Suffering

         I want to talk about suffering today. Most of us have a few books that touched our heart and stayed with us for the rest of our lives. One such book for me is Once An Eagle (1968) by Anton Myrer. Here is the summary of the book:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Once_an_Eagle

        Let us talk about the author first. When World War II came, he was a Harvard student. He could have become an officer and got some sort of safe desk job. Instead, he enlisted in the US Marine Corps as a private. He survived several island campaigns in the Pacific. He wrote a couple of brilliant books and, as they say in the Old West, "rode off into the sunset."

     The main character in the book is Sam Damon. He is a humble young man from a small Nebraska town. When World War I came, he was already in the US Army. He ends up in France. On the battlefield he shows himself to be a natural leader. He gets a battlefield commission as a lieutenant. He wins the Medal of Honor. He decides to stay in the US Army. In World War II he is promoted to general. He is a man who leads from the front. He gets severely wounded in World War II. He is always a man of honesty, decency, and compassion despite being a fierce warrior. At the end of the book, it appears that he is killed to keep him from reporting on the madness of being in Vietnam.

     Myrer had one underlying theme throughout the book:

Suffering can deaden the soul or enrich it. To say this another way:

What does not kill us makes us stronger.

   Right now, many of us are being pushed to our limits. It is so painful. Please reflect on Once An Eagle.