My Fantastic God-Given Life

Book excerpt: As for that officer who greeted me when I graduated from the B-52 school and made the remark "What are you doing here?" when I came back to Carswell Air Base again for the second time in the hangar, well when the hospital was closing its doors for good, I saw him walking slowly from the hospital. I called out to him, and we exchanged greetings. While he asked what I was doing these days, I noticed that he was much older and walked slower using a cane. Then he told me, "Don, I have known you from 1950, and I have served with you in many different occasions. I stayed in touch with most of the men who served with me. When I first met you, you were just a young kid aged nineteen and always getting into trouble. Then you got married and settled down. I always said you would amount to something good when I noticed the way you made your choices in your careers. Looks like you did okay." After a year, I read in the paper that he passed away. Today I don't see much of my son's ex-wife (who I felt was as if she were my own daughter), and I still wonder why things like that happened. To walk away from a marriage of eighteen years and three children . . . I repeat: "Why?" Many of my military buddies are gone to the military heavens, so are many of my Ashton hometown school guys that I attended school with. I am still around. I have to wonder if what did happen in that cold watery accident in New Jersey when I found myself down in that river was it just the way the brain reacts to prevent one from becoming brain-dead from fright, or was it the work of some supreme act from God?