This blog will take al least two days because I have set a limit for myself of 8" of type. I figure that that is all a person has time for.  I want to tell you a story.  Then,  I'll give you the scripture in Genesis that means the world to me.

I married a Marine fighter pilot.  Single seat, air craft carrier, all weather.  Night, day, storms, getting shot off the by 'cat' into blackness, and landing in the dark, hooking wire on a pitching deck in rolling seas.  He had already flown over one-hundred missions in Korea.  Been hit 7 times in his first twenty-five missions, and totaled 2 planes,  pitched over the side after he landed because they had taken so much battle damage.   He should have been dead a dozen times.  He was 26 and I was 18 when I met him…it was a God planned meeting.  (I'll tell you that story some other time.)

Six months before the time when he could have retired, he got orders to Viet Nam.  I was 27 years old.  He was 36, and we had three children.  Two daughters in the fourth grade and second grade, and a son in  pre-school.  Ken, my husband,  had no illusions.  Neither did I.  He would be gone for 13 months.  And he would get shot at almost every day.

He had lost a nose strut on take off  a few months before this and burned an A-4  on the runway at Roosevelt Roads ( East end of Cuba)  He truly shouldn't have survived that one.  What these Marines did in training for combat was dangerous enough.  (You get the picture.)

At the time, he was the Commanding Officer of VMA 331, and had been trying to prepare pilots for what was going to face them when they got shot at.  Missile evasion, etc.  Sooner or later, almost everyone in the squadron was going to Viet Nam.  Ken would come home late at night and stress over the fact that the Marine Corps didn't have enough money to get the fuel they needed.  "If I had more gasoline, maybe I could give these young men the training time they need in the air.   Give them a fighting chance.  Maybe more of them could survive."  (Continued)