(Newswire.net — July 14, 2014) Haymarket, Virginia — During the week my father was a steel worker and on weekends he farmed. One summer my father invited a coal miner friend and his wife to plant a garden on our property. From then on each weekend Dad’s friends drove out to our little farm to weed and tend their garden.
They brought with them a red haired, freckle faced young girl named Charlene. She and I climbed trees and played in the woods while the adults gardened and solved the world’s problems.
I’m a fast learner, so by the end of the summer I had made up my mind. I proposed marriage and she accepted. She was ten and I was thirteen.
After graduating from high school I enlisted in the Army to fight in the Korean War. By the time Charlene finished high school; I had worked my way up through the ranks from Private to Corporal to Sergeant to Second Lieutenant of Infantry, and had become a Paratrooper and Ranger.
In the spring of 1971, I was an advisor to a South Vietnamese Infantry regiment, stationed in the high jungle of the tri-state area where Laos, Cambodia and South Vietnam all converge. Several miles deeper in the jungle, one of my battalions was surrounded by the forces of a reinforced North Vietnamese Infantry Division and greatly outnumbered.
Suddenly Larry McNamara, my battalion advisor’s voice came over the radio, “We are in real deep trouble, Colonel, Is there anything you can do to help us?”
“It is dark,” I said, “so we can’t send helicopters to air lift you out of the jungle. On foot, even if we march all night, we can’t get to you before morning.
Any message we send to you over the radio will have to be encoded because the enemy is listening to our radio conversations. So, you’ll have to turn on your flash light to decode it. The enemy will see your light and attack you.
But there is something I can do. It will just take a few minutes.”
That something was prayer. I walked a short distance further out into the jungle and knelt and prayed, which is what I always did in these kinds of situations, and in Vietnam there were a lot of them.
In a few minutes, I had the answer. “Larry,” I said, “we are plotting a 100 yard thick horse shoe of artillery fire all around your position. We will leave one side of the horse shoe open for you and your men to escape.
“This will be time-on-target artillery fire. Each artillery piece in the area will fire, and each round will be timed so that all the rounds land in the horse shoe and explode at the same time. It will provide you a “Wall of Fire” and feel like an earthquake. Nothing can live through that kind of a bombardment.
“When the firing stops, you and your men fight your way out of the open side of the horse shoe.”
“OK, but which end is open? The enemy knows our plan. They will try to intercept us.”
Larry,” I said, do you remember the story of the birth of Jesus?”
“Colonel, people are dying all around me, and all you can do is tell Bible stories,” he snapped.
I ignored his sarcasm, “When Jesus was born there was a star that stood over his birth place. Do you remember the direction the star came from?”
“Yes,” he laughed.
“Larry,” I continued, “that is the side of the horse shoe that will be left open …. You have five minutes before the artillery starts firing.”
What neither of us didn’t know at the time was that God had cooked up a little surprise. The east side of the horse shoe was not guarded by the North Vietnamese — because there was a cliff on the east side which in the dark our soldiers hadn’t seen.
So when they ran toward the east, they ran right off the cliff and fell about ten feet straight down and hit the floor of the jungle which was slanted at about a 45 degree angle. From there they slid and tumbled all the way down to the bottom of the valley.
They walked all night, and by morning they were safely out of the North Vietnamese Army’s clutches.
Oh, that night not a single life was lost.
Now, if God could protect and rescue Larry and all those soldiers with him, he can just as surely Restore America to the nation it was back in the days of President George Washington. That is what this is all about; it is about Restoring America to its founding principles of freedom and liberty.
And that is why Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. could say with such conviction that, “I still have a dream. It is deeply rooted in the American dream. I have a dream that one day every valley shall be exalted, and every hill and mountain shall be made low, the rough places will be made plain, and the crooked places will be made straight, ‘and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together’.”
Tonight let us loudly proclaim that the America General George Washington and the other Founders fought and prayed so hard to be established will be restored, that America will return to being what our Founders intended it to be: one nation under the sovereignty of God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit.