This is an excerpt from my soon to be published book, as are several others in these posts.

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 the following week. 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.

Clarice was one of the most amazing ladies who ever lived in Dallas. Even when she was quite “up in years” she still taught and sponsored a large number of bible classes across the area. It is hard to calculate all the good that she did.

She was so much of an influence that she formed a large ladies’ group. I don’t remember what it was called, but that group built a large and very expensive building for meetings just across the street from the back of North Park Shop Shopping Center. That Shopping Center is on the list as one of America’s primary stops for State Department foreign visitors.

I went into that Ladies’ Building one time with Clarice, and even though she was a very modest woman, there were quite a few women there, and it was like Clarice was “holding court”, she was so influential.

When I was down in Houston on that first trip to be with Joanne, I went with her to pick up some of her European Royalty friends who were shopping. We had to wait for quite awhile for them to finish their shopping. While we were waiting I had what I thought was a very noble thought and expressed it to Joanne.

I knew that all across America, in most towns, there were what could be called “Society Ladies”. They were usually formed into some kind of a group or at least centered around one leader type lady. I also knew that those ladies did not let just anyone into their group. They want only particular types of ladies in their group. I also knew for sure that many ladies, outside the group would do most anything to get into the group. I knew that this was true all over the country in large and small communities. Since Joanne’s “group” was one of the most prominent in the whole country, I knew how influential that she could be……how many ladies would “just kill” to be on her mailing list.

The thought that I had was not real clear, but I felt that this desire of so many women across the county to be part of the “Group” could be used for great good. Like………what if the group had a function to lead people to know the Real God? Like………what if all of that influence could be used to lead ladies to a real Conversion Experience.

At that time, I thought that Joanne was probably a Christian and that such would appeal to her. I don’t know what was in her head when she heard it, but the appearance was that it just went right over her head.

Then years later, as Chairman of the Board of Trustees of Dallas Baptist University, Clarice asked me to come and speak at one of her breakfasts. She was very interested in that school and its Christian influence.

When I was thinking what to talk to Clarice’s ladies about, that same idea that I had iterated to Joanne came to me. I don’t think I had considered it since, but I spent much of my whole breakfast speech expressing that idea. I even mentioned Joanne, and that I had expressed it first to her.

Several ladies at the breakfast rushed up to me after I spoke and were gushing that they had once met Joanne and telling me all about how they had gotten to meet her. My message had not registered with them. They just wanted to tell me that they had once gotten to meet Joanne. However, what I did not have a clue about was that Clarice and some of her closest friends had already totally adopted this same idea but mentioned it to no one. They were already doing what I had tried to iterate and were leading women to know the real God……To have Jesus be Lord of their life.

Clarice was friends before, but from that moment on, she more or less adopted me.

She started praying for every visit that I made to the kid’s prison to present the Gospel to each new youth that entered the prison facility. Clarice was like a very few ladies that I have met in my whole life; that when she prayed, something was going to happen. There were going to be results. She even wanted me to call her on my cell phone on my way back down I-35 from the prison to give her a report on all the details of what had happened on each particular trip to the prison.

But I have not left the theme of this book. Listen to this…….Clarice was obligated to take her sister back and forth from Dallas to Shreveport, Louisiana several times each month, even after Clarice was way up in years She would leave early in the evening after her last bible class, travel to Shreveport and back in that same night. It took all night. Then she would start her bible class early the next morning, all bright and perky.

So, one day I confronted her about this. I said: “Clarice, be honest with me. You are sleeping through those whole nights, aren’t you?” She just grinned and admitted it. Folks, I swear to you; angels were driving that white Cadillac all the way to Shreveport and back!!!

This actually happened one time to me; only one time.

Be patient with me as I try to relate it to you. I was asked to speak to the Chapel Service at the Criswell College in Dallas. Its primary mission is to train young men for the ministry. It is considered by many as one of the finest bible teaching entities in America.

I found out that it was to be broadcast on radio and that only top evangelists and Christian Professors are invited to speak at that Chapel Service.

So, I asked the President of the College why he wanted me to speak there. What he said was interesting. He said: “Ronald, I don’t want everyone of the pastors that we are training to wind-up at a comfortable church in the bible belt; I want a few of them to be ‘Tigers for Jesus’! You know and have experienced, and can iterate those Christian “war stories.” I want you to come and tell some of those Christian “war stories” to my students and inspire a few of them to be “Tigers for Jesus”.

So, I went and told some of those stories. I am not sure some of those highly educated professors who were sitting on the front row all appreciated them, for as I am speaking, I watch people in the audience. Some of them were frowning. And I also noticed that one of the future pastors was a really tough looking dude.

When I finished, a bunch of the students just mobbed me. That guy was part of the bunch, so I asked him about himself, what was he doing to pay for his schooling. He told me that he shoed horses to put himself through school, and I said to myself: “Now that is my kind of preacher man”.

One young man came up and just attached himself to me. He left school and followed me back the several blocks to my office. I found out later that he had one of the highest IQ’s ever found. He could just glance at a desk littered with papers and tell you later (reading upside down) word for word what was on every paper. He had been recruited as a prospective student by all the prestigious universities, Ivy League ones and those on the West Coast. He had enrolled in Baylor instead. He was quite conservative politically and especially as respects Christianity and the Bible. When he took religion courses at Baylor, he encountered some of those ultraliberal professors. So to counter their “liberal teachings” he started “rump sessions” in the late afternoons for groups of students. He wanted to counter and correct what he considered their liberal ideas and teachings.

This got him in a heap of trouble. In fact, they had him up before what could only be called an inquisition by a collection of most of the faculty of Baylor’s Religion Department. I am sure he did well, but he was not satisfied with his performance there. He needed more instruction in the bible. So, he left Baylor and enrolled in Criswell since it was considered much more conservative. His plan was to go back to Baylor and really “set them straight”, but after he more or less adopted me, he never went back to Baylor.

He wound up moving into a tenant house on my ranch and coming to work with me most days.

He was so gifted and tenacious that he started quietly meeting my business contacts and having luncheons in places like the prestigious Petroleum Club in downtown Dallas financed with their money without my knowledge at all. He raised money for wild projects that he found, like audacious mining ventures.

He was so gifted at analysis that he eventually found a very lucrative niche that no one else had found and filled it. Curing pollution and highly polluted sites had become very much the rage. It is still important, but at that moment, it was doubly important. Jeff met and got to know the engineering firms that specialized in cleaning-up those sites. Then he would find a highly polluted site and meet with the top executives of the companies who had caused the pollution. Most times those executives did not think anyone really knew about those sites or cared.

Jeff would not attack them about the polluted sites, he would just let them know that he was cognizant of their polluted site, and also knew the engineering firm that could do the best job of remediation for the site. Jeff would quietly make sure that the executives panicked and then he would get the big fee from the engineering firm for bringing them that piece of business.

In doing this work, he found one area of pollution that was very dangerous, but that no one had yet been able to cure. It was mercury pollution. Up until quite recent times no one ever knew that mercury puts off dangerous fumes at just room temperature. Let me tell you how this was discovered.

At Oakridge, Tennessee where so much of our nuclear work has been done, they have used a huge amount of mercury. When I asked why, I was told that they needed to do much of their work in rooms with a total vacuum. They used the mercury to acquire the vacuum. There are rooms there where most all of the ceiling tiles have fallen down to the floor from the weight of the mercury in them. Its fumes kept impregnating the tiles until the weight of the mercury just dropped them to the floor. Those rooms and whole areas are all tightly sealed-up now.

One of the engineers who worked there had a son who was a classic hippie in the hippie age. His parents never even went up to his room, mostly because of the strange music emanating from it. However, one night his engineer father went up there because it was so loud. What he discovered just amazed him.

This boy was playing music with a big white sheet attached to the wall back behind him. The strangest psychedelic colored patterns were playing all over the sheet. When the father went over to see how this was happening, he discovered that this boy had acquired a bunch of mercury from his dad’s job and had it in a long, wide pan on the floor. The boy had black-light shining through the area above the pan.

The father could instantly see that the mercury was giving off fumes only at room temperature. And believe it or not, that is how this dangerous phenomenon was discovered……mercury giving off fumes at only room temperature.

With all the dangerous sites across America highly contaminated by mercury and no way to really clean it up, Jeff set out on the task of how to do it. He is not a chemist or physicist, but he did have that super I.Q. He found this highly skilled aircraft mechanic and hired him to work on the task. No one had ever taken a retort or large vessel and heated it up to a very high temperature and kept it at a vacuum the whole time and then opened a drain at the end of the vessel and let out the gasses collected inside on to the outside of the vessel without ever losing the vacuum.

This innovative aircraft mechanic figured out how to do that and built a test unit with just a moderate sized vessel and the burners to heat it to a very high temperature. At those temperatures, whatever was put into the vessel containing mercury, like just dirt, had all the mercury reduced to gas and completely eliminated from it and then forced outside still in a vacuum state. It was deposited into a container on the outside and became liquid mercury upon cooling. Tests were performed on different materials, and the results were astounding to those who had never seen mercury safely eliminated from such materials before.

Jeff formed a company around this technology and proceeded to patent the process. He needed a place to perform these tests to show people how the process worked. I had a friend in Denton, Texas who repaired and sold outboard motors and boats. He had a facility with warehouses and extra land that he was not using. I arranged for Jeff to lease this fellow’s extra space and facilities.

I remember one of the first fellows who came down to Texas to check this out. He had the title of Chief Scientist at E. I. du Pont de Nemours and Company. He watched that vessel heat up to a very high temperature and every bit of mercury be extracted and made an interesting statement. He said that he had worked to try to solve this mercury problem through his whole career without success. His statement was: “I can’t believe that I am standing here on this Texas prairie and seeing this actually happen!”

This was happening right at the time of the steep recession, including across Texas, when so many of the banks were going broke. Business had come to a virtual “stand-still”. Since nothing was happening in the finance and real estate world, I agreed to join Jeff and help him.

He had raised money from investors and also formed a partnership with the very sophisticated company, British Nuclear Fuels. They were the company who cleaned up most all of the nuclear pollution in Great Britain, and were over here helping in the US, since we had barely started to clean up our nuclear pollution which was and is way worse.

One if the first tasks for Jeff was to acquire and build a really large vessel and all the piping to go with it. Also, that vessel needed to be heated to over 2,000 F. Not just any metals could safely function at those temperatures. Way more abundant electricity needed to be brought to the site, also.

I did have a full degree in Industrial Engineering but had never really worked as an engineer. I wondered if I could “hold my own” with the sophisticated engineers from British Nuclear Fuels who came to help, for we were pushing the limits of basic physics, clear out to the edge of what had ever been done before. Fortunately, all those advanced physics courses that I had labored through under the famous Dr. Packard at Baylor preparing for my engineering degree after graduating from Baylor pulled me through.

I also was made the purchasing agent for this project, to source and acquire all the materials and very high temperature items that were needed.

The investors in this project were mostly not just passive. They came and wanted to physically help…..people like some of the highest placed officials in our government and even the just retired Chairman of the Board of Brown & Root. That is the company that dominates the building and servicing of the massive chemical and refining industry up and down the Texas and Louisiana coast.

Chlorine is needed in great abundance across our whole economy. One of the largest plants that produces huge quantities of it is located on the Houston Ship Channel near the Texas coast. Making chlorine is not that complicated. You just pass huge amounts of electricity through salt water and out comes chlorine, hydrogen, and caustic soda. All very useful materials. There are other ways to get the electricity through the salt water, but this plant still uses the cheapest and easiest way. They use a bed of mercury as the conductor through which to pass the electricity through regular sea water as it passes over the mercury. Eventually the mercury becomes contaminated and must be replaced. At one time they just dumped the old mercury into pits in the ground. Since they can’t get by with that any more, this plant was just storing the old mercury in big metal storage tanks. They didn’t know what else to do with it.

We took our big vessel down there and did a test to show them that we could safely and efficiently get the mercury out of the material in their tanks. Those plants are very secure and have elaborate safety rules and procedures that you have to go through. When an alarm goes off, everyone must go immediately to a safe room and stay until the “all clear” is sounded. This happens fairly often each day.

My favorite thing that happened there concerned the retired Chairman of Brown & Root. One of their work crews came there to fix some problem. This big, black worker looked, and looked and recognized his ex-high-up boss. He just went into a fit: “Lawd man, what is you doin’ here? Boss, what is you doin’ in that worker’s uniform?” His ex-Chairman was way out of place as far as the black fellow was concerned.

That vessel was later taken to Arizona to one of the world’s largest copper mines. Their smelter was right there by the mine. The smelter had scrubbers inside its huge smoke-stacks to take out any pollution. Those scrubbers had to be cleaned periodically and the residue was just piled up there because it was full of mercury. That residue also had big quantities of gold and other valuable minerals in it, but they could not be smelted out because the smelting process would have vented all the mercury gasses to the atmosphere.

Our vessel and our technology process got all the mercury out and they were able to recover the gold and other minerals.

So, I am sure I have bored you to death with all this pollution story. And I went through all of it as background just to tell you one short, significant tale. We took our smaller test unit up to Tennessee where there is so much massive mercury pollution. We wanted to show those folks that there was a safe way to remediate all that mercury pollution that they have.

We did the test. It was quite successful and they were greatly impressed. Everyone else came back to Texas different ways, but I was elected to drive the test unit back with the big, diesel pickup that we were using. I hadn’t eaten much is several days, so I had a big meal at the Cracker Barrel close to where we were staying. Tennessee is the home of Cracker Barrel and this was a really well run and fine one.

I had also not slept much for several days. When I got on that freeway, I went sound asleep. I must have slept all the way across Tennessee, because I woke up going down a hill and turning into a gas station right on the Arkansas border. This was standard procedure for Clarice, but it is the only time in my life that it ever happened to me.

My whole point is that this is totally consistent with the theme of this book, because I for sure was not the one driving that diesel truck!!!

My big Santa Gertrudis cattle were what cattlemen call “good rustlers”. When other breeds would be sleeping in the shade on hot days, these would be out there eating and growing as a result.

They had another wonderful trait. My friends who have Herefords and particularly Black Angus have all kinds of calving problems. The angus calves have such big, round heads when they are born; they very often need assistance with their birthing. The owners have to “pull” so many of their calves. Thus, they need constant watching during their birthing times.

However, the Santa Gertrudis calves have slender, elongated heads at birth which fill out later. I just left the mothers out in the pasture and they got through their birthing all on their own. Of all the hundreds of calves that we have had, I only had to pull one. I think the mother could have even managed it, but when I happened to see its hind-feet coming out first, and knew that it was being born backwards, I called the vet. We hooked the little chrome chain that is used for such purposes around its back legs and pulled it out with the pick-up truck. I have one of those winches on a pole with pads to fit across the mother’s rear and the little chains, but have never had to use it.

But that breed has one trait that gave us all kinds of trouble. Many of the mothers are extremely protective of their babies when they are first born. Those mothers can be quite dangerous at those times.

The females all had numbers branded on their hips. We needed to tattoo that number in the baby’s ear when it was first born. This was necessary to keep the records for each mother. If we waited, which happened sometimes, and got several mothers in a corral with their calves, it was hard to tell who was who’s. You would rope the calf which was much larger now. It would start bawling and several mothers would rush up to claim it. Who did it belong to?

The tattoo machine was a set of rotating numbers with needle like spikes for each number. You would dial the correct mother’s number for the calf’s ear, clamp the needle spikes through its ear, and then rub tattoo ink into all the holes. This was so much easier when the calf was first born.

I needed to rope the calf to get all this done, but if you just walked up to rope the baby, that mother would try to kill you. It didn’t work either to rope the baby on horseback, because you would have to get off the horse and on foot to work the tattoo machine.

I would usually drive the pick-up along-side the baby and try to get a loop around its neck. Then I would pass the rope back to my son, Mike, who was standing in the back of the truck. He would then pull the calf up into the bed of the truck. That is when the mother would raise all kinds of hell. She would jump up and get her front half into the truck bed and bang it up and down, making all kinds of noise and commotion. I would yell for Mike to keep the baby between him and the mother, so the mother would not hurt him.

Mike was a brave little dude, but that was really asking a lot of an 8 or 9-year old. While the mother was thus occupied with what sounded like tearing the whole back of the truck out, I would slip up there with Mike to complete the tattoo job.

Then came the job of getting back into the cab of the truck without that mother running me down or tearing the door off.

Before moving up to Denton County , I had two ranches down in Kaufman, County, one on each side of the town. The one where I lived was only 50 acres of black land prairie, but the one on the east side of Kaufman was much larger with sandy land with a big creek and many beautiful oak trees.

My first Santa Gertrudis were 10 mothers and a bull for the 50 acres. Like I mentioned before, this was the first breed ever from the United States . All other breeds came from other countries.

Starting in 1910 down on the huge King Ranch that covers a big part of far southeast Texas they started developing what they considered just the perfect cross of cattle. What they finally came to was a mix of 5/8ths pure bred Milking Shorthorn and 3/8ths purebred Brahman, with a little African cattle blood thrown in. This cross, with their selective help, had a beautiful dark red color. However, though they could get the cross they wanted, it would not breed true. The calves would be great, but would throw off to favor one of those parts when the mothers grew up, were bred and calved.

The King Ranch had many divisions. The largest was the Santa Gertrudis Division, named for the large stream that flowed through it. In those days the mostly Hispanic cowboys would stay out in “cow camps” to watch after and work the cattle.

In one of those camps in that Santa Gertrudis Division the cook kept one of their Milking Shorthorns to provide milk for the camp. To keep a cow giving milk, it was necessary to breed her so that she could have a calf occasionally. In this camp their Milking Shorthorn had this little calf. It became somewhat of a pet for the cowboys there. They usually would have castrated it, but they couldn’t catch it to cut it. As a result, they named it “Monkey” since it would always jump away from them.

Then as little Monkey started growing, he started developing beautiful confirmation. One day when one of the bosses was visiting the camp. He told them not to cut Monkey, to just let him grow up as a bull. Monkey did grow up into having the perfect confirmation and color that they were seeking. Then they discovered that his babies were the first ones that they ever had that would “breed true”.

Thus, the whole Santa Gertrudis breed came from what they eventually called, “Old Monkey”. They gave the breed its name from that Division of the King Ranch.

Let me tell you more about those first 10 cows that I got. Every ranch, especially a big one needs one “practically insane” cowboy. One who will get down into a pen with a killer cow and just do things that a sane person will never do. I am not talking about “brave”. I am trying to describe a cowboy who will do things that a sane human wouldn’t dare do. I had one of those cowboys that I will tell you about later.

W.W. Callan of Waco , Texas got some of the very first Santa Gertrudis that the King Ranch ever sold to the outside. He became one of the first big breeders of these cattle outside of the King Ranch. So, I got my first 10 cows and my bull from him. In fact, Mr. Callan and I had several cattle partnerships together, over the years.

Anyway, he had one of those kinds of necessary cowboys. He name was “Getch”. That is the only name that I ever heard, even though I came to know him fairly well. One time, later, on my ranch, a few of us discovered that we were trapped in a pen with a cow that had sharp horns and was determined to kill us to protect her baby. We all jumped out of the pen except Getch. I went over so fast that I didn’t even touch the rails and landed hard on my back on the outside.

Getch was trapped right in the corner of the pen by that cow, and I was sure he was going to be badly hurt. Getch just took off his cowboy hat, put it over that cow’s eyes and calmly eased over the rails.

Over the years, Mr. Callan would buy herds of these cattle from other ranches when he could get a bargain. On this one occasion he bought a big herd of cattle from the Sixty-Six Bar Ranch down in the heavy brush country in South Texas . The owner had been ill and then eventually died. All the while he had been ill those cattle had just run wild in that brush county. The Mexican cowhands just let them go wild while the owner was ill.

So, Mr. Callan purchased and brought that herd up to Waco to one of his ranches there. Naturally, Getch was the one chosen to handle that particular heard. Getch thought it would be a big joke to break me into the cattle business the “hard way”. He was mad anyway, because Mr. Callan had sold me a horse that Getch had really wanted.

So, when Mr. Callan told Getch to select 10 cows to send up to Kaufman for me, he chose the 10 meanest, wildest, most insane ones out of that whole South Texas heard and sent them to me. They all had that sixty-six brand on them, and to this day, I can still remember all their numbers branded on their hips.

Number 54 was just huge. She seemed quite gentle. She had a baby in October, just a little while after arriving on my 50 acres. Unfortunately, it was born during that freakish October cold spell that we had in the late 1960’s when the temperature got down to 5 degrees below zero. The calf froze to death before it could ever dry off from its birth.

My wife and I waited three days before we went down to the stock pond to see about it. Number 54 was still right there watching over it. I got out of the truck, but that mother put me up onto the top of the truck. I didn’t even have time to get back inside with my wife. I stayed up there for the longest time. Every time I tried to get down, here she came trying to whack me.

One of those 10 was a jumper. She couldn’t jump clear over the corral fence, but she would jump up on top of it and break the boards down. She could clear most any barbed wire fence though. One day she went “on a tear” and jumped all the fences until she was over into the third ranch to the north. My neighbors and I finally roped her and brought her back in a trailer.

However, the strangest one was number 27. I will never forget her. She wouldn’t bother you when you were on foot, but she “had a thing” about horses. She would put her nose down in the grass like she was eating, but if you watched closely, she was just holding her nose in the grass. She was not eating at all. She would wait until your horse was just opposite her and then she would charge up and get right up under your horse. She was so strong that she would almost lift your horse off the ground. To say the least, this was very disconcerting to a saddle horse.

I told you that I had one of those “insane cowboys” too. His name was Dave. I am not sure that I ever heard his real last name. He was a recovering alcoholic. He had been quite a hero in WWII, by piloting the landing craft in the Pacific back and forth under very heavy enemy fire. But he claimed he couldn’t remember a minute of it……all “hopped up” on torpedo juice.

I had a friend from the Reinsurance Department of the Insurance Company where I was Director of Investments. He loved to come out to the big ranch on the east side of Kaufman to help me.

We had moved Dave into the house on that ranch. He needed a helper, so I hired a nice-looking young cowboy right off the White Mountain Navajo Reservation in Arizona. He looked quite Anglo, but he was all Navajo. When he first arrived, right off the bus, he stayed the first two nights in our big white house on my 50 acres. When I asked why he acted so strange upon entering, he explained that he had always lived in a Navajo wickiup; that this was the first regular house that he could ever remember being in. He and Dave made quite a pair.

My Insurance Friend got Dave an old pick-up truck. They would go around to neighboring ranches and look for horses to buy at a bargain. I remember going with them on their first such foray. This gorgeous coal-black gelding came running up to the fence in a wild run shaking his head. My insurance friend, Bob, was from Oklahoma , and just fell in love with such wild beauty. He bought this registered Quarter House for almost nothing since the owner could not find any horse trainer who could tame him, much less gentle him to ride.

Dave promised Bob that he would break and train him, not to worry.

That horse broke my corrals all up on that ranch first thing. But Dave was really amazing with horses. A horse can’t buck unless he gets his head down. Dave took that horse down to the closest stock pond, finally got him saddled and put him out into the middle of the pond. Dave would then get on him with the water about chest high on the horse. The horse couldn’t buck him off since he couldn’t get his head down.

I later rode that horse bareback to check the cattle on that ranch since Dave had him so tame.

Dave got really sick one time. He was shoeing horses one day, since I had bought him a bellows and big anvil set-up that he had found over at the huge Canton First Monday Sale which is so famous. It was not far from that ranch.

One of the nails from the horse’s hoof scratched him on the wrist as he was pulling off its horse shoe. Being a “tough cowboy” he didn’t bother with doctoring it. Sure enough he caught real lock-jaw. You don’t hear about it much anymore, but he didn’t go to the doctor until his jaw was locked-down almost “for good”! We only had one doctor in that area. Old Doctor DeVlaming. He got Dave all well from his lock-jaw.

I had to go to DeVlaming one time. I got a case of ulcers from the stress of investing all that money at my young age. At age 26, four billion dollars (adjusted for inflation) is a lot of money in the stock and bond markets. That is when I really learned economics. I just thought I had learned it at Baylor.

I had the wonderful opportunity to be really close with Arthur Laffer and sat with him as he was first thinking out his Laffer Curve. For many years, I met with and was briefed by Alan Greenspan in New York 2 times each year before he became Fed Chairman. Every summer for many years I lived with and visited with Milton Friedman over two-week periods at the Life Officer’s Seminar in Illinois. I was privileged to spend hours of one-on-one time on different occasions with Beryl Sprinkel who Ronald Regan chose to be his economics advisor and guided so many of his policies. And I was even privileged to speak at the Institutional Investor’s Conference in New York with William McChesney Martin Jr. who was the longest serving Chairman of the Federal Reserve (20 full years) and visit with him and share thoughts one on one. There were many others, and they may not have made me any smarter, but they sure helped me recognize “the chaff from the wheat” in the finance world.

Dr. DeVlaming made me feel really proud. He said that down in that “backward area” I was the first patient he had ever had to treat for ulcers. When I asked why, he said: “No one else down here has ever generated enough mental activity to ever cause any ulcers.”

Anyway, I moved those 10 problem cattle that Getch had selected for me from the Sixty-six Ranch over to the Big Ranch with Dave and the young Navajo cowboy. I also moved the big white ducks my wife had, over to the pond near the house of those two. They practically lived off those big duck eggs.

One day two of my bulls got into a ferocious fight with the Brahman bulls from the neighboring ranch. They tore down a big section of fence. Dave went back there on that black horse to count the cattle and make sure the fence wires were back up onto their metal posts. He was just coming up to the heard, way back in the back of the ranch, but he didn’t figure on that number 27 cow.

Sure enough, she had her nose down in the grass like she was grazing, but when that black gelding got up even with her, she charged the horse. He reared up and she hit him right in the chest. “Wham”, over he went backwards. Dave got out of the saddle, but the saddle horn came right down on his wrist and just crushed the bones.

Like a good cowboy, he finished counting the cattle, took the horse back and unsaddled it and drove himself to the doctor, with that wrist just flopping the whole time.

He waited about two hours to see the doctor. When Dr. DeVaming saw that wrist, he said: “My gosh, Dave; why didn’t you say something.” He put a cast on the wrist and told Dave that he couldn’t do anything about those crushed bones, that the wrist would grow back, but that he would never be able to bend it again. But he didn’t figure on one of those old “insane cowboys”.

In only ten days, Dave cut that cast off and started bending that wrist back and forth as the bones grew back. Of course, a regular human couldn’t have stood that kind of pain. Eventually that wrist was almost as good as new.

One day on the weekend I got a collect call from Dallas . The operator explained that it was from the Dallas City Jail and from a guy named, Dave. So, I took the call.

Dave had “fallen off the wagon”. He was obviously still inebriated and said: “Boss, I am sad to tell you that I have come to town and visited the ‘houses of ill repute!’” The operator had stayed on the line and she nearly died laughing. She apologized and said she was never supposed to listen to conversations, but that she just had to hear this one. Bob went down to the jail and bailed him out and brought him back to the ranch.

Not long after that, is when I decided to leave that backward area and move up to Denton County .

I kept asking different businessmen and lawyers in Dallas : “If you could get your wife to agree to live out in the countryside where you would really like to be; exactly where would you most like to locate?” They nearly always said the same place: “I would go just west of Denton where you turn west off Interstate 35 on the way to Amarillo , where the country just opens up!”

So, I just decided to go and be there first. I was able to get this big house on a very lightly traveled parallel road three and one-half miles west of I-35 on this 1,600 acre ranch that I have already described earlier in this book.

After all this cattle business, I am sure that you suspect that I have deviated from the theme of this book about what appear to be amazing manifestations of God’s Spirit Power. No, believe it or not, I am still there, on cue.

I earlier described how Mr. Rumsey Strickland had bought this big ranch west of Ponder, Texas which was not too far west of my 1,600 acres, and how he had me put a large herd of Santa Gertrudis cattle on it. I got Mr. Callan to furnish the cattle. Two or three years later Mr. Callan found it necessary to exchange a group of those cattle for a different group that he wanted there, instead.

He sent some of his people up with long trailers to move them. They didn’t bring any horses since I volunteered to cut out the group they desired to move for them. Among those who came was Albert Day, driving one of those trucks. Albert was a fairly stocky Hispanic guy who was considered one of the finest judges of cattle, particularly this breed, in the whole country. I was so honored for him to be there. He later helped us select the cattle for our Lorena ranch whose “get” (babies) won all eight of those national shows after they grew up.

I trailered my King Ranch bred horse Suzie over to that ranch to do the cowboying. It was raining heavily, and the clouds were getting really black, but I got most of the ones the guys wanted across two creeks and to the corrals. It took a long time, since with what was obviously a major storm coming, those cows did not want to cooperate or swim those creeks. However, I had to go back for one more group.

That is when it just started really pouring down rain.

We just had to finish before dark, not only because Albert and his guys wanted to get back to Waco , but I had to be in Dallas the next day for sure. The huge national convention for the Financial Analysts’ Federation was to be in Dallas for the first time, and I was the Hotel Chairman for the Convention. Most every security analyst and money manager in the whole country was going to be there, with all manner of important speakers.

I had already made the Hilton Chain mad. The Convention had been scheduled for their hotel for many years. However, I had moved it to the new Fairmont Hotel. The Fairmont had two huge ballrooms that could seat 2,000 people each. That way we could be meeting in one while the other was prepared for a meal. Not even any hotel in New York City could do that, not even the huge New York Hilton. I just had to be there.

I set out in that pouring rain to get the last group of cattle. I found them huddled in the far back pasture. They did not want to move. Suzie “worked her tail off” cutting them and we finally got them headed back to the east. By now we had to swim them across really swollen streams. The water was clear, but it had gotten deep.

Just west of the corrals is a deep creek and then a long, high rocky ridge. I got them off that ridge and headed down toward the corrals. Then I started along the top of that ridge. The rain was coming down in torrents and the wind was getting really, really strong. I could not see hardly anything through that rain, but I stopped by this little tree, right on top of the ridge.

I tightened-up on the reins and said to Suzie: “Girl, whatever is coming, we are in this together, hang on!!!”

When I finally got down off that ridge and swam Suzie across that creek to the corrals, Albert and the guys had gotten those cows penned and ready to be put into the trailers. However, the guys were all really excited.

They said: “Didn’t you see what happened!!”

I said: “No, I couldn’t see anything for all that rain, and besides, there was all that wind noise!!”

Albert Day said: “Ronald, God must have something else important for you to do in your life. That black tornado came right down that ridge. We could all see it. Just as it got to you and that tree and your horse, it jumped back up into the air, went right over you, and then came right back down to the ground. We never saw anything like it!!!!”

PS. This is a note to the multitude of folks in China who are reading these stories: 令我印象深刻的是，中国如此众多的朋友正在阅读这些故事。 请给我发电子邮件，并告诉我有关您自己以及您对故事的看法。
我的电子邮件地址是……….ronald82@verizon.net

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”.

This is a special excerpt from my soon to be published book. If you would like to see more stories like this, please go to my website and scroll down to the bottom and enter your email in the box on the Texas flag…………. truetexantales.com Ron

When I started to Junior High School we moved out to this heavily wooded area about 5 miles west of Waco. It was called Rainbow Lake, for there was a beautiful blue mile long lake together with a little smaller lake just next to it. Our home looked right down onto the larger lake. There was a very large area surrounding the lakes, and it was all owned in common by a private club. There were only 5 homes scattered on both sides of the larger lake. It was such a large area, that the homes were separated from each other by many acres between them. You did not hear anyone else or even have anyone else close to you at all.

Actually, we had a big rustic log house there for years, even before I started to Junior High School where we lived each summer. At the end of each summer it became harder and harder to move back into town and leave this beautiful place with such great swimming in that deep blue water and with its fantastic fishing, and its total privacy. So, my parents decided to build a much larger home and just live there year-round.

My mother loved fireplaces with real wood fires. This home had several fireplaces, even one in the kitchen for her. Another interesting thing about that lovely new home was that it had no gypsum wall board or wall paper inside like most homes in the US. Every single room was paneled with a different kind of wood…..like the kitchen had wide vertical boards of white pine with each separated by narrower strips of rich colored red wood.

About 60 yards south of the kitchen was what was called the boat house. It was way up from the lake, but it had large garage doors along the front where we kept the boats on their trailers for fishing in the other many large lakes across Texas. At the south end of the “boat house” was a workshop and on the north end was a large, chest type freezer where we kept not only the regular meat for the kitchen and for barbeques, but it was also filled with deer meat, and deer sausage, and antelope meat, and elk meat.

Then on beyond the “boat house” was another green structure. (Everything was painted pale green.) That was the pigeon house. The pigeons did not fly out, for we raised those giant White King pigeons who don’t much fly. See, my mother loved squabs. Thus, those big white pigeons.

On the other side of the house from the lake were thousands of acres of virgin wooded land. Much of it has white lime stone on the surface. The whole area had been inhabited by Indians long ago, for there were flint arrowheads all over the whole place. Out in those woods there were beautiful, perfect arrowheads just laying right on top of the white limestone out in the open. That showed that no one went into those woods, for they would surely have picked up those arrowheads. I accumulated quite a collection of them.

In the early pioneer day’s the people had some beef and pork, but in the earliest days they mostly lived off of wild game for meat. They ate ducks, geese, doves, wild pigeons, rabbits, deer, bear; all manner of wild game. However, their favorite tasting meat out of all those was squirrel.

Davey Crockett and his friends would divide-up into two groups and hunt squirrels for two weeks or more. The meat would keep well with the insides cleaned out, the skin left on, and hung in the shade, in the open air. Then they would have a grand squirrel feast. The group who got the most squirrels was the winner. The loser had to skin and cook all the squirrels.

They would first parboil the meat for a short time in boiling water, then either barbeque it or, their favorite, deep fry it in an iron kettle in pig fat. They would spend two days or more feasting on squirrel.

Since my father was president of that big freight line, he traveled much of the time on weekdays. He lived off restaurant food, but when he got back home, his favorite meat was squirrel, also.

Other boys, like my peers at school, had the luxury of sleeping late on Saturday mornings; but I had to get up before daylight on Saturday mornings and get my father at least two squirrels. My semi-automatic Browning 22 rifle held 11 shells. I would take it and go across the fence into those deep, dense woods. They stretched for miles and miles. I would sit very still for as long as it took for a squirrel to come across the trees overhead. So that I would not mess-up the meat, I was required to hit them only through the rib cage or preferably in the head. I eventually became such a good shot that when I got into Baylor, I qualified to be on their intercollegiate rifle team and travel to rifle meets all over the country.

After several years, my squirrel hunting job got easier. My mother had two old maid aunts who still lived in the backwoods in Tennessee in the log house that their brothers had been born in before they came to Texas. We would visit them sometimes in the summertime. It was very enjoyable. They still lived in that subsistence lifestyle. They grew all their own vegetables, and fruits. They slopped and killed their own hogs and smoked the hams in a tall smoke house by the barns. One of the barns still had the spinning wheels and looms from which they had make the clothes that their brothers wore when they came to Texas. And everything was made of wood……fences, gates, barn doors, locks, everything. They didn’t have an outhouse. You just went out behind one of the barns and used corn cobs.

I had never slept in a real feather bed. Wow, you dived into those and sunk way down and “just died” asleep. Those breakfasts they cooked on the wood burning stove in the kitchen were fantastic. When they found out that I loved fried pies, they would make me big flat ones from their apples and apricots out of their orchards in big cast-iron skillets.

Anyway, on one trip my father told the locals there that he wanted to buy the best squirrel dog in that whole part of Tennessee. They all acknowledged that “Toby”, a ¾ cross Bull Terrier, was the best squirrel dog there. Since no one had ever been willing to pay a whole $35 for a hunting dog in that part of Tennessee. We were able to take Toby back to Texas.

We were anxious to try him out when we got back. I had a little black and brown Manchester Terrier that my mother’s friend had given me named “Toy”. Toy went with us as we all headed into those woods with our guns and Toby. In only a little while Toby had treed a squirrel on the edge of this creek. We all went rushing there and sure enough there was a big squirrel up in the trees. Since my father had a shotgun, he brought the squirrel down first. As it came crashing down, Toy, not Toby, grabbed it before it even hit the ground. It didn’t take Toy long to figure out what this was all about. She became as good a squirrel dog as Toby, if not better.

Toby had the most interesting habit. When a person comes up, the squirrel will always slip around to the other side of the tree so you can’t see it. When you were by yourself as I most always was, the squirrel would move back to the first side of the tree when I would go around to the back side of the tree. But every time, Toby would go around to the other side of the tree from me and grab a little bush and just violently shake it in his teeth. He would scare the squirrel back around to my side of the tree so that I could shoot it. He greatly improved my hunting success. I have no idea how he learned this.

I know that I am probably boring you with all of this but let me tell you about one morning in the late Fall. When I would bring out the gun, the dogs would just go “nuts”, jumping and turning flips. They just loved to go hunting. By this time Toby had gotten killed, so I took Toy and three half grown pups that I was trying to train.

We had gotten at least a mile down in those wild woods before Toy treed. I was down in a dry creek bed with steep sides at least 12 feet high. It was very strange, because it would sound like Toy was way off, and then sound like she was up close. Finally, I heard her just above us. I was able to go around a little bend in the creek where the creek sides were not as steep. The pups and I scrambled up onto the flat ground. Then we saw why her sounds were different. She had something in a big, hollow log that she was after. She would bark with her head just inside the log and sound way off. Then would bark outside the log and sound close; but she would not go into the log.

However, when those boisterous pups got there they just bolted straight into the log. All of a sudden big ringed-tailed civet cats just started pouring out of several places from the log. Most people never see those cats because they are totally nocturnal. They are tan and grey like a fox, but they have this really long black and white ringed tail. They can be very aggressive, especially when surprised and disturbed.

One of them grabbed one of the pups by the leg and they went round and round. This big female came running right at me, but just before she reached me, Toy bolted forward and grabbed her by the throat. They went rolling over and over and both fell off down into the dry creek, but Toy never let go of her throat.

Then out the far end of the log came this huge male civet cat. He was not about to run away. He ran right at me and ripped my blue jeans with his claw, but never stopped. I was so startled and he was so close that I could not get a shot at him. I really needed a shotgun; not that little Browning 22 semi-automatic. He went straight up this little tree next to us and out onto one of its limbs. I shot two or three times, but he was going so fast and so close that I missed. At this point he was just even with my head. Then, “so help me” he bolted through the air, right at my throat. I threw the gun up in self defense and just started pulling that trigger. I must have been lucky or the Lord just intervened, for I hit him right down the throat through his open mouth. He fell dead right at my feet. I had heard about it but had never experienced it. For my legs just gave way and I sank right down onto that log.

What I remember at that point was this awful screaming of the big female civet cat down in the creek with blood in her throat; just a chilling sound. Toy had never let go of her throat and finally choked her to death. And the pup had gotten away from his adversary. It was quite a violent scene. I took the big male home to show my father.

You can say that I was just lucky, but you will never get me to admit it. I just know that God had some tough angel direct that bullet into that cats open mouth as it was right in mid-air, almost to my throat!!!

PS. This is a note to the multitude of folks in China who are reading these stories: 令我印象深刻的是，中国如此众多的朋友正在阅读这些故事。 请给我发电子邮件，并告诉我有关您自己以及您对故事的看法。
我的电子邮件地址是……….ronald82@verizon.net

This week is the anniversary of the largest land-sea-air battle in world history. On this Good Friday before Easter, I think that it is only fitting for us to remember all those brave Americans who died to preserve our freedom on this anniversary, and what FDR said about our Faith in God.

Ron

The Battle of Okinawa is considered the largest land-sea-air battle in world history, and the last major battle of World War II. It began April 1, 1945, when 60,000 U.S. troops landed on the Island of Okinawa. It was called “The Typhoon of Steel” because of the hundreds of kamikaze attacks, where suicide bombers flew planes filled with explosives into American ships.

Fighting continued for 82 days. Kamikaze pilots sank 38 U.S. ships, and damaged 368 more, in what is considered the greatest loss of American ships in U.S. naval history. There were over 72,000 American casualties. Imperial Japan lost over 110,000 soldiers, in addition to nearly 150,000 Okinawan civilian casualties, many of whom were ordered by the retreating military to be human shields or to commit suicide, as the Imperial honor code, called “seppuku” or “harakiri,” considered surrender a shame worse than death.

Pulitzer Prize winning war correspondent Ernie Pyle was killed in the battle, April 18, 1945, by Japanese machine-gun fire on an island northwest of Okinawa Island. Ernie Pyle had been embedded with Army infantry soldiers in Europe, North Africa and the Pacific.

Infantry soldiers were given “Government Issued” supplies, resulting in the initials “G.I.”

Ernie Pyle’s newspaper columns were turned into the 1945 movie, The Story of G.I. Joe.

Ernie Pyle wrote in 1943:
“I love the infantry because they are the underdogs. They are the mud-rain-frost-and-wind boys. They have no comforts, and they even learn to live without the necessities. And in the end they are the guys that wars can’t be won without.”

The fierceness of Japanese combat in the Battle of Okinawa convinced the U.S. Navy and Marines to expect over a million casualties if they attempted to invade the main Japanese islands. This convinced Democrat President Harry S Truman to drop the atomic bomb on the industrial centers of Hiroshima and Kyoto in August of 1945. Secretary of War Henry Stimson argued to spare Kyoto as a target. The city Kokura was then chosen, but on the fateful day cloud cover blocked the crews’ visual identification, so the bomb was dropped on nearby Nagasaki.

Tragically, Nagasaki had been the most Christian city in all of Japan.

Nagasaki was first visited by Jesuit missionary St. Francis Xavier in 1549, through whose efforts the powerful daimyo (lord) Ōmura Sumitada had been baptized. Over 300,000 Japanese became Christian by the end of the 16th century. Suffering intense persecution, the Kakure Kirishitan “Hidden Christians” or Mukashi Kirishitan “Ancient Christians” passed their faith on to succeeding generations, century after century.

Martin Scorsese’s movie SILENCE (2016) gives the account of missionaries to Japan and the persecutions suffered by Japanese Christians.

Emperor Meiji finally allowed religious freedom during the Meiji Restoration, 1868-1912.

From 1912 to 1926, Japan experienced unprecedented freedom and prosperity during the “Taishō democracy.”

Beginning in 1926, Japan’s Shōwa Emperor, Hirohito and his generals re-concentrated power politically into a totalitarian, militaristic state.

Emperor Hirohito’s Imperial Japan entered into a Tripartite Treaty with Benito Mussolini’s Fascist Italy and Adolph Hitler’s National Socialist Workers Party on September 27, 1940, being referred to as the “Axis Powers.”

After the Imperial planes had attacked Pearl Harbor, President Franklin D. Roosevelt recited the reason the U.S. entered into war in his address to Congress, December 8, 1941:

“The attack yesterday on the Hawaiian Islands has caused severe damage … lives have been lost …Ships have been reported torpedoed between San Francisco and Honolulu …The Japanese Government also launched an attack against Malaya … Hong Kong … Guam … Philippine Islands … Wake Island … and Midway Island.”

FDR stated January 6, 1942: “Japan’s … conquest goes back half a century …

War against China in 1894 …

Occupation of Korea (1910) …

War against Russia in 1904 …

Fortification of the mandated Pacific islands following 1920 …

Seizure of Manchuria in 1931 …

Invasion of China in 1937.”

Invading Imperial soldiers massacred over 300,000 in Nanking, China, 1937-1938.

FDR concluded his address: “We are fighting today for security, for progress, and for peace, not only for ourselves but for all men, not only for one generation but for all generations. We are fighting to cleanse the world of ancient evils, ancient ills. Our enemies are guided by brutal cynicism, by unholy contempt for the human race.”

“We are inspired by a faith that goes back through all the years to the first chapter of the Book of Genesis: ‘God created man in His own image.’ We on our side are striving to be true to that divine heritage …”

“We are fighting, as our fathers have fought, to uphold the doctrine that all men are equal in the sight of God. ”

“Those on the other side are striving to destroy this deep belief and to create a world in their own image — a world of tyranny and cruelty and serfdom.That is the conflict that day and night now pervades our lives.”

“No compromise can end that conflict. There never has been, there never can be, successful compromise between good and evil.”

“Only total victory can reward the champions of tolerance, and decency, and freedom, and faith.”

This is about the born and unborn children of America…..our posterity.  The Founding Fathers of our country,  whose memory that so many current educators are trying to wipe away, were so very interested in their posterity……..the millions of yet unborn.  The Founding Fathers sacrificed their PROSPERITY for their POSTERITY.  Would you take the time to look at what they said about the yet unborn:  

After signing the Declaration of Independence, John Adams wrote to his wife:  “I am well aware of the toil and blood and treasure, that it will cost us to maintain this Declaration. Yet through all the gloom I can see the rays of ravishing light and glory. I can see that the end is more than worth all the means.” 

“And that POSTERITY will triumph in that days transaction, even although we should rue (regret) it, which I trust in God we shall not.”

George Washington wrote in his Orders, July 2, 1776:  “The fate of UNBORN MILLIONS will now depend, under God, on the courage and conduct of this army. We have, therefore to resolve to conquer or die.” 

At the conclusion of the Revolution, General Washington wrote a Circular Letter Addressed to the Governors of all the States on Disbanding the Army, June 14, 1783, stating:  “According to the system of (government) the States shall adopt at this moment, they will stand or fall … It is yet to be decided, whether the Revolution must ultimately be considered as a blessing or a curse … not to the present age alone, for with our fate will the destiny of UNBORN MILLIONS be involved.”

Colonel William Prescott, who fought at the Battle of Bunker Hill, wrote:  “Our forefathers passed the vast Atlantic, spent their blood and treasure, that they might enjoy their liberties, both civil and religious, and transmit them to their POSTERITY. Now if we should give them up, can OUR CHILDREN rise up and call us blessed?” 

“Therefore, we resolve, that it is an indispensable duty which we owe to God, our country, ourselves and POSTERITY to maintain, defend and preserve those civil and religious rights and liberties, for which many of our fathers fought, bled and died, and to hand them down entire to FUTURE GENERATIONS.”

Dr. Joseph Warren, who died at the Battle of Bunker Hill, wrote the Suffolk Resolves, September 17, 1774:”Whereas Great Britain of old persecuted and exiled our fugitive parents from their native shores, now pursues us, their guiltless children, with unrelenting severity: “Therefore, we resolve, that it is an indispensable duty which we owe to God, our country, ourselves and POSTERITY .to maintain, defend and preserve those civil and religious rights and liberties, for which many of our fathers fought, bled and died, and to hand them down entire to FUTURE GENERATIONS.”

Daniel Webster stated in 1852:  “The world will cry out ‘shame’ upon us, if we show ourselves unworthy, to be the DESCENDANTS of those great and illustrious men, who fought for their liberty, and secured it to their POSTERITY, by the Constitution of the United States.”

Henry Clay addressed the U.S. Senate:   “The Constitution of the United States was made not merely for the generation that then existed, but for POSTERITY — unlimited, undefined, endless, perpetual POSTERITY.”

Benjamin Franklin, who signed the Declaration of Independence, wrote of the Constitutional Convention (Federal Gazette, April 8, 1788:  “I have so much faith in the general government of the world by Providence, that I can hardly conceive a transaction of such momentous importance to the welfare of millions now existing, and to exist in the POSTERITY of a great nation, should be suffered to pass without being in some degree influenced, guided and governed by that omnipotent, omnipresent Beneficent Ruler, in whom all inferior spirits live & move and have their being.”

Charles Carroll, the longest-living signer of the Declaration, addressed the city of New York, August 2, 1826: “Grateful to Almighty God for the blessings which, through Jesus Christ Our Lord, He had conferred on my beloved country in her emancipation. I am now the last surviving signer, I do hereby recommend to the present and FUTURE GENERATIONS the principles of that important document as the best earthly inheritance their ancestors could bequeath to them, and pray that the civil and religious liberties they have secured to my country may be perpetuated to remotest POSTERITY and extended to the whole family of man.”

Theodore Roosevelt stated in his Inaugural Address, March 4, 1905:  “No people on earth have more cause to be thankful to the Giver of Good who has blessed us. Much has been given us, and much will rightfully be expected from us. If we fail, the cause of free self-government throughout the world will rock to its foundations, and therefore our responsibility is heavy, to ourselves and to the generations yet UNBORN.” 

“We have faith that we shall not prove false to the memories of the men of the mighty past. They did their work, they left us the splendid heritage we now enjoy.  We in our turn have an assured confidence that we shall be able to leave this heritage unwasted and enlarged to OUR CHILDREN and OUR CHILDREN’S CHILDREN.”

Franklin Roosevelt stated at Fenway Park, Boston, Massachusetts, November 4, 1944:  “We shall be standing before a mighty bar of judgment — the judgment of all of those who have fought and died in this war — the judgment of generations yet UNBORN — the very judgment of God.”

President Ronald Reagan addressed the Alfred M. Landon Lecture Series on Public Issues, September 9, 1982:” I know now what I’m about to say will be very controversial, but I also believe that God’s greatest gift is human life and that we have a sacred duty to protect the innocent human life of an UNBORN CHILD.” 

Reagan wrote in “Abortion and the Conscience of the Nation” (The Human Life Review, 1983): “We cannot diminish the value of one category of human life — the UNBORN — without diminishing the value of all human life.”

In an address “A Charge to Keep,” delivered during his 2000 Presidential Campaign, George W. Bush stated: “I have a reverence for life, my faith teaches that life is a gift from our Creator. In a perfect world, life is given by God and only taken by God. I hope someday our society will respect life, the full spectrum of life from the UNBORN to the elderly. I hope someday UNBORN children will be protected by law and welcomed in life.”

President Trump declared in his State of the Union Address, February 5, 2019: “Let us work together to build a culture that cherishes innocent life. And let us reaffirm a fundamental truth: all children — born and UNBORN — are made in the holy image of God.”           

“America’s forefathers were willing to sacrifice their prosperity for their POSTERITY, pledging their lives, fortunes, and sacred honor to give freedom and opportunity to generations yet UNBORN.”

The Preamble of the U.S. Constitution, 1787, states:

I have written about the head of the Rangers who informed me that he had taken care of and protected me all of my life. 

Some of the other Rangers that I have known just seemed bigger than life. There is a popular saying about the rangers, that the local authorities call Austin and urgently appeal for help because of a huge riot that is happening. Austin sends one ranger. The local authorities are just shocked, since they were expecting a big contingent of lawmen. Then the Ranger is asked why more lawmen were not sent. He says……”Well, there is only one riot”.

But I actually knew and spent some great times with the lawman who helped the Texas Ranger from which that saying started. It really happened. He was one big, tough dude. Some of these old lawmen have an authority about them that you can just sense and feel. 

My lawman friend was never more that a Deputy Sheriff for Dallas County, but he was so useful to the Texas Rangers that he was rather adopted by them. They used him on so many of their operations across Texas. 

This fellow was still stationed in Dallas when Dallas had its one and only huge race riot. It had been going on for many days. There was all manner of destruction. Several people had been killed. The Dallas police were just at a stand-off from all that was going on along Hall Street. Hall Street was the center of the riot. Gunfire was coming from the buildings along it, and the Dallas Police were not about to go in there. 

The Dallas authorities wired Austin for help from the Texas Rangers. They sent one ranger and he immediately conscripted my friend as his partner. When the Ranger got to Dallas, the Dallas authorities expressed their dismay that many more should have been sent. That is when the Ranger who was standing beside my friend said: “Well, it is only one riot.” I got my friend to tell me exactly what he did. 

He and the Ranger quickly saw that everything about the disturbance was centered along Hall Street. In those days there was no TV, but everyone religiously listened to the radio. He said that he went down to the local radio station (WFAA) and asked to make a special broadcast. He went on the air and said that he and the Ranger were going to walk down the length of Hall street tomorrow at noon. He said that: “if any shots were fired at them from a building, they were going to set that building on fire, and that they were going to kill every single man and woman that come out of that building.” 

Sharply at noon the next day, they put their shotguns on their hips and walked the entire length of Hall Street. No shots were fired and the riot was over. 

It is the custom in Texas that when a prominent law man retires, he is appointed as U.S. Marshal for most of the rest of his life. This happened to my friend. 

When Lyndon Johnson got his Great Society Program passed by Congress, the anti-discrimination laws were good things, but there was an immediate over-reaction to them. For a short time, a few very aggressive blacks thought that they could just get away with anything and no one would touch them. It was at this very time that a criminal case was scheduled in the Court House in downtown Dallas. 

A group bragged that they were going to storm the Court House and stop this trial. At this “interesting political time” the Dallas Police were reluctant to interfere with this group, but they knew that they should not allow a criminal trial to be stopped by a mob. Their solution………to call out my lawman friend who was now a US Marshall in retirement. He agreed to come down to the Court House and “keep order”. 

He showed-up with his badge pinned prominently on his khaki uniform and took his station at the court room door. Like I mentioned, some of these old lawmen just have a real authority about them. You can tell that they are just “not going to be moved”. The mob showed-up also. But when this big old lawman with his innate authority said to the leader of the mob: “Son, you just stand over there!”. The mob did not set one foot into that court room. 

However, there was one story that he refused to talk about, no matter how much we implored him too. Bonnie and Clyde were considered rather romantic figures by the public until they shot two Texas Highway Patrolmen to death just northwest of Dallas. It turned out that one of those highway patrolmen was this lawman’s best friend. He took it very personal. He swore and oath that he would not eat another bite of food until he shot both Bonnie and Clyde to death. 

He was only 29 years old at the time, but he found out that the lawman, Frank Hamer, who was a former Texas Ranger, was planning to ambush the couple on a back road near the town of Sailes at Bienville Parish, Louisiana. The Methvin family who lived near there had been taking care of the outlaws for nearly a year. 

My friend grabbed his 1918 Browning Automatic Rifle and headed straight to Louisiana. That ambush was actually filmed with quite clear photographic results. I have seen the film. It shows the 1934 stolen Ford V-8 Deluxe climbing the hill to the ambush. It also shows my friend in his white hat standing up and getting in by far the most telling results with his powerful BAR. After his long “fast” he enjoyed a great Louisiana dinner that night. 

When my son, Mike, was about 14 years old, I decided to take him down to hunt ducks in the marshes along the bay north of Brownsville. We got all packed and headed south on a Thursday morning. We got as far as Kingsville (the home of the King Ranch), and it was getting late and time to spend the night. After a restful night in Kingsville at a local motel it was time for breakfast the next morning. 

When you are out traveling like that and needing breakfast in a town in Texas that you are really not acquainted with, there is one rule that will never fail you in getting the best breakfast. There will probably be 3 or 4 places in a town that size that are serving breakfast along the highway. What you want to do is pass them all by that have 2 or 3 cars in front and stop at the one with a large number of pickup trucks in front.  

In Kingsville we quickly found the eating place with a whole bunch of pickups in front. We went in and took our seat among all those farmers and ranchers. At one big table across from us was a whole group of rancher looking guys who were animatedly talking with this much older fellow with a most interesting dark brown leather coat on. His coat was obviously very well worn, but I had never seen a leather coat just like that. 

Just as we were finishing breakfast, the ranchers finished also and all walked out, leaving the old fellow with the leather coat just sitting there. You could just tell that the old fellow had much character about him just as his coat did. So, Mike and I decided to go over and sit down with him. 

It turned out that he was a retired Texas Ranger with a long, long career behind him. I am sure when he was younger, he would not talk much about his exploits, but now that he was really old and a young 14 year old was sitting there, Mike and I got him to relate some of his many exploits and stories. He had worked solo all along the Texas border, mostly protecting the ranches there from predator outlaws crossing the border. 

See, the Texas Rangers were started to protect the first settlers in north central Texas from the Comanches. When most of the Comanche raids were suppressed, the Rangers were disbanded soon after the Civil War. Then in the early days of the King Ranch, it was losing so very many cattle to the predators coming across from Mexico and stealing cattle and horses that Richard King persuaded the Governor of Texas to re-establish the Rangers in 1874.

Mike and I were enthralled with some of the stories that this old Ranger related to us. And I had actually read about one of them. 

See, my mother was a famous Bible teacher and speaker. When she would be going to speak to a large women’s group, she would leave me at the nice public library in Waco. It was in what had formerly been a large home made of fine white stone. 

In the really early days of Texas, they had designated Austin as the capital, but there was little structure across the state and no news papers. Those early settlers felt the need to write-up and record the significant things that were happening…….mostly Indian raids. They would write up the happenings, most times in great detail, and send them in to Austin. Some years later in the early days of the University of Texas, the school took all those hand-written tales and published them. For some reason, the library in Waco wound-up with the whole published compilation. I have never seen it anywhere else. 

So, I would spend hours and hours reading those tales while I was “parked” there in the library. I remember one where these three farmers were riding back home to Groesbeck and were caught by a small band of Comanches. One of them was shot by an arrow in the shoulder, one was not harmed, and the third was shot from his horse. The first two were able to escape, but when they looked back as they were racing away, their friend was totally surrounded by the Indians. 

In two days, a few settlers returned to the scene to recover his body. To their amazement, they found him sitting-up braced against a tree. He had been scalped by the Indians, but he was still quite alive. He had taken off his boot and put his sock over his head to keep the flies away from his exposed brain. They took him back to their community, and in the report that I was reading, they felt that he was for sure going to live. 

Anyway, when the old Ranger was telling Mike and me one of his stories, I realized that I had read every detail of it in the Waco Library. It seems that he was following a small herd of cattle that a group of Mexicans had stolen and were taking back to Mexico. He caught-up with them just as they were crossing back into Mexico, but what made the situation so complicated was that a contingent of Mexican Federales was right there at the river to escort the rustlers back into Mexico. 

They had about 3/4ths of the cattle across the river when the Ranger came upon them. He pulled out his Henry Rifle from its scabbard and (in Spanish) ordered them to: “Put those cattle back across the River” (Poner ese ganado de nuevo a través del río). The Captain of the Federales explained that: “You are only one man; we are many. We will kill you for sure”. The Ranger explained: “You may do that Captain, but I will get at least two of you bastards before I die. Who wants to be the first two bastards to die right now?” (“Puedes hacer eso, capitán, pero conseguiré al menos a dos de ustedes bastardos antes de que muera. ¿Quién quiere ser los dos primeros bastardos en morir ahora?”) 

The Federales put all those cattle back across the River and not a single shot was fired. 

At just that week, Mike was writing a report for his English class about the Texas Rangers. I don’t have tell you that he got an A+ on the report.

I would really like for you to know about one of the most brilliant men that ever lived…..Isaac Newton.  Do take the time to read this short revelation about him that I have prepared for you…….. 

Isaac Newton was born on December 25, 1642, the same year Galileo died.  Newton’s mother was widowed twice, resulting in him being raised by his grandmother.  He was sent off to grammar school at The King’s School, Grantham.  His uncle, Rev William Ayscough provided the recommendation for him to attend Trinity College, Cambridge, 1661.

 During this time, 24-year-old Issac Newton was studying at Cambridge, but the university shut down as a precaution against the Plague.  Newton left London and self-quarantined himself at his family’s country estate.  And while he was there, one day as he was sitting in the garden, he saw an apple fall from its tree to the ground in front of him. 

In the Memoirs of Sir Isaac Newton’s Life, written by William Stukeley, there is this story:  “Why should that apple always descend perpendicularly to the ground, thought he to himself; occasioned by the fall of the apple, as he sat in contemplative mood. 

“Why should it not go sideways, or upwards? But constantly to the Earth’s center? Assuredly the reason is, that the Earth draws it.  There must be a drawing power in matter. And the sum of the drawing power in the matter of the Earth must be in the Earth’s center, not in any side of the Earth. 

“Therefore does this apple fall perpendicularly or towards the center? If matter thus draws matter; it must be proportion of its quantity. Therefore the apple draws the Earth, as well as the Earth draws the apple.’’ 

So Issac Newton from this formed the laws of universal gravitation that we study in our beginning physics courses. 

Newton became a renown mathematician and a natural philosopher. 

He formulated the three laws of motion, which aided in advancement of the discipline of dynamics.  He explained in Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy, 1687: 

“FIRST LAW: An object either remains at rest or continues to move at a constant velocity, unless acted upon by a force; 

SECOND LAW: Force equals mass times acceleration; 

THIRD LAW: When one body exerts a force on a second body, the second body simultaneously exerts a force equal in magnitude and opposite in direction on the first body.” 

Newton was honored to occupy the Lucasian Chair of Mathematics, 1669, and was elected Fellow of the Royal Society, 1672. 

He was given the position of Master of the Mint, 1699, and in 1701, entered Parliament.           

In addition to discovering the laws of universal gravitation, Newton was a discoverer of calculus.  He helped develop it into a comprehensive branch of mathematics. 

He constructed one of the first practical reflecting telescopes.

 Using a prism, Newton demonstrated that a beam of light contained all the colors of the rainbow.

  He laid the foundation for the great law of energy conservation and developed the particle theory of light propagation. 

In 1703, Sir Issac Newton became the President of the Royal Society, and served in that position until his death. 

This was one of the most brilliant men that ever lived…….just an amazing mind!!!  He has to be considered the father of modern physics………such a brilliant scientist!   

Now here is my point:  All across the U.S. in our universities are a plethora of scientists and professors who say there is no God, that “science” has proved that to be true.  They are atheists who say science has led them to this conclusion.  So, since most of the laws upon which their work and studies rest were discovered and formulated by the brilliant Sir Issac Newton.  Let’s look at what he thought and said about whether there is a God or not. OK? 

Newton wrote one of the most important scientific books ever, Principia, 1687, in which he stated:  “This most beautiful system of the sun, planets, and comets, could only proceed from the counsel and dominion of an intelligent and powerful Being … All variety of created objects which represent order and life in the universe could happen only by the willful reasoning of its original Creator, whom I call the ‘Lord God’ … This Being governs all things, not as the soul of the world, but as Lord over all; and on account of His dominion He is wont to be called ‘Lord God’ … The supreme God exists necessarily, and by the same necessity He exists always and everywhere.” 

Newton wrote in the last query of Optics, or, a Treatise of the Reflections, Refractions, Inflexions and Colours of Light (1704, London, 1730, 4th edition, quoted in Sullivan, p.125-126):  “Now by the help of these principles, all material things seem to have been composed of the hard and solid particles, above-mentioned, variously associated in the first creation by the counsel of an intelligent agent.For it became him who created them to set them in order.And if he did so, it’s unphilosophical to seek for any other origin of the world, or to pretend that it might arise out of a chaos by the mere laws of nature; though being once formed, it may continue by those laws for all ages.”

  Newton wrote in Principia, 1687:  “From His true dominion it follows that the true God is a living, intelligent and powerful Being; and from His other perfections, that He is supreme, or most perfect.  He is eternal and infinite, omnipotent and omniscient; that is, His duration reaches from eternity to eternity. His presence from infinity to infinity. He governs all things, and knows all things that are or can be done.” 

Newton was quoted in Memoirs of the Life, Writings, and Discoveries of Sir Isaac Newton by Sir David Brewster (Edinburgh, Thomas Constable and Co., 1855, Vol. II, 354):  “God made and governs the world invisibly, and has commanded us to love and worship him, and no other God; to honor our parents and masters, and love our neighbors as ourselves; and to be temperate, just, and peaceable, and to be merciful even to brute beasts. 

And by the same power by which he gave life at first to every species of animals, he is able to revive the dead, and has revived Jesus Christ our Redeemer, who has gone into the heavens to receive a kingdom, and prepare a place for us, and is next in dignity to God, and may be worshiped as the Lamb of God, and has sent the Holy Ghost to comfort us in his absence, and will at length return and reign over us.”         

Newton wrote in a “Short Scheme of the True Religion” (Sir David Brewster, Memoirs of the Life, Writings, and Discoveries of Sir Isaac Newton, Edinburgh, Thomas Constable and Co., 1855, Vol. II, P. 248:  “Opposite to godliness is atheism in profession, and idolatry in practice. Atheism is so senseless and odious to mankind. 

“There is one God, the Father, ever-living, omnipresent, omniscient, almighty, the Maker of heaven and earth, and one Mediator between God and man, the man Christ Jesus …To us there is but one God, the Father, of whom are all things, and one Lord Jesus Christ, by whom are all things, and we by Him. 

That is, we are to worship the Father alone as God Almighty, and Jesus alone as the Lord, the Messiah, the Great King, the Lamb of God who was slain, and hath redeemed us with His blood, and made us kings and priests.” 

Sir Isaac Newton died MARCH 20, 1727.           

So, I am off in Afghanistan 5 years ago doing things that would be challenging for an 18 year old, much less an old dude like me. I am sleeping on the concrete back of those piled-up sandbags and doing things that I can’t tell you about.

In late 2001 in the aftermath of 9/11 we wanted revenge for the attack on the World Trade Center. The obvious initial choice for President Bush and our military leaders was the terrorists who had planned the attacks and their training camps for such attacks that were located in Afghanistan. 

The Special Forces and advisors that we sent in there put together what was called the Northern Alliance. It was really a collection of Afghan war lords let by Afghan General Dostum. They were being supported by US air power, but with a disadvantage. All military flights had to be launched from Uzbekistan or aircraft carriers in the Arabian Sea. We needed an airbase at Mazar-I-Sharif, for our aircraft had to carry so much fuel to come from those far off locations that they could not carry much munitions. Taking that town was our first priority in that war. Winning the battle to take it was our first significant victory in Afghanistan over the Taliban.  

Meanwhile, General Noor led 2,000 men of the ethnic-Tajik-dominated Jamiat-e Islami forces against the village of Ag Kupruk directly south of the city, along with six Special Forces soldiers and seven U.S. Air Force Combat Controllers who directed bombing from behind Taliban lines.  

The Taliban had taken the city in August of 1998 and had held it ever since. The Taliban were condemned by the United Nations (for whatever good that did) for massive massacres of the civilian Shia population at the time. On November 2, 2001, Green Berets from Operational Detachment Alpha 543 and small elements of the CIA Special Activities Division were inserted into the Dari-a-Balkh Valley. Their role was to support General Mohammed Atta Nur and his militia. Together they fought through the Dari-e-Souf Valley and had linked up with General Abdul Rashid Dostum and his forces and ODA 595 and the CIA team supporting Dostum. They had also battled through an intersecting valley south of Mazar-I-Sharif.  

On November 7 and 8, the Taliban were moving 4,000 fighters across the countryside towards Mazar-I-Sharif in preparation for battle to make sure they held the town. American big B-52 bombers bombed those Taliban fighters who were hiding, all concentrated in the Cheshmeh-ye Shafa gorge. That was the southern entrance to the city. This was one of the heaviest campaigns up to that point. The B-52’s wiped-out most of them. Nevertheless, the Taliban claimed they had infiltrated 500 fighters into the city to prepare for the coming battle. 

What was really interesting to me was the US Special Forces guys saying how amazed they were to see those brave, intrepid Afghan fighters charging the Taliban tanks on horseback.

It has been a long time since US military men charged in actual, real battle on horseback. After these outlying parts of the city were taken, as many as 12,000 Taliban combatants as well as members of alQaeda and other foreign fighters began to withdraw towards Kunduz. However, the fighting for the town was still fierce. At least 600 Taliban died in the battle. 

And here is what was so fascinating to me about that battle. Just as the fighting for the town was beginning, A Mullah from Pakistan led approximately 900 Pakistani Muslim volunteers into the town to defend it. They were mostly only teenagers. They holed-up in the several buildings of the abandoned Sultan Razia Girls’ School and built up their fighting positions. Some officials from the town tried to get them to surrender but they vehemently refused. When they started shooting at Northern Alliance and US Special Forced, those guys shot back. And listen to this, all the while the battle was raging the Mullah was driving around in the school using a loudspeaker riveted onto a pickup truck and blaring out to his volunteers: “Those who die fighting for God don’t die! Those who go on jihad live forever, in paradise!”  

It is for sure most of them are there, for our guys killed most all of them. And following the battle, United States Air Force Sgt. Stephen E. Tomat was awarded the Silver Star for crawling right up under the heavy firing and calling in an air strike on six vehicles and the school.  

Also, approximately 1,500 Taliban were captured or defected. 

We now had an airfield so that our aircraft did not have to fly so far to do battle and could carry many more munitions since their sorties were much shorter.  

Following rumors that Taliban Mullah Dadullah might be headed to recapture the city with as many as 8,000 Taliban fighters, a thousand U.S. Army Rangers were airlifted into the city, which provided the first solid foothold from which Kabul and Kandahar could be reached. 

Also, after the battle was finished, US Army Civil Affairs Teams from the 96th Civil Affairs Battalion and Tactical Psychological Operations Teams from the 4th Psychological Operations Group assigned to both the Green Berets and Task Force Dagger were immediately deployed to Mazar-I-Sharif to assist in winning the hearts and minds of the inhabitants. 

I was on the first commercial air flight from Kabul to Mazar-I-Sharif and spent considerable time there. That girls school was quickly rebuilt.

I had several local friends in Mazar-I-Sarif who took me through the several private schools that they had started now that the Taliban were gone. I was able to visit with the young male students, but the girls were afraid to talk with me or even have their picture taken. They were still traumatized by how girls were treated by the Taliban. They were also afraid of what the Taliban would do to them if they ever come back. And I can understand, for in such a case, someone may tell on them and no telling the punishment they would face for having talked to an American male. 

One of my prison boys (that I will tell you about later) was always wanting me to send him pictures of people that will inspire him. Recently I sent him a picture of some guys his very age of when I was in Mazar-I-Sharif. These guys and I really bonded. 

I wrote the prison boy the following: “I am sending this picture to you, so you can see how bright and hopeful these young men are. The reality is that they are stuck in a city in the north of Afghanistan, and have not a chance in hell of ever getting out of there or having any kind of opportunity for any kind of a good life. Because of their crazy customs, most of them will never even get the wife they want, because it would cost them $4,000 to $5,000 for the payment to her family, and they will never have that much. I had one of the older ones email me recently. He and this girl were deeply, desperately in love. But her family was giving her to an ugly old man who had the money to pay them for her. Can you imagine how desperate my young friend there felt. He loves her so very, very much, and she is going to that ugly old man for as long as he lives. 

“You can also imagine how intensely and desperately they desire to be in the U.S. and have all of the opportunities that you guys have. I want you to look at their faces and into their eyes and solemnly promise me and yourself that you will live a successful and special life when you get out from back of that prison fence, since they will never have the chances and opportunities that you have.”

 And as you read this I sincerely, no desperately, solicit your prayers for these particular boys. I can’t tell you all that we went through together that will keep us bonded for life. 

So, I went through all of this about Afghanistan as just background to tell you about a U.S., black soldier that I met there. He looked so whipped and beaten-down that I just asked him: “What in the world has happened to you, fella?” 

He said: “Man, you won’t believe what happened to me yesterday!!!”  

So I said: “Tell me about it.” 

And here is what he related……………….He said that he was out on patrol in his hum-vee and had gotten ahead of his unit. He decided to stop and wait for them. He was right on the edge of this little village. He said that this darling little girl came running across the street and just smiled up at him. He said he didn’t have any candy to give her, so he just gave her one of his water bottles. 

Then at that moment, her father came running across the street. He grabbed her by the hair, reached for that curved knife that the men carry in their belts and just cut her throat right there in the street.  

The soldier said: “Wow”, that he grabbed his weapon and wanted to “blow the bastard’s ass off right there!!” 

But the soldier knew what would happen to him if he did. So, he dared not do it.  

Now that black soldier has no visible wounds, but I assure you that he is wounded for life. Do please pray for him. God knows who he is. He really needs your prayers. God’s Spirit Power can comfort him.

P.S. This is to all my many friends in China who read these stories …………… 这就是说我所有读过这些故事的朋友在中国打招呼。 请，如果您不介意，请给我发送电子邮件，并告诉我您的名字和有关您自己的信息。 我的E-mail地址是…..ronald82@verizon.net