I recently had the honor and privilege of sitting down with Mr. Don Devore, a Combat Soldier in the Vietnam War, who’s faith in Christ has been both tried/tested and triumphed over some of the darkest times in his life.
Often when he was asked to share his experience, he told me that for whatever reason, he would just recount his time in the service; “nothing prefacing that or after it. No mention of God either.”
But today, Don feels very strongly about Veterans Matters and Veterans Advocacy for the sole purpose of being able to reach Veterans FOR CHRIST. He did mention, however, “It won’t be easy; Veterans, particularly Combat Veterans, are not church people.” But then again, when was being a disciple of Jesus’s ever easy?
He also mentioned that “when Pastor would ask veterans to stand up, which he usually does around Veterans Day, Memorial Day…maybe five or six people would stand up and considering the population…” well, let’s just say Don found that disheartening.
So, with the love of Christ in his heart and the Holy Spirit guiding him, Don is now on a mission to bring Christ to veterans. Although he is tired of sharing so-called “war stories,” he speaks about it now in way that brings Christ into “that” [his] story, which he never did before.
To know how Don came to this next chapter in his life, we must go back to the beginning…
Don was born in Newark, NJ. His parents were “probably 4th generation Sussex County people,” but they lived in Newark during the time of Don’s birth due to his dad’s work. When Don was around 11 years old, they moved back to Franklin, NJ. Seeing as that he spent his summers there with family and friends, moving to Franklin was like coming back home. Don described those years as “living in a Jean Shepherd short story, just a blue-collar mining town. I treasure that; it was good.”
Don was not “brought up” in the church, but his friends from high school were regular attendees of a Presbyterian Church in Franklin. He attended with them and enjoyed it, but his parents never went.
When Don was a sophomore/junior in HS, he attended a Young Life meeting. One weekend, while on the bus ride home from a youth group retreat, Don shared, “for whatever reason [well, we know the reason…the Holy Spirit!] I got hooked up with our youth leader. I loved talking to this guy. He explained things to me, and I just understood and believed…it wasn't like there was a clap of thunder/lightning strike, but things became clear to me.” And in that moment, Don accepted Jesus into his heart as his Lord and Savior.
But to Don that was as far as it went. “I probably spent the next I don't know how many years of my life just moving away from that.” That’s how Don saw it back then; but I (and I know he does now) sees it and believes it to be what saved him, both physically and spiritually the day he was injured in combat. Injured is an understatement…to Don, it was more like, he was “blown up.”
He spent 2 years in the hospital due to severe bone and tissue damage. “The hospital was probably as traumatic & as difficult as being in the field.” says Don.
Don accepted Jesus as his Lord and Savior when he was a teenager, he then got drafted and sent to Vietnam where in combat, he was “blown up” and now he’s lying on the ground facing death.
But he didn’t die.
I asked Don, “How do you think your story and what you went through points to Jesus and His love for you?”
You see, Don invited the Lord into his heart well before the war. Sure, he “didn’t do much with it,” as Don puts it, but he sure did BELIEVE. Faith is one thing, but belief? That was a “game-changer” for Don. And while lying on the ground wounded, his 1st word was, “God.”
That night their position was overrun by Vietnam soldiers; his boots were basically “blown off [his] feet”, and he was thrown up in the air. He came back down, was “bleeding like crazy”, could not do a single thing to help himself; he just laid there…Don said, “the first word out of my mouth was ‘God.’ I recall that…God…the intent was, ‘God I want to live…I can't die like this.” He doesn’t know exactly how it all happened, but the GIs in his unit got control of the situation and both the medic, and another fellow, shot their way over to where he was. At the time Don’s left forearm was, “for all intents and purposes, severed from [his] elbow but still there.” They patched him up the best they could and eventually, the medevac helicopter came and “whisked [him] away.”
He continued… “they were worried I was going into shock. But I never did. I never did…it's funny…an odd kind of calmness overcame me at that time…in that helicopter that night, flying back to...I knew I was being flown to someplace where I was going to get help…. I was pretty convinced at the time that I was going to survive.”
Although he mentioned Vietnam had a very beautiful panoramic view, it was all dark to him. Until that night, in the hospital, the whole recovery thing was such a blur too, but he felt HOPE.
The “MASH-type” hospital came under a rocket attack, or perhaps the base did where he was, regardless, Don could hear rockets/missiles, each one getting a bit closer to the hospital. He remembered how angry he was that night. He thought to himself, “I survived in the field and now I'm here in a hospital, going to get killed by a rocket attack?!” But by the grace of God, he did not, and a few weeks later, Don was stable enough to be transferred to a hospital in Japan for further treatment.
While in that hospital, there was an earthquake…”it wasn't bad, there was no damage or anything, just a tremor. Again, I'm lying there thinking to myself, man…here I am. Now I'm in Japan, the war’s going on & I'm going to get swallowed up by an earthquake; I laugh about it now.” He says to which I reply, “Another sign of the healing process and the peace that Jesus brings to our lives.” Don agrees, and adds “Irony can bring laughter, or it can bring anger.” He now chooses laughter.
Don goes on, “I’d begin to recuperate and fail, and then the skin grafts would fail; bone grafts would fail…It was just so difficult.” The cycle was constant; he would undergo contrast baths due to a fever he had for literally 9 months…then into a tub of ice water, then they’d pour hot water on him. He also laid in a “circle [motion-type] electric bed,” where in that bed he was rotated “over a 24-hour period. You’d go from right side up, upside down, back to the right side.” Between all that and “an overdose of antibiotics,” Don was finally released from the hospital (2 years later after that dark day on the battlefield). He puts it this way: “I was well enough and rehabbed enough to be turned loose and that's all the army did, turn you lose. No job, no prospect of the job.” Which led to anger, avoidance, and in some ways, denial.
But what Don did come back to, what we also know to be the hand of God’s Saving Grace, was his beautiful baby daughter. Don was married before the war, became a dad during and then divorced shortly after his return. His 1st wife left, leaving him a full time single parent in Newburg, NY with what he says, “an apartment, my 2 to 3-year-old daughter, a card table, and two folding chairs. That was the extent of my belongings.” Don’s daughter gave him both meaning and purpose those early years after being discharged. So, once again he came back home to Franklin, NJ where his parents, his sister and her family lived. It was at that point he felt such a sense of relief, he decided it was time to get a job and go to work. Once again, the hand of God blessed Don; for it was at this job he met his wife Nan (and together their family grew, having 5 more children together).
Although he confessed, “I'm just going to put these past few years in a can somewhere, in a locked-box, and never bother with it,” he couldn’t do that per say - Don was angry at everybody, including God, and in particular, the government. “I was so angry with the government, I could not forgive them, whoever ‘they’ were…I really didn't want to be involved in Veterans Matters.” To Don, “it was part of the problem; there were times when the question was raised, ‘are you Veteran?’ and I actually said no; I didn't even want to discuss it. It wasn't that I was really ashamed of my service or anything. I performed well. But I just didn't want to get into a conversation about it, was difficult, you know, even though I didn't suffer the rejection that a lot of other guys did coming back.”
Thinking back to the war, Don would say to himself, “Did that really happen to me? Or did I hear about this happening to somebody else? It was all so confusing to me.” And so, he did not talk about what transpired, what he experienced and witnessed in the Vietnam War for a good 15-20 years. To Don, he was a husband again, a father, had a successful career-but when he looks back, he didn’t feel whole. Right around that 15 to 20-year mark, two major events took place. The first was when his friend (who was and is a Christian) called him out on having PTSD (Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, known today as Post-Traumatic Stress Injury, or PTSI). Don told his friend, “No I don’t.” His friend replied, “Don, you’ve probably got the worst case of PTSD of any person I know. He says, in fact, that you manage it the way you do, appear normal to everybody, is what makes it that much worse. And I said, come on, I don’t have PTSD… [& His friend replied] Yeah, don’t believe me, go home, and ask your wife if she thinks you have PTSD. That hit me like a sledgehammer because I did. She told me of certain times and episodes, and how difficult it was for her and the children at the time…walking on eggshells, as she described it, around me just hoping I wouldn't get set off about something. I wasn't violent, never was, but there was always something simmering
inside that made me angry; and really coming here [meaning Christian Faith Fellowship Church] that was the second change [major event] in our lives. This Church (CFFC)…I swear, you open that front door and walk into the lobby and there's, you know it’s the Holy Spirit, obviously, but it's tactile, you can taste it almost, and feel it. It's just…I'd never experienced that in a church before.”
One more thing Don did NOT want to “gloss over” was something his daughter once shared in an interview. According to Don she said, “me and my siblings are proud of my father, even though he doesn't talk about it, doesn't want to talk about it, is disgusted with war and fed up with the whole thing. We've seen the scars, the physical scars on his body; but I just hope he knows how very proud we are of him.” That really “softened up a lot of things” for Don and to him, was “another turning point. Just thinking about that, he says…makes me just well-up with tears. And there it was, say Don: PTSD.”
“Certain people in your life come along. No accident. No coincidence. Only Jesus. Took me a while to learn. Because of Christ things are revealed to me. Obviously, the Holy Spirit’s revealing things to me that should have been obvious, but because of the way I'd shut down…. even when I wrote a narrative for the Discovery Channel several years back, I didn’t bring Jesus into it…well, I’ve grown up a lot since then and I realize now that that story (narrative) was so incomplete.” He now brings Jesus into it because, as Don put it, “that's what's completed me. And so, knowing that, it gave me the courage to join an organization like the VFW [Veterans of Foreign Wars].” And although he had no specific training, Don was named Chaplain for the VFW for Sussex and Warren counties by his fellow veterans.
Don is now on a mission to share his story but not with the war as its focal point, but Christ as the center/core of his story. Don said, “Everybody calls me The Chaplain, so if I am the Chaplain for the VFW then I'm gonna ask them to let me be one (in the truest sense) …it's interesting…I've just been praying [about this] for the longest time.”
He’s not sure how he’s going to approach this nor to who, but the Holy Spirit has placed on his heart to talk with veterans at the VFW and share about the Lord in his life, and how it might relate to them. To explain to them that although sharing their war experience is therapy, that it does help, and gets you to a point…Don wants to share from experience: “you're never gonna…REALLY get better, be better, without Christ in your life. It's kind of as simple as that…that's what picks you up at that point, in not bringing us to the finish line because I don't know when it's coming, but it sure does point you in the right direction and you can share these things and you KNOW you've made it now; you're treating your wife and your family better. You know that this [Jesus] is the real answer…and that's really kind of the bottom line to my whole thing here…A life in Christ is a joyous thing. It's celebrating, it's about smiles and laughter and being grateful.” Don continues, “there’s a difference between believing and knowing, and I have to say to myself, do I believe this? In the Bible Pastor says it’s so. But Do I know? Am I convinced? Do I know it beyond the shadow of a doubt? and I DO! I KNOW! and that's a joyous thing! That should lift your spirit, that you KNOW that this is such Good News…And I know that because of what I've experienced, that letting other veterans know, I gotta reach somebody out there.”
Don’s next chapter, his goal of where he wants to take the title “Chaplain” leads us into the question, “How does Don feel his story fits into the greater story of the gospel?” and
the answer is clear and beautiful. It’s to spread the Word of God and His unconditional Love and Grace. And according to Don, “it's about time. I know that. I procrastinated a lot. I've even been mad at God. But He opened the door here, you know. The door’s always been open. But I just was…well, if can't do it this way, I don't want to do it that way…don't know how they're gonna accept it, I might be forbidden to close a prayer in the name of Jesus Christ, our Lord and Savior, and only in God's name…”
But Don is more than ready now- why? Because he has surrendered the process to the Lord and is doing it God’s way!
So, to wrap up a testimony that I am in awe of, Don ends our conversation with a laugh, saying “now if you can put any of this mishmash that I've spewed out over the last hour or so…God bless you.” He’s all about embracing laughter. Why? Again because of Jesus, and the peace in having a personal and intimate relationship with Him.
Don, we say to you, “this is not the end but just the beginning! Thank you for your service, sincerely, I can't begin to know what your journey was like; one could watch the news, watch documentaries, hear veteran’s recount their war experience, but watching it/hearing it and experiencing it, well that’s 2 completely different things. And although ‘Thank You’ are 2 short words; I am humbly grateful for the sacrifices you’ve made and continue to make, to serve and protect our USA and its veterans.”
“God is with you Don, always has been, always will be. And who better to be a Chaplain to veterans than you; someone who’s walked the walk, and by faith, not by sight!
God is Good! Amen!
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