My Spiritual Markers

By Timothy Jones

While leading my squad on patrol, I instinctively turned around to signal to my men that the enemy is in the area and to pass it up to our platoon leader. As I turned around, I hear a faint metallic click at my foot...then the explosion. Instantly, I am traveling through the air, my steel pot (head gear) is traveling in one direction, my rucksack previously strapped to my body is traveling in another direction, I can see the visions of my life moving slowly before my eyes in what seemed like an eternity. I feel suspended in time. There is no sound around me. My body is stunned, and I am going in and out of consciousness. While in this suspended state of life and death, I remember praying, "God, please don't let me die...if you let me live, I will devote my life to saving humanity. "

God saved my life in Vietnam. Before Vietnam, I lived a purposeless life caring only about fun, booze, and women....But why did he save me? What cause God to turn me around at the moment of the explosion? What was he saving me for? Looking back, I now accept my land-mine explosion encounter in Vietnam as one of many times of major transitions in my life when God interceded to guide me...a spiritual marker that would lay the groundwork for all that would follow.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Christian Faith Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: Feb 9, 2022
• ISBN: 9781638440581

Timothy Jones

Timothy Jones is an author, editor, and speaker specializing in the spiritual life. He was managing editor for Moorings, and prior to that was an editor for Christianity Today magazine for six years and a pastor for almost eight years. He has written The Art of Prayer, Celebration of Angels, and The Friendship Connection. Tim, his wife, and their three children live in Nashville.

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My Spiritual Markers

Timothy Jones

Copyright © 2021 by Timothy Jones

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods without the prior written permission of the publisher. For permission requests, solicit the publisher via the address below.

Christian Faith Publishing, Inc.

832 Park Avenue

Meadville, PA 16335

www.christianfaithpublishing.com

Unless indicated otherwise, Scripture quotations are taken from the Holy Bible, King James Version.

Printed in the United States of America

Table of Contents

***Veterans Administration***

***Graduation***

Retirement from the Georgia Parole Board

Retirement from GOHS and the State of Georgia

Retirement from the USPC

Retirement from the USPC

Retirement from the USPC

My Son, My Blessing

THIS MEMOIR IS DEDICATED TO HIM THAT IS ABLE TO DO EXCEEDING ABUNDANTLY ABOVE ALL THAT WE ASK OR THINK, ACCORDING TO THE POWER THAT WORKETH IN US (Eph. 3:20).

Introduction

On May 30, 2003, a few months before age fifty-five, I retired after a twenty-nine-year career full of accomplishments, adventures, successes, and blessings. If you count the two years that I worked part-time at a halfway house for ex-offenders prior to graduation from college, my career encompassed thirty-one years. I would have preferred to remain in the workforce, but my disabilities from the Vietnam War finally caught up with me. I finally came to terms with the difficult realization of my disabilities and returned to a life of non-employment, a condition that I had not experienced since age fourteen.

Before my retirement, I knew that I wanted to put many of my career experiences in writing, in the form of a memoir, to capture and share many of my unique blessings. But starting this project of writing my memoir was a monumental task that took me several years to seriously get underway. My greatest problem was finding some context to encapsulate my writing…an understandable path that I could follow in putting my thoughts together…a perspective…a contextual map that would guide me as I put pen to paper. I am not a seasoned author by any stretch of the imagination. Indeed, this is my first effort at such an undertaking. If I were a betting man, I would wager that this dilemma of contextual writing plagues even the best of writers. But what were my reasons for wanting to write about my experiences in the first place? I wondered. As a Black man from meager beginnings, who had achieved some success in modern-day America, I was presented with abundant experiences and opportunities. Certainly, I could draw upon these experiences. Being a disabled war veteran, honored with medals and awards for valor and heroism in combat presented me with unique and challenging themes to follow as well, I reasoned. But still, something was missing. I needed a spark…something politically, socially, or even spiritually of such magnitude to orient me, to guide me, and to provide meaning to anyone who would choose to read and share in my life experiences.

As time passed, I came to the conclusion that whatever I write, it had to be couched in a spiritual context. After all, my many blessings were made possible by nothing in particular that I had done. There had to be some external force guiding the way. As far back as I can remember there had always been a tugging in my spirit that for the most part I simply ignored or gave scant attention. Oh, I prayed when I found myself in a difficult situation. But left to my own devices, I often chose a path in life that could have been quite damaging, and in some situations, it was just that, quite damaging. But blessings came and miracles occurred in spite of life’s mistakes, especially during early adulthood. Then, during my retirement, several events took place, which led me to a clearer understanding of God and how He had factored into all of my blessings. As the reader will see, events occurred in my life that caused me to begin to take my Christian walk with God more seriously. I attended church more frequently and read the Bible more closely, looking for answers to my many circumstances. As things began to crystalize within, certain interests began to no longer appeal to me. I even ended my participation in military veterans’ organizations, which up to that point had become a staple of my free time. I enrolled in a local seminary with the goal of obtaining a master’s in divinity degree with an emphasis on chaplaincy. After a couple of semesters, I put that on hold and began taking Christian education courses at my church.

It was during one of these Christian educational courses that the contextual map for this memoir was revealed to me. In Blackaby, Blackaby, & King’s Experiencing God, I was introduced to the concept spiritual markers, which the authors identify as a time of transition, decision or direction when I clearly know God has guided me (Henry and Richard Blackaby, p. 127). That was it! "Times of transition in my life when I knew that God had guided me," whether by major decisions I made that led to new directions, or just by circumstances in which I found myself that led to new and challenging paths in my life. And the road-map to writing my memoir was laid out by the preparation of my spiritual inventory and the identification of my spiritual markers. Looking back, the events in my life that I wanted to convey in my memoir were clearly spiritual markers—God-inspired events that led to one transition after another throughout my life’s career

According to Blackaby, God is always working around you. When He gets ready for you to take a new step or direction in His activity, it will always be in sequence with what He has already been doing in your life (Henry & Richard Blackaby, p. 123). His activity? Yes, God is always at work around us, and we take the initiative to accomplish His purpose. God loves us and wants us involved in His supernatural activity. According to Blackaby, sometimes He interrupts our regular routine and uses us in a special way. His interruption may come while hearing a sermon, while reading the Bible, or while just talking to a friend. It may come through a major crisis when He reveals characteristics of His nature to help you maintain stability while in a storm in life. Or it may come with a sense of peace when you normally respond with stress and anxiety. As I prepared this memoir, I came to realize that nothing I may have achieved was done on my own initiative and for my own purposes. From my life-changing event in Vietnam in 1969, my university degrees in 1974 and 1977, my career in the helping field, to my final retirement in 2003, all were God-inspired sequential events. And almost without exception each life-changing event occurred not on my own initiative. Invariably, someone always approached me with a challenging offer, when taken, lifted me to a new beginning or a new direction. Or something always happened that redirected me away from the path I was taking onto a new path in life that invariably led to new accomplishments.

The first six chapters of this memoir cover my life-changing experiences in Vietnam, my recovery, and my career path. In them, I tried to identify God’s spiritual markers as they occurred with *** notations. I also inserted the words Spiritual Marker above the paragraphs containing God-inspired initiatives, so that the reader may clearly identify the events as I presented and experienced them. God only knows that there could be other spiritual markers in my life that I may have missed. So I pray that I have not misidentified a spiritual marker event when other positive spiritual forces were at play. I ask the reader to pray with me that unintentional things observed as spiritual markers, or spiritual markers left unobserved in this memoir will be forgiven. The final chapter, The Church and God, presents how God has always been active in my life and where I stand today by fully accepting His love, His presence, and His direction.

On a final introductory note, I must caution the reader that my spiritual travel was not an easy, straightforward trip. No spiritual discovery is, I suppose. There were many valleys and peaks. After God saved me from certain death in Vietnam and delivered me to life again, I continued to falter. Following my delivery, I often took the familiar road of sin and came close to disaster, but His saving grace continued to intercede. That is why today I know that His love is so unconditional. He sets forth and initiates His purpose for us. Blackabys’s Seven Realities of Experiencing God as presented below gives a step by step process that reveals how God is experienced by us and how His will and purposes takes place in our lives. In the section entitle God Is Always at Work around You, Blackaby states, Right now God is working all around you. One of the greatest tragedies among God’s people is that, although they deeply long to experience God, they are encountering Him day after day but do not recognize Him (Henry and Richard Blackaby, p. 16). Such was the case with me. The following is the complete list of Blackabys’s Seven Realities of Experiencing God, in sequence as illustrated:

God is always at work around you.

God pursues a continuing love relationship with you that is real and personal.

God invites you to become involved with Him in His work.

God speaks by the Holy Spirit through the Bible, prayer, circumstances, and the church to reveal Himself, His purposes, and His ways.

God’s invitation for you to work with Him always leads to a crisis of belief that requires faith and action.

You must make major adjustments in your life to join God in what He is doing.

You come to know God by experience as you obey Him, and He accomplishes His work through you.

Blackabys’s Seven Realities are revealed in my walk with God as presented here in my memoir on spiritual markers. I owe it to Blackabys’s work in setting forth a comprehensive and scripturally-based map for discovering how God has been active in my life. I pray that presenting God in my life in this manner will be understandable and inspiring to any reader who is also trying to discover and experience God in his or her life. Finally, I am indebted to Beulah Missionary Baptist Church and its Christian education program for the opportunity to engage in so many Christian educational classes, especially the one on Experiencing God, wherein my spiritual markers were revealed to me.

Chapter 1

Life-Changing Events

1969–1970

***Mekong Delta, South Vietnam***

I Hate Leapfrogging

My major life-changing event occurred in the US Army, on July 6, 1969, in Mekong Delta, South Vietnam. I arrived in the Republic of Vietnam in May 1969 as a new minted Sgt. E-5 and squad leader, after completing the Non-Commissioned Officer (NCO) school in Ft Benning and OJT in Ft. Gordon. I was assigned to the 4th Battalion, 39th Infantry, 9th Infantry Division at Fire Support Base (FSB) Danger, located in the Dinh Tuong Province in Mekong Delta, the southernmost province in South Vietnam. Word had it that the original name selected for FSB Danger had been Dickey. This did not sit well with the outspoken 4/39 battalion commander, (The) Lt. Col. David H. Hackworth. To promote Esprit de Corps among the troops he renamed it Danger, and, in a flair of drama, designated his unit The Hardcore Recondo Battalion.

Between my arrival in May and July 1969, I had gone out on numerous search and destroy missions, ranging from large battalion size to small three-man sniper missions in the Delta. On most excursions we would encounter booby-traps as evidence of Viet Cong presence in and around villages surrounding our fire support base. On more than one occasion we would run into enemy small-team ambushes that we had to fight our way out of. On this occasion my hardcore recondo company was carrying out so-called leap-frog maneuvers, which calls for several squads to load up on helicopters, drop in one location to patrol for a short period of time, then be picked up by helicopters and dropped in another location to patrol for a short period of time, picked up again, and dropped off to patrol in yet another location for a brief period. Several squads in my company are conducting these exercises simultaneously and are actually leap-frogging over one another in the same AO (area of operation.) These maneuvers would occur from daylight to dawn until you make contact with the enemy. For many GIs, the enemy is Mekong Delta itself, the southernmost part of South Vietnam consisting of dense jungle, mud-bottom rivers and streams, rice patties, rain, heat, varmints of all types to include fire ants, blood-sucking leeches, and the ubiquitous mosquito, which gives you malaria. Everywhere were land mines, which accounted for the largest percentage of GI injuries and deaths, and the Viet Cong (V.C.), sometimes disguised as friendly workers in your AO during the day and enemy attackers during the night. There was a favorite saying among the troops that the GI owns the day, the VC owns the night. Considering the number of casualties caused by land mines, injuries, sickness, and diseases, I am not so sure we owned anything.

At any rate, we had been out in the boonies (jungle) on this particular search and destroy mission for a few days already, and everyone was anxious to get back to base camp. While out in the boonies, you are constantly wet and dirty. You are sleeping and eating in the rain, walking in waist-deep water, encountering leeches, fire ants, mosquitoes, and generally exposed to all of the dirty elements in the jungles of the Mekong Delta. SOP (standard operational procedures) called for patrolling only two or three consecutive days at a time in the boonies before returning to base camp. Any longer and you can contract swamp feet, a foot condition caused by constant wetness and bacteria in the jungle, resulting in open sores on the bottom of the foot and in between toes. So when we are ordered to engage in this leap-frog maneuver, it is the third or fourth day of deployment (I cannot recall exactly), we are tired and wet and we are very anxious to get back to base camp. At base camp, we could clean up and rest. There is hot food waiting. A dry bunk. We could get out of these muddy boots and jungle-fatigues (combat uniform) and do a thorough check for leaches. And we could get these sixty-pound rucksacks off our backs. My load was extra heavy because I am carrying an M79-grenade launcher, with about fifty rounds of grenades, in addition to my rucksack. I chose to carry the M79-grenade launcher because I simply did not trust the standard M16 rifle, which was known to jam up due to the constant wet and muddy condition in the jungle. There were several different ammo-types that the M79 could accommodate, including the most used ball-bearing, high-explosive 40-mm canister that exploded on contact from a range of between fifty and two hundred yards, with an impact zone of about fifty yards. Once the canister explodes, anyone within this fifty-yard impact zone was subject to being hit, maimed, or killed by one of these deadly balls of steel. Additional rounds included the buckshot, flechette, illumination, and the CS gas-canister round. I normally kept my M79 loaded with a buckshot round since most immediate combat was up close at first encounter. And I carried a couple of ammo pouches containing up to about fifty rounds, most of which were the high-explosive type. (To this day, I have a long visible scar across my right shoulder caused by the straps attached to the heavy ammo bags that I carried full of M79 grenades, which continuously cut into my skin.) Also, hanging on my shoulder webbing are several smoke canisters, used to mark our position if we come under attack or needed to mark our position for a medevac helicopter. Underneath my rucksack is the trusted flak-vest, which consists of steel plates in the back pocket of the vest, covering your lower and upper back and steel plates in pockets over your front rib cage. In the boonies on patrol, we would not be caught without our flak vests; they definitely saved lives. And there’s the steel pot we wear over our helmet liner that weight about four pounds. Not only does it protect your head from injury from shrapnel or a bullet, it serves as your cooking pot, wash basin, and balls protector when riding on helicopters in known enemy areas. So here we are, exhausted, wet, muddy, overstaying our SOP in the boonies, pissed off about it, and ordered to engage in this high-risk, leap-frog maneuver. The good news is that this is our final maneuver before returning to base camp.

On about our third drop off, my squad runs into enemy activity. It is about noon and the weather is clear, but miserably hot. As normal, when we dismounted from helicopters, we form a perimeter for security. I am the squad leader, and on this occasion, I am walking point with about seven of my men spread out and walking behind me. (I considered walking point a courageous thing to do for a leader as it proves to your men that you are no better than they are and that you value their lives as much as yours. Unfortunately, the man up front is the first to be hit in an ambush). We moved slowly into an open area in the jungle, and right away, I smell food cooking. I can see some utensils used for cooking and eating spread out on the ground as if someone had left there abruptly. Looking about five meters in front of me, I noticed a footprint in the mud whose imprint was slowly rising. This indicated to me that someone had just stepped in and out of this position and was moving quickly to avoid our contact. I instinctly turned around to signal to my men that the enemy is in the area and to pass the word up to our platoon leader. As I turn around to signal them, I hear a faint metallic click at my foot…then the explosion. Instantly, everything began to move in slow motion. I am traveling through the air, my steel pot (head gear) is traveling in one direction, my rucksack previously strapped to my body is traveling in another direction. I can see visions of my life moving slowly before my eyes in what seems like an eternity. I feel suspended in time. There is no sound around me. My body is stunned, and I am going in and out of consciousness. While in this suspended state of life and death I remember praying, "God, please don’t let me die…if you let me live, I will devote my life to saving humanity."

Then all of a sudden, I hit the ground on my back with a thud and life comes thundering back into me. I look around, and there is yellow smoke and purple smoke and red smoke all around me. The smell of the smoke and gunpowder is filling my nostrils. I could see that some of the smoke grenades that had been attached to my shoulder harness had been set off by the explosion and were lying around me. They were still discharging smoke, giving off a loud, hissing sound. Panicking now, I am thinking that the enemy is coming to finish me off so I reach for my weapon…it was just a few feet from me… I am reaching with my left arm, but my body would not move. My entire body is stunned. My ears are ringing. I can lean up on my left arm, but the rest of my body is flat on the ground. I feel completely helpless and terrified. I look around and see two or three of my men lying behind me, with gaping wounds to their legs and arms. There is blood everywhere. Then come the screams… I’m hit, I’m hit. Medic! Medic! Then we are all screaming out of pain and out of fear. I hear my own voice crying out for help, as if I am a bystander, looking back at all of the carnage surrounding me. But I am not a bystander. The excruciating pain reinforced the reality within me that yes, I am a major actor in this grim play. Shortly, the medics arrive along with some other soldiers from another squad. One of them is staring at me as if he was in shock. The other is reaching in his bag for medical supplies.

I yell, Get away from me…help my men…can’t you see they are bleeding?!

Then one of them says, "Sgt. Jones, you are fucked up—his words exactly—you are worse off than the others. I look at my body and can see that my right arm is mangled, immobile and bleeding in several places. I am on my back and cannot see my other wounds, but there is tremendous pain in my legs and in my feet. Puddles of blood from my wounds are gathering under me and around my legs in the mud. The force of the explosion virtually undressed me from waist up. All of my webbing holding my gear was gone. My rucksack attached in the back to my webbing was gone. My flak jacket had been blown away. Just my tattered fatigue jacket was hanging on my body in shredded threads. All the while, my open wounds and blood are being mixed with the mud and soil of Vietnam…the runoff from the rice paddies, the human excrement used to fertilize the fields, the toxins (Agent Orange) used to defoliate the lush vegetation of the jungle…the decades of dying and death, mixing in with my blood and seeping into my body as a permanent internal reminder of war in Vietnam. I finally realize that I am hit pretty badly, mostly from behind. I yell at one medic, Cut my boots off!"

There is excruciating pain in my feet! He’s just standing there, with his medic bag in his hands, staring at me. I then realize, this motherf——is in shock. I yell at him again to give me morphine, give me morphine… I am not hit in any vital organs…only my legs and arm! (In training, we were taught not to give morphine to a soldier if his wounds are in the trunk of his body. Somehow, we were taught, administering morphine to a soldier whose guts are spilling out hastens death.)

The medic finally comes to himself, begins to patch me up, and gave me a couple shots of morphine. He then began cutting off my boots…but he is not cutting fast enough. From the pain I am feeling, both feet have to have shrapnel in them! He finally gets my boots off, and there are no wounds to my feet! Just this excruciating pain as if someone was holding a red-hot flame to my feet while hitting them with a sled hammer! I did not realize it then, but both my sciatic nerves in my lower legs, the nerves carrying feelings to my brain from my lower extremities, had been severed. The pain from the severed nerves in my legs was telling me that my feet were severely injured. (I would be later diagnosed by the army doctors with the medical term causalgia, a condition of severe burning pain caused by a peripheral nerve injury.)

More soldiers begin to mill around, looking sad but trying to cheer me up. Don’t worry, Sgt. Jones, you’re going to be all right.

The chopper is on the way, hang in there.

Man, you got the million-dollar wound! meaning the wound that would get you sent home from Vietnam…alive. The morphine starts working… The pain begins to subside somewhat, and I am lifted onto a stretcher. I hear a loud explosion and fear creeps over me again. They say it’s okay, that they had to blow an area for a landing zone. I hear the thump-thump of the chopper getting louder and louder, coming in closer and closer…they lift my stretcher and race to the chopper. Me and the others are lifted into the chopper and strapped in. Some of the wounded in my squad were able to walk to the chopper. Some had been twenty to thirty yards behind me and still were hit by the shrapnel. For me and a few others, we lay prone in our stretchers and some were fastened tightly to the outside skids of the chopper. As the chopper lifts off, I look down at the little Puerto Rican soldier in my squad who is waving and shouting, his image is getting smaller and smaller as the chopper gains altitude, but I can hear his voice over the roar of the engines: Sgt. Jones, you got the million-dollar wound! The wound that many soldiers in combat dream about, which become their ticket out of Vietnam and combat. At that moment, through the haze produced by the morphine, I knew I was not going to die and that I would survive Vietnam.

***SPIRITUAL MARKER***

GOD saved my life in Vietnam. Before Vietnam, I lived a purposeless life caring only about fun, booze, and women. Many, many times since then, I get the horrifying realization that but for the grace of God, I would have lost my life in Vietnam on June 6, 1969. The land mine exploded right at the heel of my foot, at the moment that I turned around to signal my squad. The force from the blast blew off my rucksack, my flak jacket, and my helmet. Almost every part of my body that was not protected in my rear received multiple fragmentation wounds. My right arm, which was not protected, was fractured in several places, and my sciatic nerves were severed in both legs. A piece of shrapnel remains lodged just at the bottom of my spine, almost touching the nerve at the point where it splits off and runs to both legs. Had I not turned around, the blast would have occurred in front of me, causing, I am sure, life-ending injuries to my torso, my neck and face. But why did He save me? What cause God to turn me around at the moment of the explosion? What was He saving me for? According to Blackaby, When God gets ready for you to take a new step or direction in His activity, it will always be in sequence with what He has already been doing in your life (Henry and Richard Blackaby, p. 123). Looking back, I now accept my land-mine encounter in Vietnam as one of many times of major transitions in my life when God interceded to guide me…a spiritual marker that would lay the groundwork for all that would follow. Yes, God saved my life in Vietnam. In the process, He heard my vow to devote my life to saving humanity. From that day forward He would periodically remind me of my vow…a solemn and guiding promise that would shape my life, my career and my relationship with God.

***Nine Months in Army Hospitals***

My first stop in an army hospital occurred on the day I was wounded, July 6, 1969. After about fifteen minutes airborne in a medevac helicopter we landed yards away from what was called a field hospital. As shown over and over again in documentaries about the Vietnam War and the treatment of wounded soldiers, these field hospitals close to the AOs where soldiers are fighting saved many lives that were lost in previous wars. Wounded soldiers were evacuated and transported to these field medical facilities within that golden hour when lives can be saved. Cadres of military doctors, nurses, and other medical personnel are on constant alert to receive and start work immediately on the wounded. I recall my stretcher being lifted out the helicopter and rushed into the tented facility just yards away. While some were stripping and cutting off what remained of my fatigues and field dressing, others were peppering me with questions: What’s your name? What’s your unit? Where are you hit? What happened? Do you give us permission to operate? I recall signing an X with my left hand (something I would come to learn to do over the next several months while my right arm was healing) in the blank space on a form, which I presumed was the permission-to-operate sheet. Then began the extremely painful scrubbing of my wounds, cleaning, and pre-op prep. I recall one of the doctors pulling nails, broken glass, and other debris out of my wounds and showing them to me before I eventually fell off to sleep. Next, I awoke with bandages from the bottom of my ankles up to the small of my back, and again from the base of my right hand to my armpit. I was pretty