Involuntary MISSION: In China with a Thorn in the Flesh

By Tim Ulmer

"Ask, and it will be given to you; seek and you shall find."—Matthew 7:7

Everyone's heard that, but whether they take it seriously depends on how quickly a prayer is answered and if God packaged it differently than they had expected.

Another axiom, "Everyone has a mission."

Often, Tim Ulmer admired the great people in history books more for their character than for their achievements, especially when they were epileptic. He has seizures, also, and envied people like Julius Caesar, Einstein, and Plato who significantly impacted mankind. If the Greeks' 'Genius Disease' didn't stop them from being famous, it shouldn't stop him either. He was going to pledge his life to fighting for the USA against communism and all other enemies.

The complex-partial seizures he'd had since the age of 2 were mild and didn't keep him from being an achiever, so their wretched fangs weren't bared fully at him until his teens, when epilepsy kept him from driving. Soon, it ravaged him like a T-rex when it kept him out of the military. It left him in a heap, aching to find another big mission he could do for history. A political career came out of the mist. But he left God out of the equation.

After college, Tim left the Illinois farmlands for a business in Chicago that he knew would pay for politics. He was aware that epilepsy was shadowing him, but he didn't care and drove a car since his seizures weren't as disabling as tonic-clonic (gran-mal). He'd keep functioning, but he just never remembered later on what he'd done. It took 4 car wrecks and a final wreck with a semi to make him jobless, penniless, and with nothing to do except move in with his parents in a village.

Suicidal thoughts even followed. Tim humored a friend who insisted that since no one was ever hurt in those accidents, including him, he wasn't meant to die yet. She swore that God had a big mission for Tim; which was why none of his plans had worked.

However, it was a "break" for him, not a blessing, when the State paid for him to return to college and get a degree in TV. Producers at the show, The Young and the Restless, wanted to hire him after an internship, but the T-rex devoured that when Tim had a seizure at its studio. It kept him from other jobs.

A minister in LA told him what the Bible said about epilepsy. Best of all, he said that experts think that the "thorn in the flesh" that St. Paul asked God to remove was epilepsy! Paul's seizures made God be seen stronger!

He returned to Illinois to help care for his mother, but that was a facade. He worked at a local TV station, but epilepsy cost him a full-time job. A reporter he'd teamed with left to teach English in China and urged him to follow her. Doing anything for that nation made him nauseous. They had a spy in our nuclear weapons lab, paid for a president's re-election, crash-landed a US Navy airplane. And its human rights were atrocious!

It seemed treasonous to him to teach a skill to anyone Chinese! Eventually, medical side-effects that made him feel like he was drowning into oblivion motivated him to accept a job at a Chinese university.

Once, as he recovered from a seizure during class, students wanted to know why his "sickness" didn't scare him. He shrugged that God had saved his life at least 5 times, and he could get killed just as easily at home, so why not travel? Upon mentioning God, people began asking him to tell them about Christianity in private.

The school told him to leave because it considered him to be "contagious". In two years, he taught in 5 cities, and was asked about Jesus everywhere. That's when he knew his prayer to serve the US hadn't been ignored. He'd needed to find God first and his epilepsy was the means by which God steered him. Serving God, too, impacted more people than if he had gotten into the military.

Tim is proud to be epileptic. He has created a TV show called "Epilepsy Gangster" so others with epilepsy can discover their missions in life.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Feb 29, 2020
• ISBN: 9781098303907

Book preview

Acknowledgements

Chapter 1

When you go to war against your enemies and see horses and chariots and an army greater than yours, do not be afraid of them, because the LORD your God, who brought you up out of Egypt, will be with you. —Deuteronomy 20:1

What Did I Get Myself Into?

It felt like a dream to finally be arriving in the People’s Republic of China after all the time I spent agonizing on whether to accept the job. Once the airplane crossed the International Dateline, the calendar dates showed that I’d been traveling for three days even though it had only been thirty-three hours since I embarked on my odyssey from St. Louis. There were layovers in Los Angeles and Seoul before reaching my destination, Changchun, in the northern Jilin Province of mainland China. Since the trip had been in the planning stage for several weeks, nothing seemed extraordinary, neither the going-away party my parents hosted nor the fact that I had been awake all night long to finish my packing. My mother didn’t join Dad and me on the ninety-minute trip from Murphysboro, Illinois, because she had diabetes, Parkinson’s disease, kidney failure, and had never made a full recovery from a partial stroke a decade earlier. Actually, the relief my Dad got from me helping take care of Mom was one of the weightiest factors to be considered in deciding whether to take this job; it meant that he would return to being Mom’s sole nurse 24/7. However, with both of them having loved being teachers, they were so overjoyed at the thought of having a child following in their footsteps that they practically shoved me out of their house.

While deciding whether to take the job, I’d been having confidential conversations with Mom and Dad, individually. When talking to her, I would have usually been sitting on the floor in front of the lounge chair that she left only to go to bed or the bathroom. I honestly doubted that she would be alive whenever I would return from China. Nevertheless, I asked, Do you mind?

I think it’s great! she exclaimed without any reservations. It going to be so fun to see you be a teacher! I’ll be very proud of you.

Goodbye kiss to Mom

Mom knew it was ironical that I’d taken a teaching job. While I was growing up, I watched her and Dad work incredibly hard. Being a communicative and inspirational teacher at the same time there might be some unruly kids was tough enough. In addition, in recent years, society’s respect for educators had spiraled downward, as fewer parents held their children responsible for their actions; it’s more and more common for parents to claim their children would never misbehave at school nor would they ever not study enough. Therefore, they thought if anyone was to blame, it had to be the teachers and school administrators. The older I got, I never thought teachers were paid enough to make that sort of bad treatment and lack of respect from the public worth considering a job in education. Masochist is a word that I might have used to describe anyone considering being a teacher. Mom thought it ironic that for me to have those resentments, yet accept a job for not even a third of the pay that my parents earned their first year teaching, forty-four years earlier, in 1958!

Mom, I just want you to be sure about this, and I’ll do whatever you want, I said. Are you really sure?

Taking my hand in both of hers, she pulled me closer in order to give me a hug and said, I want you to do it. I’m just so happy!

Dad’s treat to last American burger until whenever

Once Dad and I crossed the bridge over the Mississippi River and into St. Louis to catch my flight, Dad kept an eye out on where I could get one last made-in-America hamburger. He told me that it had been one of the things he’d missed most during his missions to Japan and Korea as a Navy sailor during the Korean War, so he wanted me to have one last All-American meal, including fries and a shake. Because he doubted that the Chinese probably had never even heard of drive-ins (which later proved to be correct!), he chose a Sonic Burger drive-in. Even though I was departing to the homeland of Dad’s former antagonist, the People’s Republic of China, we didn’t talk about anything besides wondering what Chinese food would be like. I believed he was proud of my decision, and he was probably feeling like he did when I marched passed him for the first time in the Memorial Day parade with my Cub Scout troop many years before. As he drove me to the airport, I noticed that he was wearing the golf shirt with the name and logo of his U.S.S. Talladega APA-208 (an amphibious assault ship that landed U.S. Marines at Iwo Jima, Guam, and Okinawa) and his American Legion ball cap with the U.S. flag he’d pinned on it. The man exemplified duty and love for one’s country to me. Scores of veterans elected him to be the president of both the Talladega’s reunion organization and the Murphysboro American Legion post. Dad taught me the Pledge of Allegiance about the same time that he taught me The Lord’s Prayer. He showed me how to properly fold the flag and made it my responsibility to daily raise and lower the flag above the center of Mom’s colorful flower bed, and he was really proud of me when the school principal asking me to join the little squad of fourth- and fifth-graders who raised and lowered the school’s flag every day! Dad and I had fun putting a couple dozen flags around the edge of our yard on the national holidays. While my parents supported me for anything I tried, they never pushed me into doing something. But the pleasure I got from those things—and seeing the passion with which Dad told me his Navy stories—caused me by the age of five to set the goal of one day defending my country as an officer in the United States Navy.

It still seemed to be some kind of routine trip when we said our farewells outside of Lambert Airport’s International Drop-Off, rather than inside the terminal. It wasn’t until I walked through the gates at the International Terminal that I started having different feelings. It seemed like every stewardess and flight crew member who passed me was Asian, and they were some of the most beautiful women I’d ever seen. My adrenalin took another leap when I got to the gate’s window and saw the fat nose of the Korean Air’s Boeing 777 that I’d be flying on. Even though civilian airplanes never thrilled me as much as warbirds, this airplane excited me, because it was the biggest one I’d ever flown in, and it would take me overseas. Something else walloped me on my head; it was the realization that, even though we were still on American soil, I was hearing less English spoken and more foreign languages. The straw that broke the camel’s back of any of my remaining complacency happened after I boarded the plane and saw that the audio of all four movies I’d ordered was in Korean; English wasn’t even an option. There was no mistaking it for me at that point; I was doing something different from anything else in my life.

We arrived in Seoul in the middle of the night in a heavy rain making it impossible to see any of the Korean surroundings. A shroud of clouds prevailed after my transfer, so I could have just as easily imagined myself as being over Kansas. Eventually a horizon began to glow and the sun got higher but the fact we were above the clouds kept me from seeing when we entered China.

Changchun, a city of 25 million people, wouldn’t be much farther from the coast of Asia. It is in China’s northeastern-most province, Jilin, and is less than a three-hour drive to either the North Korean and Russian borders. These were places I’d only read about, never expecting to go anywhere near them. Curiously, I became more relaxed as the sky took on a rapidly increasing orange hue. It was a surprising reality to me that my confidence grew in proportion to the brightening of the sun. However, I hadn’t been paying attention to how close we were pitching downwards, back into the clouds. The loss of the sun came with the loss of much of my newly-found confidence. I jumped at the first thunderclap after we descended into a thunder storm. I began to imagine that the thunder might actually be an artillery barrage that I was charging into! It was the first time I’d ever seen lightning while I was flying. There were no announcements from the captain about our arrival, and before I had a chance to try and see the airfield at Changchun, my stomach cringed when the airplane made a loud THUMP! That landing was even more shattering than ones I’d had in small private planes. The clouds remained dark and thick while the airliner was taxiing even though the rain had stopped. There was enough light to reveal the knee-high weeds growing from cracks and holes in the runway, which was not a very comforting sight for me.

My breath was taken away when the airplane taxied past a long row of Soviet-built jet fighter planes that flanked the runway—there were probably two dozen MiG-21’s. Called Fishbeds, they killed many American pilots over Vietnam. The tail of each one was practically entirely covered by a giant red star. I hadn’t been aware that the Soviet Union, the MiG designer and primary flier, had let Communist China have any. Even if my dread of coming to this country had about been laid to rest, the sight of those fighter airplanes so close to a civilian air terminal was something like I’d expected of the People’s Republic of China. I love reading or watching documentaries about aerospace, particularly military aircraft, but my excitement about actually seeing an entire squadron of Fishbeds quickly turned into guilt with my realization that these weren’t static exhibits or performers at an airshow. It had been the goal of all American pilots in Vietnam—and Korea, fifty years earlier—to shoot down any plane sporting one of those red stars, but I just gawked at them while other passengers started unloading their overhead packages. Rather than those fighter planes ebbing me with senses of excitement or adventurism, they sprinkled me with a sense of foreboding.

Passengers exited the airliner and stepped into a poorly lit and desolate terminal. Its interior was simply one glass wall with unpainted cement floors, walls, and ceilings.

Tim, over here! called a friendly voice.

For his and his family’s personal safety (even a decade later), I’ll refer to this man as Philip Wang. He waved at me, and as they say, was grinning from ear-to-ear to see me. He was a high-ranking officer at Northeast Normal University (NENU), and I had become friends with him and his wife, Judy when they were visiting NENU’s sister school (and my alma mater), Southern Illinois University (SIU) in Carbondale, Illinois. That was where he’d assured me that I’d be like his little brother if I accepted the teaching job at Northeast Normal University, which was a nationally-accredited university for educators.

My Chinese contact back in the states at SIU, Claire, who was a NENU graduate herself, had been preparing me with some basic phrases for several weeks, since I didn’t speak any Chinese (Mandarin). I said, Philip, boge. Sha-en-shung ni hao! which I meant to be Philip, big brother. It is good to see you! Hello! Even though my pronunciation was less than perfect, it was still close enough for him to understand me and give me a laughing approval with a slap on my back.

A woman in her mid-twenties, Xu Yingge, Jackie, as I had gotten to know her online, had accompanied him to get me. She was responsible for all of NENU’s foreign experts (as foreign teachers are called) and would have been doing this by herself if Philip hadn’t insisted on accompanying her. She hung back and simply smiled while saying, Ni hao, the Mandarin word for Hello.

Xu Yingge, shea-she zjeah. Ni Hao, I told her, which means, Xu Yingge, we meet at last. Hello. Jackie and I had exchanged lots of information while making plans for me to teach conversational English at NENU. Then, I spoke another phrase that I had been practicing for her, alone: Waw-shir, Tim Ulmer. (I am Tim Ulmer.)

What I could see of the city during the cab ride on the freeway didn’t leave me with much of an impression, although I’ll blame that in part on my jetlag and the clouds overhead. All of the energy remaining in my mind was whirling like a broken record, constantly asking, "What am I doing in China?"

As they were taking me to my new residency at the NENU Hotel, I tried to compare the cars on the Chinese highway to the freeway bordering St. Louis (that I’d been on a day and a half earlier), or the Kennedy Expressway (that I used to try and navigate when I lived in Chicago). It was difficult to gauge the number and sizes of the buildings, however, because the walls dividing the lanes and shouldering the road were so tall that the upper parts of buildings were the only things clearly visible. I had been wondering about my new home and what it would be like, because SIU didn’t even have a hotel. Not only did NENU have its own hotel, but there was a woman—in addition to the receptionist—who stood at the door all day long in a traditional ankle-length Chinese red satin dress who greeted all of the entrants, whether they were residents or visitors. Other than my hosts who had picked me up at the airport, this hostess’s greeting was my first good impression of China.

Philip asked if it would be my preference to have a lunch then, or take a nap and do something in the evening? I chose the lunch. It was a bit of a surprise to me that he had reserved a small dining room not just for the three of us, but included his wife, Judy, as well. She had taken a longer break than usual from her job as a loan officer, just for my arrival. When the Wangs were in Carbondale, I’d taken them to several Chinese joints, but they insisted that all of them were Americanized, which is a complaint any Chinese visitor will say when you take them to a restaurant that’s supposed to be Chinese. Philip ordered six dishes for the four of us and asked if I needed a fork, rather than chopsticks.

When in Rome, do as the Romans! I replied enthusiastically, I’ll have chopsticks. That was when I realized that the idioms I had long taken for granted weren’t universal and how strange I might have sounded to bring up the Romans. My friends smiled at each other but didn’t have a reply. Every time I dropped some food with the chopsticks, it really didn’t matter, because they were just so happy to have me as their guest.

Jackie soon told us that she would have to leave. There were five more foreign experts arriving that afternoon who she had to pick up. The following day, she would be going as far as Beijing to pick up some more. But none of their arrivals could have received as warm and assuring of a reception as what Philip and Judy gave me!

Lunch was extravagant enough that it would still be over an hour before I could go to my room and sleep. Thirteen hours later, I woke up and simply laid in bed for about 30 minutes, still digesting the events of the last few days and wondering if it could all be some sort of dream. While my systems powered-up, I resumed asking myself if re-locating to China had been a good—or disastrous—decision. Either way, it was too late to do anything about it, so I was a little more stern with myself than I had been back on the airport’s runway.

Once I found the stamina to get out of bed, just like back home, my first task was to surf the television. A channel with English dialog or subtitles was nowhere to be found. However, the opening theme of one program made me stop surfing. Every actor was wearing uniforms of the People’s Liberation Army. The musical score and the collage of video clips struck me as being something like a soap opera. There were clips of older generals laughing and arguing, yelling at wives who appeared drunken and forlorn. It seemed to me that an attractive younger officer provided womanizing subplots, because he was caressing a woman’s neck, and kissing her as they sipped wine; the disapproving expressions on the faces of other uniformed young men and women implied that the two were most likely flaming star-crossed lovers. The last character to be shown was a sergeant who was in charge of ferocious guard dogs which snarled and leaped right at the camera lens as the theme song concluded.

However, the program that followed was drastic, not to mention, ominous.

Every screenwriting and TV production instructor I had in college incessantly drilled it into students’ heads that the ultimate goal in filmmaking was to use pictures that are good enough to tell the story without any words; otherwise, they should be studying radio. The pictures on this television show weren’t making me feel very good, but it had me hooked. I turned up the volume and its turbulent music was unnerving. If some Chinese TV writer knew that his story scared me too much to change channels, he would probably take great pride in his work. The episode began when a handful of generals, most of whom bore an uncanny resemblance to Chairman Mao, solemnly strutted into a control room like the White House’s Situation Room. It would be erroneous of me to label them as being expressionless, because when faces don’t reveal pleasure, anger, anxiety, that really becomes an expression all its own—one of cold hostility. The sparkle in the pupil of each general’s eyes made me shiver whenever the camera filmed an extreme close-up of their faces. The expressions of the technicians and guards wasn’t human while they toggled their switches and keyboards with the concentration of a concert pianist. Upon the generals’ entry into the control room, they did sit straighter and rolled their chairs closer to their consoles, giving me the impression that they wanted to be distant from any fits that might be thrown by the generals if they fouled up something. Plus, none of them showed the same anxieties or nervousness about their deadly jobs that’s sometime seen by their counterparts in an American movie, like licking their lips, flexing their fingers. I don’t know which was more nerve-racking to me—the generals’ uncanny silence or the deadness of the technicians’ eyes. One didn’t need to know the Mandarin language to know something big was about to happen!

The TV next presented the huge main screen in the control room that showed an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM), and the TV cameraman had panned across the control room to again show those automated operators. The tempo of a person’s voice makes a countdown recognizable in any language, and it made me squirm.

"Shi . . . Jiu . . . Ba . . . Qi . . . Liu . . . Wu . . . Si . . . San . . . Er . . . Yi," and the missile blasted off and flew out of sight.

Technicians and guards remained indifferent about the launch, as did their generals. Still, no one was breathing heavily, licking their lips, or biting fingernails about any of the telemetric signals they were receiving from the missile. Automatons is the best word I could use to describe these fearsome people. The were polar opposites of the U.S. Navy missile technicians I’d seen in the American box-office movie hit, Crimson Tide, when Denzel Washington lead a mutiny of sailors aboard an American nuclear missile submarine so that they would not have to launch a missile. I wondered how realistic the behavior of these TV actors was in comparison to how real Chinese servicemen might be if they found themselves in the same scenario, particularly since China was chomping at the bit to replace the Soviet Union as the East’s superpower at that time.

The white plumage coming from the bottom of the missile as it climbed toward outer space drew me closer to the TV. My breath was taken away when a U.S. Navy aircraft carrier task force showed on the screen, next. Another quick image of a cone-shaped device that I recognized as a MIRV (Multiple Independent Reentry Vehicle nuclear bomb) was being released from the missile to drop back to the earth. (However, an ICBM like that one might carry five nuclear bombs.)

The next image displayed on the control room’s main screen made me flinch. It was an overhead shot of the American aircraft carrier task force. The picture was slowly zooming bigger, so that viewers knew that the bomb was falling towards it. The big numbers on the ship’s deck distinguished it as the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln, CV-72. This was becoming personal to me because a childhood friend of mine was serving aboard it at the time, running its nuclear reactors that drive its engines. He’d even given me an unofficial tour of the ship when it was in port in San Diego, back in the days before 9/11 and the heightened security that followed. Now, they were attacking me!

What had been tiny dots on the flight deck a couple seconds earlier were growing into airplanes, and eventually grey tufts of steam could be seen rising from the carrier’s launch catapults.

And then, my television screen went completely blank with static for a second: denoting that the warhead had obviously plunged at least one of the biggest ships in the U.S. Navy into the ocean depths along with probably ten thousand men and women. When the picture of the control room resumed, all of the operators’ screens were static too. Immediately everyone was laughing and, for the first time, looking like human beings. A few were even elbowing each other like beer-buddies watching a baseball home run being hit by one of my beloved St. Louis Cardinals! Technicians were thumping one another on the back, and when the Chinese crew at the launcher appeared onscreen, they were jumping like they had just won the World Soccer Cup! Not a single Chinese serviceman showed the slightest bit of remorse about killing Americans.

It seemed insane to me! Despite some real-life Chinese military atrocities in recent years, I’d assumed that they had to have known the Cold War term, mutually assured destruction (MAD) which even our adversarial Soviet Union had also held sacred. Actually, this made me think a little bit like the Soviets hadn’t been so bad after all, because they had repeatedly exhibited an understanding that if they blew up something of ours, we’d do the same thing right back to them--including the total annihilation of Siberia. It seemed to me that the USSR had exemplified some kind of respect for Americans, and this TV show gave no sign of that. This seemed indicative of how there actually was a time in the past when Mao Tse Dong had the entire People’s Republic of China believing that a nuclear war could be won.

I’ll grant you that there was a significant amount of glorifying war in American movies like Patton, The Dirty Dozen, The Green Berets, or The Longest Day. But to watch such anti-American jubilation about blowing up a prized symbol of my country—while I was on the soil of that enemy—was utterly horrifying!

No one was expecting me to be anywhere; they were just allowing me to recover from my jet lag. So, I turned off the TV, fell back onto the bed, and kept asking WHAT HAVE I GOTTEN MYSELF INTO?

Chapter 2

To keep me from becoming conceited because of these surpassingly great revelations, there was given me a thorn in my flesh, a messenger from Satan, to torment me. Three times I pleaded with the Lord to take it away from me. But he said to me, My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in your weakness. Therefore, I will boast all the more gladly about my weaknesses, so that Christ’s power rests on me. That is why for Christ’s sake, I delight in weaknesses, in insults, in hardships, in persecutions, in difficulties. For when I am weak, then I am strong. —II Corinthians 12:7-10

Spinning Out of Control

In actuality, this Chinese odyssey of mine had started nearly a half a year earlier, but I had been unwittingly being groomed for it since the day I was born. My life was turning out to be nothing like the expectations I’d had for my future when I was growing up. I believed that by putting on a little more elbow grease into a task, or burning the midnight oil a little while longer, I could change things to be just like I wanted them to be. Sure, I wanted to help improve people’s lives, but most of all, I wanted to do something so great that the lives of many people would be changed for the better. I believed that anything the mind can conceive, it can achieve. In spite of that belief, something murky was forming up in my mind—albeit at a snail’s pace—throughout my twenties; whenever things unexpectedly happened to me, whether good or bad, I always felt that things happen for a reason. Whether I earnestly believed that or not, I’d been using it for years to encourage friends who felt down on themselves for one reason or another, even if I didn’t sincerely grasp the meaning of the words. We’re all under God’s control, and, as in my case, it might be decades before we each would discover what the missions are that He has in mind for us.

When I was eighteen months old, I fell all the way down a tall, hard, wooden staircase, and this accident caused me to suffer from epilepsy. Today, neurologists call the seizures complex-partial; back then, it was referred to as either petit-mal and another type called psycho-motor. (It’s possible to have more than one kind of seizure.) My seizures were mild and infrequent enough that it didn’t make my childhood and teen years much different from anyone else’s. It didn’t stop me from being a good student, an active Boy Scout, or dash my hopes of being an officer in the U.S. Navy.

Wearing Dad’s uniform’s hat and dreaming of being in the Navy

Being a soldier like Grandpa

My family is very patriotic. Ten generations before me, three ancestors who fought in the American Revolution proved themselves as early pioneers to Illinois right after it was purchased from France (in the Louisiana Purchase) in lieu of accepting their Revolutionary Army pensions. The expedition leader was Isaac Waggoner, the first man born in America to his father from the Nethlands, named Hans.. He fought under Col. William Moultrie for the Battle of Sullivan Island. (I always wonder what influence he had upon their settlement being in Sullivan in Moultrie County, Illinois.

Gen. Winfield Scott (Smithsonian Institute)

My great, great, great, great, great grandfather, Commanding General of the U.S. Army Winfield Scott, captured Mexico City in 1846 in the war for Texas and the American Southwest, was the Whig Party’s candidate president of the United States in 1852, and was the first general asked by President Lincoln to command the Union Army during the Civil War. (He declined because he was 74 years old.)

Two ancestral uncles left their Illinois roots to ranch in Texas in the 1850’s. But when their Yankee sibling, from who I’m descended, was captured and eventually condemned to the notorious Confederate prison camp at Andersonville, Georgia. It was clearly brother against brother when one of his rebel brothers was his guard! Instead, his rebel brother was able to free him without endangering either of their lives, and my great, great, great grandfather ended up passing away on his brothers’ Texas ranch eighteen years later.

My grandfather, Pvt. Carl Martin was a small sprinter who became a runner, soldiers who delivered messages and orders on foot before field radios were even invented. He was awarded a Silver Star for valor, a medal for gallantry from France, and a Purple Heart in World War I. When he was in basic, he wrote his father to send him an efficient knife. His father, a minister, sent it to him and commented, I pray you never have to use it but I pray it will save your life. His peers tried to buy it from him, but he wouldn’t do it. Then one day during the Battle of Meuse-Argonne, a man in his company heard that Martin got killed and was at the foot of a nearby tree. The man went to scavenge the knife but discovered Grandpa was still alive and got him to safety. A bullet had hit his helmet buckle and it scarred up his face, terribly. He had wanted to be a lawyer, but after that, he was too embarrassed by his scars just farmed. Because paper discharge papers from World War I and II were destroyed in a fire in 1973 at a facility in St. Louis, we never knew what he did to get his commendation.

Pvt. Carl Martin, Silver Star, French Medal of Valor, and Purple Heart

He lived an exemplary Christian life. Ironically, he never went to church: His killing in the war would ban him from all salvation by Jesus Christ. I can’t imagine how a man could live a productive and loving life for over half a century knowing that he was going to Hell whenever he died. It was a classic case of post-traumatic stress syndrome. Forty years after his death, Mom had a near-death out-of-body experience of her own, and she got to meet him again. He looked just like he did at the time he died, but he was calm and tender. She told him not to take her then, because she still had two men (Dad and me) who needed her. But after that experience, Mom wasted no time in getting baptized!

Finally, with a father in the Navy during the Korean War and his two brothers in World War II, it was assumed that one day I would serve my beloved United States of America against all foreign enemies, and I would do so proudly. Ironically, I’m the only one in my generation of the family who wanted to carry on the military tradition.

Quartermaster 2nd Class Thomas H. Ulmer

Steering his ship beneath the Golden Gate Bridge

Operating the engine telegraph

One of my Mom’s cousins, Glenn Martin, was an Army colonel who fought in Germany in WWII. He became my immediate hero when we met for the first time when I was 14. After retiring from the Army, Glenn became a self-made millionaire lawyer, which stoked my interest in how to become successful. He was the only person I’ve ever known who owned a Rolls Royce. We quickly became weekly pen pals, and I asked him lots of questions about life and careers. Something he wrote was my prime directive for years, Tim, there’s no such thing as luck. You make your own luck.

If I wanted to be a Navy officer, he advised me to get to know my congressman. Glenn explained the best thing for me to do was to volunteer for a congressional campaign. A dentist, Dr. Daniel Crane, of Danville, Illinois matched my conservative views. While classmates were spending their Saturdays watching cartoons and playing basketball, I was door-knocking for Dr. Crane; and while they watched TV at night, I was addressing hundreds of postcards. He won and I stayed close to him. I was a volunteer for his re-election in 1980, the year before I would graduate high school and be ready to report to the United States Naval Academy. By then, I was on a first-name basis with him. My parents and I really believed that with Congressman Crane’s support, and having faithfully abided by Glenn’s, You make your own luck, I might just win an appointment to the Naval Academy regardless of the epilepsy. We always had known it was an impediment, but nowhere as forbidding as the Iron Curtain or China’s Great Wall. Somehow, we just knew I’d get this chance to serve my country.

Col. USA Glenn Martin

But I didn’t.

A Navy commander who was responsible for Academy and NROTC candidates in the Midwest was authorized by Representative Crane and Senator Barry Goldwater (Chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee) to consider a medical waiver for me. The officer crashed all my hopes in one sentence: I’m sorry, Mr. Ulmer, but we can’t use a person with your handicap in Navy.

But it sounded to me like he shouted "GET LOST!"

An entire decade’s work and preparations were shot down in one fell swoop. All those political connections I had made—all those hours of having doors shut in my face or writing cards until my hand hurt—turned out to be for naught. My life-long dream of serving my country was instantly obliterated. There was no greater way to serve my country than to put my life at stake in order to fight for my beliefs and Americans’ safety as my ancestors had done. (Although I liked the way Gen. George Blood N’ Guts Patton when I later read a quote of his, "No dumb soldier ever won a war by dying for his country. He won it by making the other dumb guy die for his.")

Years later, Dad shared with me that the commander had telephoned him the previous afternoon and told him not to bring me in, because I simply couldn’t pass the physical. Dad explained to him that I would have to hear it from the officer himself, or otherwise I’d hate him and Mom for not letting me try. Dad told me that perhaps their worst experience as parents was watching me lay out letters-of-reference, high school records, and awards for the commander’s inspection and secretly knowing that he was about to shoot down my dreams for a military career. Dad compared it to watching a surface-to-air missile streaking up to intercept an expecting airplane.

Thirteen years of hard work, community involvement, studying hard, and most off all, the encouragement from my family during my weaker times hadn’t been enough to keep me from spiraling downwards and exploding into what I envisioned as a nuclear mushroom. Epilepsy didn’t stop Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, and Napoleon from being the greatest generals in the world of their days, but it was preventing me from even being a uniformed cook! I remained silent for the entire two-hour drive home without noticing the fields of corn and beans that were sprouting. The silence continued once we got home, and Mom & Dad hung back and watched me wander into the woods that surrounded our house without changing out of my suit, tie, and my first pair of Oxfords. It was longer than an hour until I went in and laid on my bed until suppertime.

Over 100 warplanes and spacecraft models had been built by me. After running out of shelf space, I started hanging all of them from the ceiling. Some were monumental because of the feats accomplished by their pilots, like the Wright brothers’ first airplane, the Flyer, Charles Lindbergh’s Spirit of St. Louis, Col. Paul Tibbits’ Enola Gay B-29 that dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Capt. Eddie Rickenbacker’s World War I Hat-in-the-Ring biplane that made him an ace, and Capt. Gregory Pappy Boyington’s F-4U Corsair, Lulu Bell, that made him a legendary ace in the World War II’s war in the Pacific. Hanging highest of all were a space shuttle, and an Apollo lunar module that I had rigged so that it could land on my bed.

But only one of those warbirds held my attention that afternoon—an F-14 Navy Tomcat fighter. It was painted like the VF-84 Jolly Rogers squadron, which were distinguishable with their black tails with a pirate’s white skull and cross bones, and golden stars and trim beneath the cockpit. My model was of aircraft #202. A year earlier, I’d been able to find a postal address for the Jolly Rogers, which was aboard the Navy’s newest aircraft carrier, the U.S.S. Chester Nimitz, and I sent them a letter to learn the identities of the crewmen of #202. One day I was surprised to get a large envelope in the mail, and it was from none other than the Jolly Rogers’ commander. He told me that #202 was actually his own. He sent an 8 by 10 photo of #202 in the air with its wingman, and it was personally autographed to me by him and his back seater. The most exciting thing of all though, was the black ball cap he gave me with a big, golden VF-84 embroidered on the front. He told me that it made me an Honorary Jolly Roger. That cap was going to be more precious to me than getting my driver’s license, and I wore it while lying on my bed for the rest of the day and into the evening. (After all this time, that old hat has gotten too tattered for me to wear frequently, but I still bring it out for special occasions.)

Staring up at the Jolly Roger’s belly, I could only think that no one would ever gaze up at the belly of an airplane that was being flown by me, whether they were at an airshow or on the deck of some gigantic aircraft carrier. I wouldn’t be getting to fight any Soviet MiGs or Sukhois. Looking over at the Apollo lunar module and my space shuttle, it became necessary to close my eyes to prevent