So.  Ken was boiling, and every day he got madder and madder.  He was reassigned as the Operation Officer for the group as I recall.  Which should have made him happy.  But no.  It didn't undo all the bad things that had occurred.  Losing the squadron under the dishonorable pretenses of a Colonel who had lied was almost unbearable for him.  Losing 52 friendlies because the pilot, the man that replaced Ken,  didn't have any experience in the airplane, was even worse.  You just don't send someone into a fight the first week they are in-country that doesn't know what they are doing, especially when they are unfamiliar with the plane they are flying.  

So I wrote him and told him to get his Bible and a pair of scissors and for him to cut Romans 8:28 out of his Bible and throw it in the trash--because it certainly wasn't working for him.  I said that he needed a Bible that didn't have that verse in it.   Romans 8: 28  "And we know that all things work together for good to them that love God, to them who are the called according to his purpose."

He wrote me back and told me that I was right.  That we don't always see the big picture, and that he couldn't see it right now.  He was too angry.  He also said that he had told the Group CO that he could take his airplanes and shove them where the sun didn't shine--that he was through flying.  (His words, not mine.  I'm not a Marine.)

All of this happened at the end of six months in Nam.  He spent the next six months directing sorties, and when he came home, he said that it was the best thing that could have happened because it gave him time to mentally download some of the horrors of war before he came home.  He didn't have to be in the middle of the fire and destruction.  He already had over 100 missions anyway.

He spent twenty one years flying for our country, and was hit seven times in Korea and once in Viet Nam.  All of it under the protection of God himself.  "...according to His purpose."  He served as a deacon, a youth director and a Bible teacher for the next forty-four years.  He was my hero.