Thoughts from Mark "Hat" Rackley

Moses answered the people, “Do not be afraid. Stand firm and you will see the deliverance the Lord will bring you today. The Egyptians you see today you will never see again. The Lord will fight for you; you need only to be still.”

• Exodus 14:13-14

“You know the human response to panic?  First, we are afraid.  Second, we run.  Third, we fight.  Fourth, we tell everybody.
“God’s counsel is just the opposite.  Don’t be afraid.  Stand still. Watch Him work.  Keep quiet.  It’s then that He does it.  He takes over!  He handles it exactly opposite the way we’d do it.  The Lord just taps His foot, waiting for us to wait.”

• Charles R. Swindoll, Bedtime Blessings

I keep misquoting an old Congressional Medal of Honor recipient – because I cannot find the quote on the internet – but he said that the hero is scared too.  In fact, he is so scared that he ran in the wrong direction.

Have you ever been that scared?

I was in a live round training exercise that went horribly wrong.  We were demonstrating how a classic battlefront, preparing to advance, worked.  The big boomer artillery did their job.  The intermediate artillery did their job.  Then the 105mm howitzers were not properly zeroed in on their targets and they fired their rounds directly in front of the earthen foxholes that we were in.  With these guys off target, the grandstands full of dignitaries were quickly emptied.  We had a roof on our earthen foxholes.  We were minimally safe if the artillery barrage stopped and did not advance toward our position.  But that was the plan, to land at the back of the enemy position and roll back toward us while we fired our weapons, loaded with tracer rounds to impress the people that were now on the buses getting away from there.  I had the M60 machine gun, as usual, and my ammo bearer panicked and tried to run from the foxhole.  Only problem was that the rounds were hitting the barbed wire, maybe twenty yards in front of our position.  You could hear the pieces of wire flying over your head.  I took two steps and tackled the ammo bearer, who may have made the military his career.  I crawled over the top of him since he was outside the roofing.

The ammo bearer who had shown cowardice in the face of adversity was never reprimanded.  I was.  After cussing for a minute or so, the sergeant, in a voice that sounded like he was about to cry rather than simply cussing someone out, whispered in my ear (this was just as the “cease fire” in Vietnam was signed, but they still shot at each other),…  He whispered, “We don’t need anymore dead heroes.”

Then they made me stand at attention while the sergeant and another recruited sergeant picked pieces of barbed wire out of the back of my uniform shirt.  As the sergeant said, “We didn’t need me sitting in the back of a cattle car and a piece of shrapnel or barbed wire cutting an artery and I’d bleed to death before the truck stopped at the barracks.  (cattle car – an 18-wheeler flatbed fitted with seats, dusty, but you didn’t have to march the ten miles back to the barracks)

But with God, He tells us to wait and let Him fight the battle.  No frightened heroes running in the wrong direction or cowards running for the hills.  We are commanded to not be afraid.  To stand still.  To be quiet.

We are told to sit back and see what God can do and will do for us.

He loves us that much.

Soli Deo Gloria.  Only to God be the Glory.