God's Glorious Grace

By Carlston Jackson

Ray Jackson did all the things boys in his low-income neighborhood did growing up. Sometimes, that led him into trouble.
After turning sixteen, he realized he did not have a plan for his life and he joined the Army. Shortly thereafter, he was sent to Vietnam and found himself in the center of hell.
When he was hospitalized and physically dead, he heard a voice say to him, “Go back and help people.” It turns out that Vietnam was the place God wanted him to be to get his attention and set him on a new path.
Once back home, he was not the person he was before as he suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder and had difficulty communicating with others, including his family. But through God’s grace, he was able to confront his problems.
Join the author as he looks back at the horrors of war and celebrates God’s incredible power in this heartfelt memoir.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Balboa Press
• Release date: Oct 27, 2020
• ISBN: 9781982257439

Carlston Jackson

Ray Jackson joined the U.S. Army at age seventeen and went to serve in Vietnam two years later. He’s enjoyed God’s grace while living with post-traumatic stress disorder. He did not find the true and living God in a building but in his heart—and God created a personal relationship with him.

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Copyright © 2020 Carlston Ray Jackson.

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The author of this book does not dispense medical advice or prescribe the use of any technique as a form of treatment for physical, emotional, or medical problems without the advice of a physician, either directly or indirectly. The intent of the author is only to offer information of a general nature to help you in your quest for emotional and spiritual well-being. In the event you use any of the information in this book for yourself, which is your constitutional right, the author and the publisher assume no responsibility for your actions.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

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Scripture quotations marked KJV are from the Holy Bible, King James Version (Authorized Version). First published in 1611. Quoted from the KJV Classic Reference Bible, Copyright © 1983 by The Zondervan Corporation.

ISBN: 978-1-9822-5742-2 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-9822-5744-6 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-9822-5743-9 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2020921119

Balboa Press rev. date: 10/26/2020

CONTENTS

Introduction

Chapter 1 Early Life

Chapter 2 Life as a Teenager

Chapter 3 Enlisted in the US Army

Chapter 4 Tour in Germany

Chapter 5 Tour in Vietnam

Chapter 6 Firebase Shamrock

Chapter 7 Back to the States

Chapter 8 The Power of God

Chapter 9 Marriage

Chapter 10 US Army Reserve

Chapter 11 Flashbacks

Chapter 12 New Directions

Chapter 13 More Vacationing

Chapter 14 Homecoming and Healing

Chapter 15 Concluding My Life’s Story

INTRODUCTION

I have lived a blessed life and thank God for the journey he has allowed me to live. My mother and father raised me with the best knowledge they possessed, although some moral—and immoral—people also helped direct the path of my life to make me into the person that God wanted me to be. As a young boy, I did the things that many boys who grew up in a low-income neighborhood did. Although our parents gave us what we needed, they did not have a lot of money, and sometimes, we could not get what we wanted.

In elementary school, I got into fights with boys who tried to challenge me because they wanted to start trouble. I fell behind in my grades and could not advance to the next grade level a couple of times.

As I grew into a teenager, I started to look at girls and tried to become an adult early. When I turned sixteen years old, I realized that I did not have a plan for my life. I join the Job Corps and then the army, and in 1970, I went to Vietnam. A new direction came into my life that I did not understand; I was in the core of hell—a place where God wanted me to be so he could get my attention, talk to me, and give me that new direction in my life: to help people.

As I looked over my life, many years after I came back from the Vietnam War in 1971, I realized that God was the only reason I had come back from the war. I was hospitalized while in Vietnam and was physically dead, and my spirit was in eternal darkness—Vietnam—and I heard a voice say to me, Go back, and help people.

I have now lived my journey of life for sixty-nine years, and I now have a story to tell the world about God’s glorious grace. God allowed me to travel across many hills and valleys of life with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). I came home to my parents and sibling after being away for about four years in the Job Corps and US Army. Many things happened to me in the war, and I was not the same person I had been when I left home. My thinking had changed because I was still living in the war in Vietnam. I could not communicate with my family the way I had done before I went into the military. When I came home from Vietnam, I was mentally unstable—a result of the war.

In 1972, I moved out of my parents’ home. I wanted to be alone and drift around the United States, but God had another plan. I moved to Richmond, Virginia, where I worked jobs to earn money so that I could move to another city.

But then I met a lady who lived there. We married forty-five days after that first meeting and now have been married for over forty-seven years.

I have been in therapy for PTSD for thirty-seven years at VA hospitals and community veterans’ centers. I hope my journey through life with PTSD will help others to realize that we are not alone because our families love us. The more we help ourselves, the more help we can offer our families to overcome their secondary traumatic stress, which results from our PTSD. As you read my life story, you will see that God is with us all the time in our everyday journeys.

As I write my journey of life and I think back almost fifty years, I am convinced that many combat veterans who came home (and who are coming back home) are seeking the same joy and happiness with their families, coworkers, church members, and acquaintances as I have sought. We want to have contented lives.

I have dreaded writing about some of the events in my life because they are painful. People have asked me, Why do you write about it? And I have said, My life is not mine; it belongs to God. I was dead, and I heard a voice say, ‘Go back, and help people.’

This is my mission, and this is why I am sharing the highlights of my life story and God’s glorious grace.

CHAPTER 1

Early Life

Main Street

I was born on August 31, 1950, weighing ten pounds. I had two older sisters—one was seven years old and other was four. My parents had a son who was stillborn, but in 1952, they had another baby boy, so now there were two boys and two girls.

My family resided at 416 Main Street in Portsmouth, Virginia. When I was eighteen months, I would walk out of our apartment and go to Mr. Rex and Mrs. Lois Penn’s house next door. They were my second set of parents. Mama and Mrs. Lois laughed when they told me that I would hold my milk bottle and drag my blanket to Mrs. Lois’s house. Once I got there, I would knock and knock with my little hands and yell loudly, Open door, Lois! Open door, Lois! Mrs. Lois said that once she opened the door, I would walk in, go straight to the kitchen, and point to the toaster on top of the refrigerator. I would say, Toast, Lois. Toast, Lois. Once I finished eating my toast, I would go to the bedroom behind the kitchen, get in the bed, and fall asleep. Sometimes, my mother would come next door to look for me and find me asleep in the house. She would want to spank me for leaving the house, but Mr. Rex Penn was my protector, and he would put me on his shoulder to keep my mother from chastising me.

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Ray, sitting on Mr. Rex’s shoulder

Mr. Rex was in the US Navy and sometimes was gone on sea duty for seven to nine months. After more than twenty years, he retired from the navy, and in his spare time, he would draw some fantastic pictures. I think I learned to draw from him.

During the Christmas season when I was a child, a vast star, illuminated with blue Christmas lights, was attached to the front of the apartment complex, and at night, it gave the apartment a heavenly feeling. We had a brown radio with a round top, glass face, and large knobs. It was about twelve inches high and sat on the table in the right corner of the living room, and my parents would listen to it at night. The Christmas music sounded fantastic to me as I lay on the sofa, playing with my toys.

In 1954, Main Street was a dirt road with two streetlights and shallow ditches on both sides. We lived in a four-unit apartment complex, and each unit had an outdoor toilet about thirty feet behind the building. I used to walk in the yard, play on the back porch with my toys, and run back and forth, into and out of the house. One day, Mama was cooking in the kitchen, and the food smelled so good. I decided that I had to see what was cooking in the pot, so when Mama went to the other room, I pulled a chair to the stove, climbed on it, and lifted the lid. I saw what looked like snakes. It scared me, so I returned the cover, jumped off the chair, and ran. Years later, I told Mama what I’d done, and she said she had been cooking pig tails.

God blessed our family with another baby girl in 1954. I now had three sisters and one brother.

Mama used to press clothes for the family. She would place the clothes iron on the wood-burning cooking stove until it got hot, and then she would iron the clothes. Sometime, if she put too much wood in the stove, the iron would get too hot and turn red. The ironing board was made of wood, and she would place a thick cloth on the ironing board before pressing the clothes. One time, I was playing too close to Mama while she was ironing clothes, and I got burned on my right arm, between my hand and elbow. A large blister formed that lasted for a long time, and it left a scar that remains to this day.

Wilcox Avenue

In 1955, we lived on Wilcox Avenue in a two-story house with large windows and a front porch with a railing. When my brother and I got into bed for a midday nap, our mother would open the windows upstairs in our bedroom, and a delightful breeze would move the curtain. We felt the warm spring breeze blowing through the window and heard the large trucks traveling on the street a few blocks away. The sound of the vehicles shifting gears to increase their speed sounded good. The sounds of the birds singing and the insects talking to one another enhanced our relaxation. In the background, we often heard a train about a half mile away and enjoyed hearing its horn—a sound that I still like to hear as an adult. The train would blow its horn two or three times before reaching a street crossing. As the train got closer, we could hear its wheels rumbling over the train track, making a sh-ch-sh sound as the cars went by that was music to my ears as I drifted off to sleep. Even today, I listen for the sound of the birds, the trucks, the breeze, and the train when I am going to sleep.

My daddy had a 1945 Chevrolet that he had to start from the front by putting a hand crank on the crankshaft and turning it clockwise until the engine started. One day, while Daddy was in the house, I got the hand crank, put it in the crankshaft, and tried to start the car. The hand crank would not turn for me, but I kept trying. I moved the hand crank clockwise a little, and it kicked back on me, knocking me to the ground; that was the last time I tried to start that car.

When my cousin was seven years old, and I was five years old, she lived about a half mile away in the same community. She was a character and a lot of fun. One day, she talked to me about trapping a bird under a box, and once we caught the bird, and we would cook it and eat it. We got some bread from the kitchen, a cardboard box, a string, and a stick to make a trap for the bird. We placed the box on the ground and positioned a stick to hold up one end of the box. We tied the string to the stick and put the bread under the raised box—and then we waited. A bird landed on the ground and walked around the box, but it would not go under it. We had so much fun, sitting there, waiting for the bird to enter our trap, but it never did.

Our neighbors across the street would invite us kids into their house, where the father would show cartoon movies by projecting them on a bed sheet hanging across the room. I later created the same environment for my children and grandchildren.

I attended kindergarten at the Fredrick Military Academy campus in 1955. I would sit in my classroom, listening to my teacher, and learning numbers, letters, and how to write my name. The best thing about kindergarten, for me, was the aroma of food that wafted throughout the campus, especially at lunchtime. We went to the lunchroom for our lunch, and I would see my aunt Cora in the kitchen with the other ladies, dressed in their white uniforms; they looked noble. The male students who attended the academy were white, and they all were respectful to everyone.

We went to Aunt Cora’s house to visit. She had a big red rooster in the backyard. I once sneaked into the backyard, thinking the rooster was in the cage, but he wasn’t. He ran over to me and used his wing to knock me to the ground. I got up and ran, and he chased me.

My family attended First Baptist Church in South Portsmouth. On Sunday morning, all the kids would line up in front of the altar and recite the Bible verses we learned in Sunday school. My favorite Bible verse was, Thou shall not steal, from the Ten Commandments. I said that verse because it was easy to remember. We had Christmas plays at church during the holiday. I wore a white