OMTL: Going Forward

What now?  The enemy did not go away. Photo-echo23marines6569.org

I’m giving this my best shot, but the rest of the world didn’t get the memo that I am a One Month to Live Alumni and is not giving me special privileges. What now?

OK, that didn’t work. You have permission to throw in the towel and just live the way the world tells you to. And wouldn’t the prince of this world love that. Another easy victory—didn’t even have to step up the busyness meter, just sucked them right back into their old ways.

So taunting me with the devil is getting the best of me and I am not producing the fruit that God wants me to produce is the answer. It could be, but I prefer to answer in story.

 

The first Gulf War broke out when I was a fairly seasoned Marine Captain. I was training reservists at the time and took them from Iowa to Camp Lejeune, North Carolina for two weeks refresher training before shipping them out to the area of operations. 

A few weeks later, I went back to Camp Lejeune to go to the Gulf. Even though I was an active duty officer, I went through the same refresher that my reservists had a short time before. Most of the Marines going through this training with me came from similar situations. They had been training reservists, shipped out their units, and now were going through this refresher course. We admittedly had something of a cocky attitude.

Then we went to the firing range for close combat and a pistol refresher. The attitude among most of us was that if desert warfare gets down to pistols, knives, and hand to hand; this is going to be a bloody mess. We had other metaphors to describe this that will not make it into this article. Needless to say, our attitude at this point had a hint of cynicism to it. Just get us to the fight.

The instructor for this segment was a crusty old gunnery sergeant from the Vietnam era. He sensed the attitude of the group and conveyed an earlier experience from when he was a 19 year old private first class.

The fighting had gone on all night. His team was still alive but out of ammunition and all four Marines were wounded. They were too far separated from the rest of the platoon to go anywhere. The enemy was less than a hundred yards away. Though they could move silently when they wanted, they did not try to hide the sound of their movement now. The sun was coming up and all four Marines could see each other now. All were exhausted and in pain and the team leader, a lance corporal—which meant he was only a couple months older than the rest but still in charge, sensed that the group was ready to accept that they were beaten and would die in a few minutes.

As the enemy resumed the attack—they too were low on ammunition and each Marine realized that his death might come via a North Vietnamese bayonet—this young, lance corporal team leader looked at this Marines and said what even today, I believe might be the most compassionate thing that once Marine can say to another.

He looked at these young men leaning against mounds of dirt and ready to die and said:

While the enemy might kill them; this very young team leader was not going to let any one of them die from self pity. They repelled the enemy’s attack and three of the four survived the day. One of them was the old salt conducting the close combat and small arms training for our group.

So what do we do when the enemy tries to take our abundant life from us? 

Just live one more hour putting what is most important at the top of our real life list. Just make it one more day living and giving and blessing like God made us to live. We are not changing the entire world. We are changing ourselves and making an eternal difference in our part of this world.

Don’t throw away the truth that we have discovered about ourselves, our lives, our purpose, and our relationship with our God. Get in the fight and live!

Live to the full!