Almost a Hero Again Last Night
By Yan Xiong 9/12/2004
At 11:00 last night, Commander Parker asked me to see the soldiers standing guard at night with him. When we saw the stand in the front vaguely, Parker turned the light off to protect ourselves. The commander has 25 years of military experience. He is strong and energetic, with the height of 1.8 M. I feel excited, not afraid of danger.
We continued to drive ahead to another stand. U.S. soldiers are weathered. They know that it must be the officers coming far in the night for check… The commander asked them the information and talked about things happening these days. The soldiers had to be vigilant of the enemies’ action at night.
After we inspected a few guards like this, we encountered a situation.
On the road, I saw Parker stopping slowly. When he fully stopped, he said to me: “Chaplain, there is a big ditch ahead.” I jumped down to look closely. Under the dim light, the night saw a huge ditch. God! Luckily, Parker has over twenty years of military experience. He is an excellent army man. Otherwise, we would have become hero right away. And we would be found the next day in the fallen car by our guys.
At the moment, I was not scared at all, but I understood some reports on the army newspaper all of a sudden. In “Stars and Stripes”, there is a column “U.S. deaths in Iraq”, reporting death number regularly. So far, out of approximately 900 deaths, there are over 700 died of the enemies’ attack. The other 200 something was because of accidents. Without the experience, I did not understand why the other number was so big. After the occurrence, I got to know that we would have become heroes with that 200 something without God’s blessing.
From this matter, I conclude that we really can not talk military affairs on paper.
We are called “deploy to the theater of Iraq”. I appreciate the word “theater” very much.
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