Post Scripts: My life was saved… a veteran remembers

Since this is Veterans Day it reminds me of my tour of duty during World War II in the Pacific on General MacArthur’s Press Staff. One of the chapters in my book, Paragraph Trooper for MacArthur, was entitled "My Life Was Saved."

I was stationed on the beautiful Island of Morotai and my tent mate was another captain, John Edwards. He had a wife and two children in Pittsburgh, Pa. He and I would dream about getting back home. He would tell me of the tremendous joy of having children and the blessings they brought to his life. He loved his wife very much and that he missed all of them terribly. He explained that he accepted being called into service because he was going to help make the world a safer place for his kids.

At that time Kathy and I didn’t have children, of course, but that did not keep me from dreaming of the day when we would become a real family. It was at times like these that I yearned for home and the war seemed to drag along so slowly.

One day Captain Edwards asked me if I would like to go on a resupply mission to aid a group of infantry temporarily cut off from their unit, running short of food and ammunition. Early in the war I sought out excitement of this nature by witnessing war at close range. It was like a big adventure.

However, as I approached the plane I heard a voice and the words came: "Don’t go Joe, don’t go." I was dumbfounded and confused. "Hey, Captain, you gonna go with us or not?" I could not take another step. I lifted my leg, placing my foot on the plane’s ladder. Again, this time very clear: "Don’t go, Joe." I was so shaken by this experience, I could barely respond. Greatly embarrassed, I replied: "No thanks, sergeant….tell Captain Edwards I’ve changed my mind."

The aircraft soared off and I stood there immobile for a moment, trembling, shaken, my brain twirling, pondering this strange encounter with the unknown. I had been a Methodist Sunday School boy and sang several years in a boy choir at an Episcopal Church and maintained casual interest in religion all the way to adulthood but had never experienced anything like this before.

Did I actually hear someone speak? Was God actually talking to me, or was I suffering from some sort of combat fatigue? I returned to my tent wishing I could tell someone about my strange experience. I was startled out of my shock by another officer who came dashing by and said: "Hey, Snyder! You hear what happened? That cargo plane with the drop for the infantry guys has crashed. The word is it swooped into a small valley to drop the stuff, and as it zoomed up the other side, it didn’t clear the mountain. It’s still burning, and everyone is presumed dead."

As it turned out, everyone aboard was dead. I was devastated by the news. Captain Edwards, who was my tent mate, was gone. His wife no longer had a husband, and his children no longer had a father. I was stunned and grief stricken.

I excused myself and put my face in my hands, threw myself onto my cot and went through an agony of guilt and soul-searching like I had never done before. I thanked God over and over again. Tears came, then I underwent a sincere rebirth of my long-dormant faith there in the jungle of one of earth’s most remote green cathedrals, little Morotai Island. For whatever reason, my life was preserved, I do not know. I am thankful I was spared for my wife and family-to-be, and for my parents. For that I will eternally be grateful.