Dale Hanson

And I went to the back pew so it wouldn't disturb anything and put that pillow down and sat on the pew.

And it was only in retrospect from years later that I kind of thought and realized that, you know, even at that young age, I was making decisions under extreme pressure.

A 13-year-old can't handle much more pressure than that, you know.

Yeah.

Those were three events just growing up that I thought were formative in my life, and going and getting older, college and all that, and the military.

You realize that I can handle stuff.

Maybe other people can't, but I know I can.

gave me a comfort and even the simple thing about being a christian going going to combat knowing that you're going to kill people and and all that kind of thing that was resolved in my mind too and that it's permissible to take a life for self-defense capital punishment and war you know and that's not a problem with me and i looked at all the the characters uh moses was adopted by pharaoh's daughter

to be perhaps the next pharaoh.

And he would have been a general in the Egyptian army.

And then David, King David, the shepherd boy who killed Goliath, they used to sing, Saul hath killed his thousands, but David his ten thousands.

And all the way down the line, there were heroes.

And in the New Testament, when it talks about the Christian life, Ephesians 6 talks about putting on the armor of God and all this kind of thing.

So the metaphors of war are there.

That's interesting.

you did all the research before you went yeah most of the time i was actually in college i mean a serial student and uh um uh i think it was in my third third year a year to go and um i believed in the war i'm very anti-communist

Anyway, I kept thinking, reading the newspaper, so many GIs have been killed and all that stuff.

I'm thinking, I'm ready to die if I have to.

I'm not eager, but I'm ready.

The least I can do is do my part.