A Paratrooper’s Tale
Photo of Vietnam soldier, 1970, is not of the author, and is from Sky Soldier, Spring 1971.
On the bleak winter day that set it all in motion, I knew only one thing: my father was dead, and I had some fast growing up to do.
I was 15, the eldest of three children, when my father had a heart attack and died. A woman relative took me aside at the funeral and said that as the number one son it was now up to me to become the man of the house. I’d have to be there in support of my mother, brother, and sister.
But who would teach me how to think and talk and dress and carry myself as a man? Who would be the role models? What was the quickest route to mature young manhood?
At 17, I found the answer. I’d sign up for the U.S. Army Airborne, the rugged paratroopers who are trained to jump into battle by parachute. The Army was the proverbial Man’s World. I’d be surrounded by mature men. I could study them—their turns of thought and speech, absorb their values, and work to master the code by which they moved through life and prevailed.
For an 18-year-old in Vietnam, the fact of mortality seemed the very essence of tragedy, vast, towering, immeasurable.
I loved the military, made rank fast, and had a battalion commander wanting to sponsor me for West Point. But I decided I’d first volunteer for Vietnam. I was assigned to the 173d Airborne Brigade, which by then was patrolling the lush coastal province of Binh Dinh in the Central Highlands region.
Sometimes at night, while on perimeter guard, I’d look up at the stars and think about the meaning of life. Why am I in this world? Where am I going? If I get killed in battle, is there life after death?
Some mornings, when the sun was coming up over the darkish mountains, pale mists lingered on the jungled slopes. But as the sun climbed higher, the heat would slowly burn the mists away.
The Bible says in James 4:14, “YOU DO NOT EVEN KNOW WHAT WILL HAPPEN TOMORROW. WHAT IS YOUR LIFE? YOU ARE A MIST THAT APPEARS FOR A LITTLE WHILE AND THEN VANISHES.”
That, indeed, is the truth, clean, simple, uncomplicated about us all. We are mortals who have at best a few fleeting decades to live. We are here a little while, then we are gone.
The bonds between man and wife, parents and children, are all severed by death. Not only are these ended, but any honors that may have been accorded us, any material thing we may have cherished—a house we had come to love, a favorite painting or garden—at the last, all we accomplished, all we knew and loved and wanted, falls away. Our world reduces to the narrow confines of a single hospital bed, and we can only wait for the final darkness to fall.
“What man can live and not see death, or save himself from the power of the grave?” asks Psalm 89.
For an 18-year-old in Vietnam, this fact—mortality—seemed the very essence of tragedy, vast, towering, immeasurable.
The young Keats had felt it and envied the nightingale. It had been spared the knowledge of:
“The weariness, the fever, and the fret
Here, where men sit and hear each other groan;
Where palsy shakes a few, sad, last gray hairs,
Where youth grows pale, and specter-thin, and dies.”
And it triggered in me the same questions that teenagers and college students ask all over the world: Who am I? Why am I here? And while I am here, what is the way to live my life? What should I do and not do?
I was soon to have even more time to ponder these questions.
A day came when I was airlifted by helicopter onto a hill in the Song Cai Valley, northwest of the port city of Qui Nhon. We set up our weapons and dug in. Three days later Communist North Vietnamese regulars attacked the hill. We beat them back but I and six others were wounded in the opening moments of the assault. I spent the next two months in military hospitals in Vietnam, Japan and the U.S.
Vietnam and the months in the hospital worked into me a most acute and intense resolve: I would try forever after to squeeze, out of every waking moment, the absolute last drop of quality and benefit and enjoyment. I’d have lived the fullest life possible by the time my last day on the world’s calendar came around.
Once I had recovered from my wounds, I was sent to an Airborne unit in Germany, and there I met a fellow-paratrooper who was a Christian.
In one sense, we were a study in contrasts. He was the picture of someone content with himself and with life. His easy smile and clear-eyed confidence said so.
Outwardly, I knew, I struck others as being self-assured. In fact, I was a hollow, hungry vessel, starving for love and meaning.
And I was casting about in all directions to fill the void. Yet carousing and camaraderie, I found, couldn’t do it. Getting drunk couldn’t do it. Neither would relationships with women. Nor would music or literature. World travel—whether to Vietnam where history was being made, or to the cities of the Old World where history stood in every street—this too could not anchor my soul.
Because after every high, there was the coming down. After every GI weekend, the waking up. And whether the head awoke off the hard ground of an Asian hillside or on a pillow in a barracks in Germany, only the venue was different; the still-present inner hunger was the same.
This paratrooper seemed to have what I’d been always seeking and never finding. But how could I get it? I struck up a conversation and soon learned he was a believer in Jesus Christ.
I was skeptical about religion, thinking it the refuge of the weak and deluded. Yet something rang very true about this fellow trooper.
So we’d have long talks.
He told me that the Bible’s claims were not propositions merely, but life-changing realities that could be experienced day-to-day. God, he said, is the Creator of the universe, and God loves each person he’s made.
God cares about me intimately, he said. He knows my hurts and needs and searchings. And God was eager to bring me into friendship with him. He’d give me the gift of eternal life. I wouldn’t have to fear physical death anymore. For a Christian, death wouldn’t be the end of life; it would be the passage to God’s home in heaven.
God wanted also to invest me with his own Spirit to produce purity and godliness in me. Where there had been emptiness, there would now be wisdom and renewal—with joy.
In fact, my friend said, he found his God-given joy to be so strong at times, it seemed it would all but burst from his chest.
Love, joy, peace. Exactly what I lacked, exactly what I wanted.
But even if these things were true, I doubted I could live the Biblical way. God says, “Love others.” But if I disliked someone, even found them contemptible, I couldn’t love them. And swearing. As a Christian, I wouldn’t be free to use profanity. What if I wanted to tear into someone verbally? How could I be sure I wouldn’t curse them out, even though God says not to? No, I said, I really doubted I could start the Christian life and stay the course.
The answer surprised me: my friend said, right, I could not live a Biblical life—not, that is, in my own power. God knew that. By his Spirit he would enable me supernaturally to live a godly life.
I mulled these things over for several days. My friend was sincere—but maybe only sincerely deluded.
On the other hand, what if all these things were true? He’d shown me in the Bible John 14:6, where Jesus said: “I am the way and the truth and the life; no one comes to the Father except through me.” If these things were true, there was simply nothing left but to fly into God’s arms for eternal life with him and ask for a changed life right now.
In the barracks one afternoon, my friend asked if I wanted to come to God. I said yes.
He led me in a short prayer in which I acknowledged to God that I had lived a life that had broken his laws and that neither honored nor worshipped him. I asked God to forgive me and grant me eternal life. I asked him to change me and make me his friend. I said that I would submit to his authority as the Sovereign God. I said I’d trust him to help me live his way.
When we finished praying, we looked at each other and I heard myself say—the words sprang so quick- ly—”My emptiness is gone!”
I knew at once that I was changed. In but an instant, a fullness and contentment had entered me that surpassed any of the best moments I’d ever known.
It was the prompt beginning of a transformation of my entire life.
I awoke the next day with that new contentment still fresh and full. I saw the world through new eyes. Even—and I mean this literally—the green of the hills and the blue of the sky seemed richer, though of course they were surely just their usual hues.
This joyous vitality and new purpose came not from my human soul or some earthly inspiration. It was God Himself. The Bible says in 2 Corinthians 5:17: “Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has gone, the new has come!”
I little knew, looking out across the perimeter those nights in Vietnam, that what I hungered for I would find only a few months later, in the person of Jesus Christ. I heard. I believed. I acted. In the years since, these words from Psalm 16 would come to stand as an emblem of my life, present and future:
“You have made known to me the path of life; you will fill me with joy in your presence, with eternal pleasures at your right hand.”
Franklin Fisher