via TJC
I joined the US Army in 1998, my first assignment was to Schweinfurt Germany where my Armor Battalion was deployed on a rotation with SFOR in Bosnia. At this time things were heating up in the Serbian Province of Kosovo where an Ethnic cleansing was taking place against Albanians. My First three deployments would all be so called "Peace Keeping" missions which in effect would be where we would serve as armed human shields protecting one ethnic group from retaliating against another. In the US where we are a little more than 4% of the world's population, we are brainwashed by propaganda in the mainstream media and academia to believe racism is about oppression of one group with a lower amount of melanin against another group with more melanin and a racial slur or questionable stare is considered a "Micro-aggression". In these first few deployments I would see real racism first hand that was white on white with real physical aggression where men women and children were brutalized and executed in mass and dumped in pits because one group decided the other were nothing more than vermin, perpetuating a hundred generations of hate that had nothing to do with the color of your skin.
At the beginning of these deployments, we didn't know what we would be facing, but we knew that the likelihood of some of us not making it home was higher than working at a fast-food joint at home, but not as high as an infantryman in Vietnam. The US sustained 10 fatalities in Bosnia, half of them from accidents where soldiers were being careless. In Kosovo there would only be two fatalities when an Apache helicopter crashed.
With that as context we were all instructed to write letters home in the event we were stupid and somehow managed to get ourselves killed while peacekeeping. I wrote my first letter to my grandparents who had raised me for almost half of my childhood. My Father's parents were devout Southern Baptists and had grown up during the depression outside Monroe Georgia. They taught me what a Christ filled marriage looked like by serving each other and strictly enforcing boundaries. My Grandfather had his responsibilities and my grandmother had hers. They were pretty traditional but the take away was that they had gotten to a point where their roles were defined and highly respected. They also were always doing little things to help and serve each other. I told them how proud I was to serve my country and in part due to their example I had no fear of losing my life which belonged to God. I was ready for him to call me home at any moment. I asked them to pray for me and that my walk would reflect Jesus.
There would be 11 total deployments before I was medically retired in 2013. My last letter was to my wife and two children while she was pregnant with number 3. I volunteered for an 8 month deployment to East Africa. I expressed how proud I was to have her as my wife, best friend and lover. How blessed I felt to have found her and to have her as the mother to my children and reaffirmed that nothing I could ever do would amount to the impact of bringing life into the world and nurturing our children into courageous and productive members of society. I left her with a list of bible verses I wanted our children to memorize so that they would know who they are in Christ and who the Most-High God is.
I never got the chance to share with my Grandfather what was in that first letter, because he would have a massive stroke that left him debilitated and unable to speak just a few months after I returned from Kosovo in 2000. He would die three years later while I was deployed to Iraq and newly married.
I did make sure that nothing I would write in a death letter to my wife and children would ever be the first time they would hear it. There is nothing left unsaid between me and those that I am the closest to, and I’m living out a life reflective of who I am in Christ. That is still a work in progress and not as apparent to strangers as it should be.
Carpe Diem! Seize the day and don’t waste any opportunity to communicate to those around you the reason why you have joy in this life and live as though tomorrow is not promised, because it’s not!
Daily Battle Order:
If you’ve never written an “Upon my death” letter, write one. Then make sure those things you want imparted to your friends, family, church community and colleagues do not go unsaid or communicated. Then revisit this letter from time to time to stay accountable.
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