew that if they had their eyes still closed, I could get them out with no problem.  But if their eyes were already open, I would get bit for sure.

I reached down and brought out five little squally pups and put them in my saddle blanket.  I gave two to a hippie friend who made guitars and harpsichords on a property on the east side of Ponder.  I kept a male and a female and the Baton Rouge, Louisiana Zoo came and got the other one. 

I fed my two on milk until they were large enough to take more solid food.  My ranch had a really nice dog pen with a concrete base on all sides and very heavy wire that was over 10 feet high, with the bottom of the wire imbedded in the concrete.  It had heavy metal poles to support the wire and a secure metal gate.  It was a good place for these two critters.

 I had them stay in the pen about half of the time and run free on the ranch half of the time.  I have had many pet dogs of several breeds, but never anything like these two.  They were so much more quick than a dog.

The 1,600 acre ranch was about 3 ½ miles west of Interstate 35 on a paved county road with almost no traffic on it at all.  Our closest neighbor was 2 ½ miles away.  This was a perfect place and distance from the town of Denton for people to come and throw out cats and dogs that they did not want.  This happened regularly and consistently

You may not be aware that the very favorite food of coyotes is house cats.  That proved true for these two hybrid critters, too.  I have never known of a dog that could easily catch a cat, but it was no problem for these two.  This may seem cruel to you, but people would throw out so many cats on such a regular basis, that there was no way for them to catch enough song-birds and mice to survive.  I didn’t want to shoot the cats, and you couldn’t catch them, but these two took care of the problem.  My wife and I would go for a long walk along that lonesome road in front of the ranch on pretty nights, and these two would get at least one cat every time.  They quickly ate every scrap……feet, ears, tail and all.

People would also drive out from town and drop out dogs, especially really mean ones that they just couldn’t keep in town.  My two red wolf hybrids could kill any dog, even when the dog was over twice their size.  They seemed to sense which ones were mean and which dogs were nice.  They never bothered the nice, tame ones, but it was death to the bad ones.  I was glad, because I didn’t want to have to shoot all those mean dogs, and you just couldn’t let them run free and kill the young calves.

These two hybrid wolves didn’t fight like a dog.  Dogs will fight one of two ways.  In both ways they will try to get at the other’s throat.  When fighting head-on they will try to make the other dog only bite the back of their neck where their skin is very thick.  But more often they will back up to each other so that the other dog must reach around to get at their throat.

These two red hybrids didn’t fool with all that and the dog didn’t expect or know what to do about it.  They would just rip open the dog’s rear flank where the skin was thin and incapacitate the dog in nothing flat, and then kill it by grabbing its throat.  I am sorry if this all sounds gruesome, but those were really mean dogs and this was just the way it was done.  Dogs will growl loudly and make a fierce noise when fighting, but these two would dispatch their job and never make a sound.

They would make big sounds when my cowboys would go by their pen and howl at them and get them to howling.  They would also howl back at the wild ones across the prairie too, especially at sundown and on moonlit nights.

These animals are very mouth-oriented.  They were always interested in my hair when I would bend down or be sitting with them.  One night when everyone else in the house was asleep I went out to their pen to play with them.  They really wanted to put the whole top of my head in their mouths.  I finally let them do that.  They spent a long time at it.  I am sure it had to do with something deep down in their genes.  But from that moment we were totally bonded together as far as they were concerned.  I can’t explain it, but it was very obvious.  You wouldn’t believe how protective they were of me after that night.

One time when I was speaking at a conference up in New York, I was gone for over 10 days.  The rest of the family was off on a trip for the whole time.  So, when I got home, I let them out to roam for a few days.  Before the trip I had forgotten to tell the newspaper man not to deliver the newspapers while I was gone.  He delivered them only to the mailbox which as at the road about the distance of two city blocks from the house.   Since the mailbox only held one or two, there was quite a pile papers under the mailbox since I subscribed to several daily papers.

While I was unpacking my clothes, I kept noticing that these two critters were going back and forth from the house to the road, over and over.  Finally, I went out to see what this was all about.  I had never trained them for it, and I don’t know what was in their minds, but they were going down to that mailbox and each getting one newspaper and bringing it up to the house and putting it up on the porch, neatly in a  pile right at the front door.  They kept this up until every newspaper was right there by the front door.

Eventually the male died.   Then the female started going off for the night with the wild ones.  Then she started staying off for 2 or 3 days.  Finally, she never came back.  I have often wondered if she had a bunch of pups.

                       

This is one interesting guy. He surfaced at the very height of the Hippie Movement.

Those of you that are old enough to remember 1967 and the years after that know of this extremely strange phenomenon. So many of the young people across the US started moving west, particularly to San Francisco and Los Angeles.

I remember attending the Financial Analysts Federation (which later became the Chartered Financial Analysts) Convention in San Francisco at the height of the Hippie Movement. Such sites and experiences I had never seen and have not seen since. Many of the “participants” were called the “Flower Children”.

I remember going down to the beach there where so many of them hung out. These young ladies would walk up to me and had me a flower. Drugs were rampant, and they also had places like what we would now call coffee houses where they congregated. Many of the young women were going topless.

They were all so very friendly. I did not stay in the Analysts Convention hotel, so I would ride the cable car to that hotel. One morning this one very attractive young lady on the cable car was telling me how she had a job or act at one of the coffee houses. She pled with me to come see her at her “place of employment” that night. There was nothing planed that first evening at the Convention so I went.

The first thing that I noticed there was that guys were going to bed early on the grass around the place in their sleeping bags. They were carefully laying out their banana peels to dry beside their sleeping bags. They maintained that they could “get high” by smoking dried banana peels.

I entered that place and the young lady spied me right off and ushered me over to her table. As entertainment in this place they had acts to watch while you ate items from their menu and had your coffee. The young lady showed me her act on the marquee. Much to my surprise, she was the “Topless Girl on the Trampoline”. She got topless right away and started her bouncing activities on this trampoline.

When she came back to the table, she wanted to seriously confide in me this big worry that she had. She was very concerned that with all that bouncing, her breasts would shrink and she would lose her job. I really had no answers or solutions for her.

On that trip I had rented a car and drove through the Haight-Asbury District. That summer of 1967 was, what is now known as “The Summer of Love”, the enlightened, psychedelic period was at its peak. It most all started in Haight Ashbury that would attract over 100,000 people to the area, quickly becoming an epicenter for free thinking, creative expression, free love, free drugs and free food. Driving through there I was amazed at the sites and the people.

The whole thing quickly spread to Los Angeles, particularly to the Sunset Strip area before spreading back across the US and eventually around the world.

A couple of years later I was in Hawaii on the Island of Kauai. If you have seen the famous old movie South Pacific you have seen Kauai. Most of the movie was filmed there, especially the mysterious, romantic part about Bali Hai. Do you remember those haunting lyrics?………..

Most people live on a lonely island
Lost in the middle of a foggy sea
Most people long for another island
One where they know they would like to be
Bali Ha’i may call you
Any night, any day
In your heart you’ll hear it call you
Come away, come away
Bali Ha’i will whisper on the wind of the sea
Here am I, your special island
Come to me, come to me

When the young lieutenant gets to finally go there, the big entrance and welcoming scene at Bali Hai was filmed right on the Napali Coast of Kauai.

When I was there, at the height of the Hippie Movement, the very ultimate hippie experience was at the Napali Coast. Those few that could get there would walk the 10 miles of trail along the cliffs to the little secluded valley and beach in the center of the Napali Coast. There they would shed all their clothes and live in little huts that they made from materials from the jungle and cover them with banana leaves.

The Hippie Movement grew and grew in Los Angeles along the Sunset Strip. That is when young Arthur Blessitt surfaced. He was a very strong Christian and as he expressed it at the time and later…..”totally in love with Jesus”.

He opened a coffee house right there on Sunset Strip and named it “His Place”. Hundreds of young people flocked to it. It was two stories inside with an open mezzanine with stairs leading up. Arthur had a big 12-foot cross hanging at an angle overhead. Here, mostly at night hundreds and hundreds of young people started turning to Jesus. It was later called the Jesus Movement.

There was nothing at all on the mezzanine floor but one functioning commode right in the center. It was here that the young people would literally and symbolically throw their drugs in that toilet and flush them away from their life.

Others were involved in starting the Jesus Movement, but it mostly initially all started with Arthur Blessitt. It spread up and down the California Coast. Just look at Arthur preaching to the flocks of Hippies as they are turning to Jesus……………….

Thousands were being baptized each week in the Pacific Ocean. Further down the coast in Costa Mesa, Calvary Chapel exploded with growth. Five hundred new converts were baptized each month at Pirate’s Cove on the Pacific coast, as the church embraced a wave of hairy, hippy youth turning to Jesus.

Ted and Liz Wise were early adopters of the hippy revival in San Francisco. Ted was an arty beatnik, grafting on yachts and tripping out on drug highs. Meanwhile, Liz was a regular at the conservative First Baptist Church of Mill Valley. Reading the New Testament Ted says, “Jesus knocked me off my metaphysical ass!” Then, following a bad trip on LSD in early 1965, he responded publicly to a gospel invitation at Liz’s church.

Ted and Liz were soon spreading the word to their contemporaries. Yet, despite their best efforts to evangelize hippies through their more traditional church, the hairy bunch just didn’t feel at home there. They eventually pioneered an independent hristian commune, “The Living Room”, right there in Haight-Ashbury. Located in a 20 foot by 40 foot storefront, they offered food, rest and gospel chat. By the following year they were seeing 20 or more people making commitments to Jesus each week.
I have a friend from Germany who works in Public Health in Washington DC.

He originally received his medical degree in Germany but was very high up in The US Public Health Service. He told me that he sent a team out California to study this phenomenon. These young people who were highly addicted to drugs would be baptized in the Pacific, throw their hands up in the air to praise Jesus, and walk away without having any withdrawal symptoms. US Public Health Service had never seen anything like it.

The team from Washington validated what was happening, but I never heard what become of their study.

That young people led Jesus movement spread back east across the United States. Probably the greatest manifestation of it was EXPO 72.

That was an event that happened in Dallas, Texas in the summer of 1972. It is considered the largest one week gathering of people in the name of Jesus in world history. Many came for the event from around the Dallas/Ft. Worth area, but over 80,000 come from cities away from the Dallas area. They came from all over the US and even from other countries. I met military personnel who had gotten leave from their ships stationed off Vietnam and had bummed rides on military aircraft all the way to Dallas. When asked, they said (like most all the other folks) that: “We just felt that we were supposed to be there!”

I had a friend who was the main dentist in Prescott, Arizona who cancelled his appointments for the week and came and stayed at my ranch for the occasion.

Tens of thousands of young people came from churches across the country. Bus companies like Greyhound and Trailways completely sold out of busses. All hotels and motels in the area were completely booked and people took visitors into their homes. One night I ran into this black mother with several children who had no place to stay, so I took her home to the ranch for the night.

Many thousands of young people were housed in the dormitories of the universities in the area, such as the University of North Texas 35 miles north of Dallas. These groups slept in the university dorms, attended teaching sessions in the schools’ facilities, and then came to the Cotton Bowl for the evening services. Many of my Christian friends stayed up all night making sandwiches to feed all these visitors.

The Cotton Bowl in Dallas holds a little over 100,000 in its regular seating, but when all those seats were filled, the young people completely packed the whole space on the floor of the field.

The list of speakers were the top ones in the country for inspiring and leading people to know Jesus……..such as Billy Graham, and E.V. Hill, and Bill Bright and a host of others…..and of course Arthur Blessitt. Many of the nation’s top Christian musicians and singers were there, too.

Those evening services were just amazing. Many people there had never heard those Jesus Cheers that the host of young people were using.

This whole Explo 72 was started by those first young people at Campus Crusade. And, of course, Paul Eshelman was the main person in charge. There were whole special editions of the local news papers about EXPO 72. It was an amazing, what I would call, a “movement”.

Since it was the biggest thing that had ever happened in Dallas, the Dallas Mayor went down to its headquarters to observe how and why it was running so smoothly with all its complicated parts.

When he walked in and looked around and found Paul Eshelman, he exclaimed: “Why this whole thing is just a bunch of kids!”

To which Paul responded: “Mayor, who else do you think would dare to try such a thing!”

At this very time was when Campus Crusade had just come out with their little yellow book, The Four Spiritual Laws, which has proved to be one of the very best tools ever to lead someone to know Jesus and accept Christ. These were passed out to everyone, and there were many training sessions on how to use it most effectively.

I shall never forget going to one of those sessions in an auditorium and sitting behind a large group of Catholic nuns. These nuns were all meticulously taking notes on how to use the Four Spiritual Laws to lead people to Christ.

Whenever God’s Spirit just descends onto a group such as this, there are some very interesting and unexpected manifestations. The huge Fair Park Area where the Texas State Fair is held each year also contains the Cotton Bowl. Many people were there during the day for training sessions as well as for the big evening service. The City of Dallas has an absolute army of workers to clean-up behind such enormous crowds that leave mountains of trash there. Not this crowd. Those workers did empty all the trash containers each night, but they could not find so much as one piece of paper to sweep up in the whole place. They were just amazed.

I talked with some of the hotel people in Dallas. They were equally amazed. They said that when their maids came to make up the beds each morning and pick up the towels that are usually thrown around, every bed was already meticulously made up and every towel was carefully hung up. They had never seen anything like it.

The last event for this gathering was a huge outdoor service on the north side of downtown Dallas. No one knows for sure how many were there, but the crowd was just enormous. The sound system was set up to cover the whole crowd. Like all the other events at EXPO 72, you could just feel God’s Spirit permeating the whole place. It was a fitting conclusion.

The movement eventually moved over to the U.K. Much of their famous music scene turned to modern Christian songs.

Larry Eskridge, Historian at Stirling University in Scotland and later at Notra Dame, estimates at least 250,000 people become Christians. The evangelical churches in the U.K. are different even to this day as a result.

However, all this turning to Jesus almost did not happen. Go back with me to those very first days at Arthur Blessitt’s His Place on Sunset Strip.

So many, many young people were swearing off drugs, that Arthur’s His Place was beginning to make a major dent in the drug market in Los Angeles. It seems that a mafia group owned the building that Arthur was leasing. They decided that it would be in their “best interests” to cancel the lease and kick Arthur and all these young people out.

Arthur had to have a place to continue his work. He was not an authority on real estate; he was a dramatic witness for Jesus. He received wide-spread media coverage in that part of California for what he did. He chained himself to the lamp post right there on Sunset Strip and went on a fast. The young people would come at night and drape their bodies over him to keep him warm during the cold nights. He stayed and stayed, chained to that post.

Finally, the drug dealing mafia group backed off because of all the publicity, but not for long.

Now come back to Dallas with me. I am headed home to the ranch a little early one afternoon from Downtown Dallas. I am in my Buick sedan, but it is not going back to the ranch. I know this sounds weird, dramatic, and totally unbelievable, but it was headed to DFW airport and the American Airlines Terminal in spite of efforts on my part to the contrary. Simultaneously I had this overwhelming compulsion that I was to go to Los Angeles.

In those days they had those big signs as you went in the entrance to DFW Airport showing the next flights that were leaving and from what gate. I parked at one of those convenient spots in front of the gate for the next LA flight and headed straight to the ticket counter to buy a ticket to Los Angeles.

As I walked up, there was my pastor friend, Bill Smith, right in front of me. I have mentioned him several other places in this book. As I have already mentioned, many pastors talk about sawing the limb off and expecting God to catch them, but he is the only one that I know who actually lives that way.

“So, Bill, are you going to Los Angeles?”………”Yes.”

“Please tell me why you are going!”

And he says: “I don’t know, but I will find out when I get there.”

I told him that I thought I was supposed to go there, also; and he said: “I assumed as much.” So off to the west we went.

It was still afternoon when we arrived. I asked Bill if he now knew why we were here and he replied: “Arthur Blessitt needs us. Let’s go straight to His Place on The Strip.”

I had never been to Arthur’s His Place. I saw the big cross hanging ominously at its angle from the ceiling. I walked up and saw the toilet in the center of the mezzanine. And I shall never forget the big, tall dude who was laying there on the floor. He had “Jesus Loves Me” tattooed on his toes………..one letter on each toe. He was oblivious to anything around him as he was furiously writing in this notebook. I asked Arthur what he was writing about, and Arthur explained that he was writing personal instructions on what he considered the best way to cope with withdrawing from heavy drug use after accepting the Lord.

Then Arthur explained the desperate situation that he was in. It seems that the drug dealing mafia, the owners of his building, had returned with a vengeance. Arthur had an eviction notice to be out by that very night. He and the youth had prayed through most of the whole night before.

Arthur explained that it was not essential for him to have another coffee house immediately, but that he desperately needed a new address by the next morning for all their mail and telephones to be connected to that new address.

Bill Smith and I walked two blocks down and one block over to the lovely office building where so many of the top Hollywood actors and directors had their offices. Our good friend, Tennessee Ernie Ford, had his office there. Fortunately. Ole’ Ern’ was still there. He made some calls and directed us down to the leasing office for the building. I went over all the details with the leasing agent, and Arthur Blessitt had a fine, functioning office for the next morning in the most prestigious office building in LA.

The rest of the story…………….

You have probably heard about what I want to relate to you about Arthur Blessitt, since his exploits are now world famous.  Arthur says that right there, that night, God spoke to him; not like some religious types say those words, but actually spoke.  Arthur said that God told him to take that cross down and carry it completely across the whole nation.

Arthur put a little wheel on the bottom of that cross, put it on his shoulder and started to walk.  Many Christian leaders came and walked with him, including Billy Graham.  Books have been written about the plethora of adventures that he had, just amazing ones.  For see, after he had walked across the whole US, he decided that God wanted him to carry the cross across every country and province and principality and island of the whole world.  

I would encourage you to read one of the books about his adventures, but let me tell you just a little about his adventures with the cross here.

He has (as of this writing) now walked over 42,780 miles through 324 nations and territories and islands.  He is listed in the Guinness Book of World Records as “The World’s Longest Walk”.

He has carried that 12-foot cross and the one to replace it when it finally wore out, through wars, Christian hating countries, deserts and jungles.

He has actually faced a firing squad.

He has been in jail over 20 times.

He fasted for 40 days.

40,000 people walked with him across Communist Poland.

He has been on every major news network not only in the US, but most every other nation.

Pope John Paul II personally welcomed him to Rome and wanted his picture with Arthur.

During that vicious war in Lebanon when Yasser Arafat was cornered in Beirut and almost exterminated, Arthur went right through the dangerous lines to Arafat and told him how much he needed Jesus in his life.

He slept in Prime Minister Menachem Begin’s private home in Israel.

There is no telling how many just common people he met along the roads across the world and led to Jesus.

Going back now……….Just after taking the cross and walking across the United States, Arthur decided that God wanted him to walk across England, Scotland and Ireland.

Just before leaving, he held a rally in New York City in Duffy Square.   A reporter from the London Daily Mirror came up and asked if he could follow Arthur around and take some pictures.  And after Arthur had preached, the fellow wanted to know if Arthur was coming to England.  When Arthur told him that he was going very soon to walk across the country, the Reporter wanted to know if he already had tickets and when he was arriving.  Arthur showed him his flight that was to arrive on September 2.

Arthur said that he did not know a single soul in Great Britain.  They had a long flight that was diverted to Holland till the weather cleared in London.  What Arthur did not know was that on the very day of his arrival the largest news paper in England, The Daily Mirror, had a double headline entitled:  Suddenly, Jesus Christ is more popular than the Beatles.  Then it had a huge side headline:  ARE YOU LISTENING JOHN LENNON?

It was a huge article about how popular Jesus was becoming and all about the Jesus Movement that was going to be sweeping across England, and that the “leader of that movement, Arthur Blessitt, was arriving in London that afternoon.”

Their little group was so tired, not having slept for almost 24 hours.   Their children had been sick on the plane and smelled terrible and the men needed a shave and the women so wanted to clean-up and sleep. 

They gathered their bags and walked out of immigration.  Wow!  They were greeted by a huge group of reporters and flashbulbs and other well-wishers.  Arthur did not know a soul in England, and here he was the most popular guy in the country.  He could hardly keep up with the multitude of questions that were thrown at them.  They knelt and had a prayer.

One of the TV newsmen came up and said:  “I’ll collect your baggage. We want you on ‘Nationwide’ tonight.”

“‘Nationwide’? What’s that?” Arthur asked.

“It’s the largest news program in all of Britain. It’s on BBC at six o’clock.”

“Oh, we’re all so tired. Could we do it tomorrow night?”

“No, no! We want you tonight! And we want you to be on twenty-four hours.”

“How many hours?” Arthur gasped.

“Oh,” he laughed. “’Twenty-Four Hours’. That’s the name of our late-night talk show.”

The news people loaded them and their bags into taxies and on to the TV station.  Arthur and his wife kept protesting that they needed to clean-up, but the news people said:  “No, please, we want you just like you are. 

They all lay down in the studio and were soon fast asleep, but they were waked-up for the 6 o’clock “Nationwide” TV broadcast.  The newscast was quite a show. They had them sing “God’s Not Dead,” and then Arthur’s son Joel led in a Jesus cheer. During Arthur’s interview he told the TV audience that we were in England to bring Jesus and His promise of Life, and that we wanted British followers of Jesus to move “out of the staid old buildings and into the streets and house-to-house sharing about Jesus and helping the needy. Jesus called us into the world, not out of it.”

What Arthur did not know was that Time magazine had just come out with its overseas edition with Jesus on the cover.  That added to the Daily Mirror’s big story to its three-and-a-half million readers, plus the incredible two appearances on TV the night of their arrival made for the most miraculous welcome anyone could imagine. They hadn’t been there twenty-four hours yet and they were known all over Great Britain!

God took one man who didn’t know a single soul in the whole country and introduced him to the entire nation of 65 million people in a matter of hours!

The cross that Arthur had carried across the US was in such bad repair, that it was retired to Los Angles.  He went to a lumber yard in London and made up a new one complete with the wheel on the bottom.  This is the one that has been carried across the rest of the whole world.

His little group headed out across Great Britain and were warmly welcomed everywhere they went.  They angled up along the North Sea and across Scotland and Ireland.  They spoke to overflow crowds all along the way.  So many churches there had been boarded up or were put to other uses.  Arthur and his friends prayed at each one, that God would continue to awaken the country to Jesus.

When they had finished their walk, they returned to London and Arthur preached to huge crowds as the country was awakening to the Jesus Movement.  He spoke in Hyde Park at an event called “The Festival of Light” to 70,000 people.  It was on Saturday September 25th and was an awesome event.   Arthur was the last speaker and he closed by leading the crowd in singing “the Lord’s Prayer”.  People were weeping and praising God.

This all took place in 1971.  Arthur later returned to England and spoke to large crowds all through the summers of 1972 and 1973.  These were huge meetings. They were held in most of the key cities at football fields and large parks. Tens of thousands attended with thousands receiving Jesus as Savior. There was truly a national awaking at that time in Britain. The Jesus movement swept the nation.   Arthur said that he considered it to be one of the most powerful events he has ever known.

So, Arthur continued on his odyssey of carrying that cross across the whole world.  Here are just a few random excerpts of his adventures:

Near Baku, the capital of the Muslim nation of Azerbaijan, the engine of the Land Rover that was following him along the road just went to pieces.  The block was cracked and the rods were twisted into grotesque shapes.  They were hundreds of miles from the closest parts shop if there even was one in Baku with Land Rover engine parts.   There were so very many divine interventions for Arthur.  In this case there was a grizzly old bearded mechanic who took the engine completely apart, laid all the parts out on the desert sand and pounded those rods back into shape.  Fortunately, he did have some piston rings that fit.  Arthur said that after the old guy’s work, when he tried the ignition, that engine purred like a kitten.

Arthur went 11,000 miles across the many parts of Communist Russia.  In so many places when people saw that cross they just burst into tears.  They had thought they were the only Christians left on the planet with all that Communist persecution.

Of all the places he visited, Arthur told me that Bangladesh had the poorest people that he saw.  It has the seventh largest population in the world and is a strongly Muslim nation.  They were told that as Christians carrying a cross, they would not only not be welcomed but would face severe persecution.  However, they were featured in all the newspapers with pictures of their cross.  The people welcomed him so very warmly and were attentive and receptive to his evangelistic message.

In Cuba, the communist leaders gave him a hard time, but the people welcomed him, especially when they saw the pictures of him and his cross with the Pope.

In Cambodia, which I have already written about, Arthur arrived at just the most propitious time to lead many people to the Lord.  In that viciously war-torn place, Arthur was so happy to be there to represent Jesus and it must have shown.  At the airport a man rushed up to him and asked:  “Who are you?”  And Arthur told him his name, but the man said:  “Who are you, your face is glowing!”  Arthur did not miss that opportunity to explain why and witness to the man about Jesus.

In China, Arthur took that cross right up to the highest place he could find on the Great Wall.  He saw many conversion experiences in China.  On a remote part of Hainan Island, part of China, a man came up to Arthur and told him in perfect English that it was the first cross he had seen in 40 years and the first English words he had spoken in 40 years.  He told Arthur that he had thought he was the only Christian left in the world.  He had originally been reared by Christian missionaries from the US.

There is so much more to tell about the amazing adventures of Arthur Blessitt.  He just goes on and on infused with his amazing love for Jesus.  I don’t know where to stop.

Abkhazia  “Awesome, today we crossed into Abkhazia from Russia. There is war in this area as Abkhazia is fighting to break away from Georgia. Denise arrived at the border before me and had already made friends with the soldiers on the Georgian side.”

“A lady waiting on the roadside wants us to park at their house. She showed us a small corner of her living room with crosses where she would sit with her family every few days. They had no Bible and no church. At night a lady schoolteacher that speaks English and I had the privilege of explaining about Jesus and the entire family cried and invited Jesus to be their savior. We gave them a Bible and gospel material. The big question from all the people is how we got into the country and how we got through the roadblocks. Everyone must have permits or be known to the men manning the checkpoints!”

There was no way Denise and Arthur could get permission to carry the cross across Pakistan and into Afghanistan.  However, they flew to the area of Chitral and found people and a guide who considered it his mission from God to get Arthur across the very high mountain passes and trails.  You can read about his amazing adventures there on his web site.

Arthur and his son Joshua were determined to carry the cross on all seven continents.  That meant Antarctica, the seventh.  They finally accomplished it, overcoming all kinds of’ obstacles and finally walking among the penguins and seals and leading people to Jesus even there on the seventh continent.

Over and over in Africa and other places, Arthur has had attacks from Satan, usually from people under the influence of Satan.

Arthur led so many people to Jesus in Belize.  As in many other places, while he was preaching there. A man came in with a machete, determined to kill him.   He first attacked the cross and then came after Arthur.  The police came and took him away, but before Arthur was finished with his message, the Satan filled man came back and tried to kill Arthur again.  Fortunately, the police were still around and grabbed him just in time.  Time after time across the whole planet things just like this happened to Arthur.  He knows more than most anyone how alive the devil is.  Arthur seems to bring out overt opposition from the devil like no one else that I know of.

In the Himalayan Kingdom of Bhutan nothing is allowed but Buddhism, especially not a religious symbol of any other religion.  However, miraculously, Arthur and Denise were able to get the cross into the country.  They had a tour guide and a car and driver.  It is very unusual for just two people to be on a “tour” in that country.  They did not get to preach, but they led young men to the Lord anyway.  It was necessary to start at the beginning with Adam and Eve and go through the whole story.  The young men in their knee length traditional robes were moved to tears that Jesus had actually died for them.  They had great, meaningful conversions in that high, Buddhist country.  The converts even wanted to help carry the cross across the country, and the Police even waved to them along the road, as did the farmers who would leave their little fields and come up to greet them.

Arthur and Denise came to the Congo in 1996 just before their first big civil war broke out, not to be confused with many smaller ones earlier.   They found the capital of Brazzaville in almost indescribable turmoil.  They had the name of a Catholic sister which they finally found.  She was known by so many there and was of great help to them.  She knew more than most how much the cross and Jesus were needed there.  She took them to a house for the blind.  Arthur had great results there presenting the Gospel to those blind people through an interpreter that Sister Bridgett got for them.  Arthur was moved to tears by the way they all wanted to lovingly touch the cross and then go out and lovingly carry it.  He heard later that the blind people’s house was burned down after he left and many of them killed.  Sister Bridgett was able to flee the county to the US, but actually went back later to represent Jesus there.

So, I have been going through these countries and skipping most and am only at the “C’s”.  I won’t go though all the hundreds of other countries, even though Arthur has let me read his personal, hand-written notes from them.  If you would like to pursue his amazing adventures in them, go to his website and click on “Countries”.

So, I am sure God would have otherwise intervened for Arthur.  But it was certainly a privilege to be a part of God’s answer to the prayers of Arthur and the young people on that critical afternoon when they had to leave the Sunset Strip and help provide them with their needed place that they had to have by the next morning. 

When God decides to make you part of an answer to a prayer like theirs, I can attest that you had better just “follow along”.

I have already described how I went every week to the large, high security prison, at Gainesville, Texas for for boys ages 12 to 19.  I did this for 20+ years to present the Gospel Story to each new boy who came into the prison.  Over the span of those years that amounted to thousands of youth (for at lest 12 each week).
Most of these sincerely prayed to accept Christ into their lives.  I admonished them to not “mess around” with God, but to really, really mean it.  I followed up with very many of them later.  On that occasion, I would tell them stories.  One of the stories that seemed to mean very much to them was the story of what a “Covenant” is.  I put that story in the Appendix of my soon to be published book, and below I am sending that story to you.  The story is written in the exact words that I used in telling it to those boys. 

The Covenant – (In the same words as told to each prison boy)

I wanted you to know what a “covenant” is.

The closest thing that we ever had to a covenant in this country and in Mexico was when the Indians would cut their wrists and put them together and let the blood run together as they were becoming Blood Brothers with each other. The reason that they did that was because they did not have police are FBI back in those days. They needed to have someone to watch their backside or their family’s backside.

It was the same way back in the Bible Times. They needed someone to watch their backside and their family’s backside. In those long ago times they did not call it “blood brothers” they called it going into covenant with someone. It was really for mutual defense and was most always in secret.

For nearly 3,000 years they had the same ceremony that they would go through when they went into covenant with someone. It was a strange affair. The first thing that they did was to build a fire. Then they were to walk a figure-8 with their covenant partner between two walls of blood. And you say, “ what do you mean……two walls of blood”? Well, they would take a big animal, like a bull or an ox, and they would split them into two halves. Then they would hang up the two sides or prop them up to make two walls of blood. The Bible says that when Abraham did his covenant, he took birds and goats and cut them in half and put them on bushes to make two walls of blood. Blood was important back then.

Anyway, after that, they would sit down across the fire from each other and exchange their outside coats or their outside robes. That was a symbol of putting on the other person.

Then they would exchange belts with each other. Now why would they do that? They did not wear pants. They wore robes. They did not have any pants to hold up with a belt. Their belts held their weapons…..like their sword and their dagger and their head-knocker. The belt went around the outside of their robe so that they could get at their sword quickly. This exchange was a symbol that if someone attacked one of them, he was attacking both of them.

Finally, they did cut their wrists a little bit and let the blood run together. And then they would do a strange thing. They would rub the black soot or the charcoal from the fire into the cut. Now why would they do that? They wanted to make a scar. That is how you make tattoo ink…..by grinding up charcoal and mixing it with water. See, you may be away from your “home boys” and someone is giving you trouble. You just cool roll that wrist over and they see the scar and realize that this guy is in covenant with someone. We are not facing one sword and two fists; we are facing two swords and four fists. He may be in covenant with some big, ugly dude…..with a big sword.

And another thing about the covenant that I want you to remember is that it lasted until the second generation, to the children. But the children would not be under the terms of the covenant unless they said “yes” to it or signed off on it. It would not be fair to put them in the covenant otherwise. Their fathers many have gone into the secret covenant with each other before they were even born.

And the most famous Covenant Story in the Bible was the story of David and Jonathan. They were in this strong, secret covenant with each other. Jonathan was King Saul’s oldest son and he was in line to be the king someday, which must have been confusing for David; because when he was a young boy, the High Priest had this secret ceremony and put this oil on his head and said that he was going to be the king someday.

Anyway, Jonathan and King Saul both got killed in this big battle. So, David started up to the Palace to become the new king. All the people already wanted him to be the king.

And in those days when someone from outside the king’s family came to be the king, the custom was that he always killed all of the king’s children and grandchildren. They did not want them to grow-up and take the kingdom over again someday. Of course, David would not do that, but if you did not know any better, you might assume that he would.

Well, before he died, Jonathan had this little boy named, Mephibosheth. And when the nurse that took care of that boy heard that David was on the way to the palace to become the new king, she was terrified. She was sure that he was going to kill this little boy. She grabbed that boy up and went racing through the palace, and she stumbled and the little boy went flying through the air, and he hit on these marble steps on his back. And the bible says that “he never walked any good” after that. It probably paralyzed his legs. But they took that boy way out to a town in the desert called, Lo-debar, and hid him out there with this family.

Well, David gets there and goes through all the ceremony of becoming the new king. He takes over the army. But he knew about this little boy. And he knew that the boy had the right to be in the covenant. He never mentions the covenant; that is a secret. But he keeps asking where the boy is. And nobody will tell him. They think that he wants to kill him. So, 17 years go by. That boy is over 18 years old now. And after all that time, finally, one of King Saul’s old advisors realizes that David is a good man, a godly man; he wouldn’t kill that boy. He tells him: “Sir, the last that I heard, that boy was still out there in the desert, in Lo-debar where they hid him.

Wow, David sends the royal chariots racing out there…….the sun glinting off their gold and silver…….they are throwing up a plumb of dust. That was like the Hummers in those days, but with horses. They circle around that town and come in there, and they found that boy. They put him on one of those chariots and race him back to town. They let him off right there in front of the palace. They say: “Boy, you walk straight up through there, the king is waiting on you right now.

Well he goes up there on his little crutches…….”clump, clump, clump”. And when he got there right in front of the king, he just threw those crutches out, just like that. Well, he just fell down right on his face. And King David says: “Stand that boy up”! Oh, gee, he thinks that his head is coming off right there…..whoosh, with a big sword.

No, King David gets up off of his throne (He never does that.) and goes down and talks to that boy quietly. He says: “Son, see that scar on my wrist? I was in covenant with your father. I am prepared to return all of your father’s and your grandfather’s lands to you; and all of their assets…….millions of dollars in gold.” All this little ugly dude has to do is say “Yes” to the covenant………to get all of that…………..

Man, he is no dummy. Of course he says “Yes” to the covenant. And Kind David says: “Son, you have the right to eat at the king’s table any time that you want, the rest of your life.” Wow, you can hear him up there the next morning. He is having breakfast with all of the princes and princesses. He says: “Pass the jam, man!” And they say: “Why you sorry-ass little bugger, what right do you have to be here at the King’s Table. And he says: “Ask the King about that scar on his wrist.” He was in covenant with Mephibosheth’s father. And now he has signed-off on the covenant. That makes him like the King’s own son, with all of the rights and privileges.

So why do I go through all of that long story of what a covenant is with my prison friend here? Because, Jesus used the story of what a covenant was to explain to those dumb-head people back there why he had come down to the earth. They knew what a covenant was, but they did not have a clue why he had come down to the earth. He explained to them that he had come down to the earth to, in effect, complete a covenant between God and man. So, if you are part of that covenant, you become like part of God’s family and inherit eternal life, and all that goes with that.

So, my friend, that time when you and I were looking at that little yellow Four Spiritual Laws book and we were looking at those two circles in the back, and I looked you right in the eye and said: “Which one of those circles do you want to be?” That was just like Mephibosheth standing there in front on Kind David, and King David saying: “Son, do you want to be part of the covenant or not part of the covenant?”

And you were not any dummy either. You said “Yes” to the covenant; and we prayed and you asked God, in effect, to put you in The Covenant.

So, I thought that story would have lots of meaning for you. And I want you to remember all your life that you are part of the Covenant. Don’t ever doubt it.

And God is not like some big judge up in the sky who whaps you up the side of the head whenever you do wrong. Of course, I wish that he would. But He expects us, out of gratitude for what He has done for us to try our best to keep his rules and to for sure be part of his church. So, I want you to get into a really good church when you get back to the free, and participate, and to be in its Sunday School, especially.

And I will be praying for you.