Clough Genesis Lesson 72

Special: Biblical principles of military operations

There was an article in the paper that is one of those articles that comes up from time to time that is quite significant; in fact, I think it’s so significant I decided to stop our forward progress in the Genesis series and devote a morning service to some biblical principles that are very much linked to this particular story. “Dallasite triggers raid by Commandos” was the title.

“Computer magnate, H. Ross Perot, said Monday he arranged for an American led commando squad to free two of his employees being held prisoner by the Iranian government in Tehran. The daring escape was ignited when a mob, whipped up by Iranian revolutionaries paid by the Dallas millionaire, stormed Tehran’s [?] prison allowing the two Americans to flee, Perot told a news conference. William Gaylord and Paul Chiparoni [sp?], both 39, two engineers with Perot’s Dallas based Electronics Data Systems, Inc. had been jailed for seven weeks, with the Iranian Ministry of Justice demanding twelve and three-quarter million dollars for their release. But they managed to flee during the assault on the prison February 11, two Sundays ago. Once free the men met the Perot organized commando team at a hotel about ten miles away and made a dramatic escape to the Turkish frontier, covering 450 miles in five days. Perot would not say how the men traveled or how they got across the border without passports. The team arrived at the Turkish border on schedule, Perot said. We had flown in a specially equipped 707 aircraft and the entire team flew from Turkey to Frankfurt. Perot, who gained prominence in 1969 when he attempted to fly two plane loads of supplies to Americans held prisoner in North Vietnam, and his team arrived in Dallas Sunday night on a commercial flight from London.”

“Our strategy was to arrange for an Iranian mob to storm the prison, Perot said. We first confirmed that our government could not do anything to help our men. We then arranged with revolutionary leaders in Iran to have the prison mobbed. The group was led across the territory between Tehran and the Turkish border by retired Army Col. Arthur Bull Simon, 60, the Army officer who led the unsuccessful attempt to free American prisoners of war from a camp near Hanoi in 1970. Perot’s commando team had 15 persons all together, although not all of them were in Tehran for the escape. All but 2 were EDS employees, mostly former military men with combat experience. Perot insisted the escape plan was activated only after he failed to negotiate a twelve and three-quarter million dollar ransom, he said, was demanded by the Iranian government. Our first preference was to pay the ransom but our efforts to pay it failed because the banking system in Iran collapsed, Perot says. Perot stayed in Turkey while Simon carried out the escape plan. He declined to say specifically whether the commandos were armed but he said they had the equipment they needed.”

“The travelers were greeted Sunday night by several hundred jubilant friends and workers after they landed at the Dallas/Fort Worth regional airport. It’s wonderful to be an American and wonderful to work for EDS said elated Gaylord, who spoke briefly during the news conference but declined to elaborate on his adventure. Perot said Simon had trained the commando squad in Dallas beginning January 1 as a contingency operation.”

I basically have three objectives this morning in this special, built out of a passage in Genesis which we covered last summer and that is first of all I want you to, as a Christian citizen, to begin to read the newspapers with discernment; to do two things: first, find out what are the really historically significant things that are being reported and going on. And second, to be able to think largely in terms of spiritual categories, to relate what you read and the events that go on around you to the major themes of Scripture. Surely as Christians we ought to start thinking this way. Another objective I have is to expand some of you as far as your experience of parts of general revelation. I said that time and time you cannot sit and hope ever to understand portions of the Scriptures and confine your real life experience to just religion in general. In other words, the Bible uses illustrations borrowed from all sorts of areas of life.

The Bible uses, for example, many athletic metaphors in the New Testament. The Bible uses the sheep that we studied Wednesday night and if you’ve never been around a sacrificed lamb then you can read all you want to about Christ being the lamb of God slain from the foundation of the world and it’s not going to mean as much to you as it would if you had had that experience of seeing one. That’s just the way life is, and history is constructed that way under God as the Creator so that we have this, what we call the general revelation of God going on in every day providence where we learn this, that and the other thing, and then the Bible comes in, ultimately as the authority of course, but the Bible yet in turn borrows metaphors, thousands of them, from general revelation.

Now one of the great themes of the Scriptures that is flagrantly missing from the pulpits of America is the military metaphor; that is, because so many clergymen are so hostile to the military because they have such a ridiculous view toward the military and transmit that to the Christians so the Christians have largely a ridiculous view of the military, therefore one of the central themes and motifs of the Bible is gone. And we can read passage after passage after passage that describes the Lord Jesus Christ in military metaphor and it doesn’t mean anything to most Christians because most Christians are as far away from any kind of a military experience as east is from west. This is why I say that young men who are training for the pastorate who do not go in the military, frankly, are simply wasting their life. They are absenting themselves from an area of experience they have got to have if they are going to understand these vital sections of the Scriptures.

This raid that we read about is an example of a modern day military operation that we’re going to expand on this morning in conjunction with some Scripture. I’m going to use that to trigger in your minds, hopefully, many of you who do not have military experience, a little appreciation for what it takes to conduct this kind of a raid, what kind of men it takes to think it up and how they execute it. So besides just reading the news with discernment and learning a little bit about a military metaphor we also want to discern something as Christian citizens about our nation at this hour. What is it about our country that leads businessmen, like H. Ross Perot, to conduct forays, armed forays with trained guerilla commando teams, into other countries across international borders to recover employees when we supposedly have something called the United States government?

Let’s go to Genesis 14; this is a passage we covered; we’ll go back to that passage and look at some principles contained therein. Genesis 14 is the first military operation in Scripture. Significantly and much to the embarrassment of anemic clergymen, Genesis 14 features the star role believer of that day; he was the man who went out and killed in a military raid. I know this just frosts some of you who have been brought up in Christian circles, so necessarily I have to say it loudly, but Genesis 14 represents a model, and as I’ve said time and time again from this pulpit, in the flow of biblical revelation in history it’s always the first occurrence of the revelation that sets the tone for all later revelations of that theme; and surely Genesis 14 sets up a basic biblical image, all the elements are there, of genuine legitimate godly military action.

The situation as it existed in that time is given in Genesis 14:1, “And it came to pass in the days of Amraphel, king of Shinar,” that’s the area around Mesopotamia, “Arioch, king of Ellasar, Chedorlaomer, king of Elam, and Tidal, king of nations, [2] Made war with…” the kings of Sodom and Gomorrah.” The strategic situation was that the Middle East, again, was the boiling pot of intrigue, politics and military action. In the Mesopotamian river valley there was a group of people gathered around the old area of the tower of Babel that had been previously, centuries, two, three, or four, been dismantled by God supernaturally, and this group of men in military alliance, for that’s what verse 1 and 2 is talking about, a military alliance, invaded Palestine, and attempted to control it, presumably for the routes, the trading routes that would be going down into Egypt, southern Africa, and then also westward through the Mediterranean.

This force came down and at the time the Dead Sea was probably cut off there, the southern end of the Dead Sea being a recent edition, presumably due to the catastrophic geologic events surrounding Sodom and Gomorrah. So these kings in the pentapolis here that is now under water but at that time was above water, were defeated. And this whole area of terrain was lost to the control of those kings.

To understand the significance of all this, and this basically is fundamental to the point we’re trying to make this morning, is that the Bible says human society is ordered legally and judicially by the divine institution of state. We’ve gone over the various divine institutions, the first one being human choice; the second one being marriage; the third one being family; and those three being the basic divine institutions. The fourth divine institution, however, was the state and the state was added after the fall for one objective and this one objective is very important because this is the reason for the state and its power of the sword. And people who do not study the Scriptures simply to not orient properly to the role of the state. I recently asked a candidate who was running for Congress from this congressional district: What, sir, is your basic philosophy of government. What is, if we would trim it all down, get rid of the trimmings, what’s the basic function of all government? A startled look comes across his face and he looks up and says I was never asked that question before. This, a graduate student of one of the leading colleges in the United States, running for federal office, and has never either been asked or considered himself what the basic function of government is. Now is it any wonder why we seem to be going in n different direction, where n is a very large number? It’s obvious, because people haven’t got down to the basics.

The book of Genesis gives the basic and the basic function of the state is to partially and imperfectly attack evil. The state is basically negative in its function, it is not a productive institution; it is the family that is the productive institution, not the state. To illustrate this I’ve often used an agricultural illustration from our present terrain around here. If the farmer went out with all the herbicide he could and spread it from hedgerow to the other, and destroyed all the weeds on his acreage, but never planted anything to grow, how much money would he make? Obviously nothing, in fact he would lose it. Well, that’s the way government is; government is like the herbicide. Government’s job is to eliminate the weeds but not make the crop; the crop has to be made on the fields when the weeds are controlled, and the power of the state is to control the weeds of evil, to control the order so that godly people can produce and make a functioning society. Without law and order human production is impossible, and that includes, incidentally, the teaching of the Word of God. I can’t teach the Word of God in the middle of a riot and missionaries can’t teach the Word of God in the middle of a riot and they’re learning in Iran today. So we have a situation where the state’s main function is to maintain law and order.

In this shaded area of the map around the Dead Sea, in Genesis 14:1-2, law and order had collapsed. It had collapsed, as it does frequently in history, when enemy armies invade and destroy the existing infrastructure. Read the newspapers and see what a mess now Khomeini has in Iran. Once you start guerilla movements that work insidiously against the established power structure the only problem, a classic problem for centuries has been you can’t turn a guerilla action off; you never can get the thing stopped once you get on it, and that’s what you’re seeing today, we can’t get the structure back because everybody is anarchistic in their mental attitude.

This is what happened at this time and Genesis 14:14-16 record Abraham’s action in the middle of an anarchy, in the middle of a time when the government had collapsed. There was no order, now what do we do? Verse 14, “And when Abram heard that his brother was taken captive, he armed his trained servants, born in his own house, three hundred and eighteen, and he pursued them unto Dan. [15] He divided himself against them, he and his servants, by night, and he smote them, and he pursued them unto Hobah, which is on the left side of Damascus. [16] And he brought back all the goods, and also brought back again his brother, Lot, and his goods, and the women also, and the people.”

Verses 14, 15 and 16 give many, many principles of defense, principles that I mentioned when we exegeted the passage in detail. But verse 14a, “When Abraham heard,” there’s the first principle, he was alert, he wasn’t sleeping, when evil strikes you’d better know it’s striking, you’d better identify that it’s evil, some people are too stupid to do that, you’d better identify that it’s evil and then you’d better be prepared to do something about it. Verse 14b is the second principle, and that is the principle of being decisive. You notice Abraham didn’t call a conference and didn’t go to the University of Jerusalem to do studies on what we should do in this great crisis; he figured out what he was going to do and he took 318 employees of his private company, like Mr. Perot did, and he went and he did something about it. So the second principle is he was decisive; he had a plan and he had resources to carry out the plan.

Another thing, “he pursued them unto Dan,” let’s look at a map and see what happens. They captured his uncle and moved north, and as they started moving, carrying booty, they were over-weighted with this booth that they were carrying, he gets the word, he’s somehow to the west, and position one has already been vacated so he doesn’t mess around there, they’ve already gone, they’ve evacuated the target area, say by the time they reach position two Abraham hears about it; he puts his plan into effect to intercept and comes after them, and they finally catch up at point three, up near Dan, which is the northern part of the nation. It takes a little while, it’s some seventy to eight miles pursuit to catch them. But that demonstrates the principle of aggressiveness. Whenever you have these kinds of people, these animals that walk the streets, these animals that take over in historical vacuums with their anarchistic attitudes, when they rape, when they pillage, when they destroy, when they murder, there has got to be an aggressive response. And here you see they pursued them all the way to Dan; he didn’t give up, he knew that something had to be dealt with.

At the end of verse 15 he chased them all the way up to Damascus, which was a hundred more miles up the road. And this demonstrates not only aggressiveness but it demonstrates speed; again you can’t wait for this kind of thing to just solve itself, it isn’t going to solve itself if there’s not a law/order structure to solve. Verse 15 also, “he divided himself against them,” he was tremendously outnumbered but he had 318 men that basically had been trained, that’s another factor about him being decisive. When you read in verse 14 about him taking his armed employees it didn’t mean that all of a sudden he says okay, put down your pencil and I want to show you this; this thing is called a sword, it works this way. He didn’t have to introduce weapons to his employees at the time of the crisis. His employees were well-drilled. So again, he had this in mind. And he was a smart businessman, he knew his company was operating in a no-man’s land that any moment the system might collapse and if the system might collapse he doesn’t take a bunch of his sheep and go head for the hills until somehow, some way society just kind of gets born again or something. He doesn’t do that, he has a plan and he says no, I am a businessman, I have a right to make a living and if the government doesn’t provide me I’ll provide the protection I need with my company’s resources, and that includes training my own private army if I have to, but we will maintain law and order. Abraham had that attitude.

In verse 15 he was cool and this is the difference, and some people never do get the difference and I know people will walk out of here today not having got this difference. We’re not glorifying power; we’re not glorifying the military here. What we’re glorifying is the principle that evil has to be dealt with and it sometimes has to be dealt with very forcibly. And in verse 15 you find him cool, that means he thinks with precision, he doesn’t flail around, it’s not a case of personal vengeance, he’s not going out there just to smash somebody. It’s not that at all. It’s a deliberate surgical procedure. There’s something bad and it’s going to be cut out, and he uses skillful tactics. Verse 15, when it says “he divided himself against them, he and his servants, by night,” that is as skillful in the military field as the finest most delicate musical instrument can be skillfully played in an orchestra. It’s that kind of skill we’re talking about, coolness.

And then in verse 15, the last part, he “pursued them” all the way to Damascus, that’s the principle of ruthlessness, to go all the way until the problem is dealt with. He didn’t go half of the way and say well now you boys are very good, you leave me alone and I’ll leave you alone. No, because he knew if he let them alone what would they be doing next year? Back again. So he decided he was going to end this right now and so while he had them on the run, it only took a couple more arrows to wipe them all out and that’s the way you have to solve the problem. If you’re going to solve it, solve it!

And in verse 15 you notice he did it “by night” and that indicates another principle, the principle of surprise. Don’t telegraph your motions, you plot and you plan and then you hit, and then later we discuss, but you don’t discuss first in this kind of a situation; normally, yes, normally we do work through the state. Nothing I say this morning is to knock legitimate exercise of the divine institution of the state. All I am saying is that the first military operation of history occurs in an anarchistic political vacuum where there is no one there to maintain law and order and so a man who was a natural leader, who has resources, stepped into the gap and says I will do it.

Now there’s the difference. The Bible is not like your little Marxist Maoist handbook that says if you don’t like the way the system is going, go out and start a riot, rabble-rousing. The Bible never condones rabble-rousing. What the Bible does say though, and this is a principle that goes far back to the Reformation, I think it goes back further but that’s as far back as I can trace it, is the doctrine of elected officials, and that is if your high officials are defecting, if they cannot maintain law and order, you go down to the next lower level of official and work a legitimate operation under that official to restore order; that is not disobeying Romans 13 because you’re following an official.

And it’s the same thing here where all the officials faze out and there’s total chaos, what is your next group of leaders in any community? Your next group of leaders underneath the government, underneath the state, is your large businessmen. And Lubbock has large businessmen and small businessmen. Quite frankly, if the thing craters some day I hope some of the big businessmen around town take the bull by the horns and do something about it; it’s their town and they’re the big men with the resources to do something about it. It’s the same principle. Abraham was the big businessman of the area. Now this is an analogy to H. Ross Perot. True, Abraham didn’t deal with computers; he was walking around with camels but the point still remains, relative to the economic climate in that day Abraham was to that society, probably, what H. Ross Perot is to our society. Don’t ever, ever come away from the Scriptures thinking Abraham was some poor little cluck that fell out of a sand dune some place. Abraham was a very remarkable businessman with a lot of resources and intelligence.

But the most important part of this whole passage, lest you get the wrong spirit out of this thing, is the last phrase of verse 16. Ultimately, after we’ve talked about alertness, decisiveness, aggressiveness, speed, coolness, ruthlessness and surprise, after we’ve talked about all those principles we must finally say: what was the motivation for the raid? Was it just to raise hell? No it wasn’t, it was because, and this may shock some of you who already appear to be sensing this is going to be one of those Sundays; the motive behind this was love of his neighbor. He loved the people that were involved; it doesn’t say that he just took Lot in verse 16; if he was just concerned about Lot I’m sure a little ransom negotiation could have solved the whole problem. Abraham was not just concerned about Lot; Abraham was concerned about people who were taken captive, women who were being manhandled and gang raped and he was concerned about private property. And he stood up as one individual in his generation and said this is wrong and I’m going to do something about it if no one else will. Now that’s the motive for this raid, it was not just to kill people. The motive of the raid was because he cared enough to go out and risk his life, this is what always makes me laugh about these idiots that are against the service, the bloodthirsty military… just a minute, who lays their life on the line? The soldier, not the bigmouth at home in his easy chair that’s always doing the [can’t understand word]. And after all, in the New Testament what is the highest illustration of loving someone. 1 John 3 and 4 has a passage in there about he who lays down his life is the one who loves. So this was done with a motive of love toward the people who were held prisoner. Remember that because that comes up again and again.

Now this raid by H. Ross Perot into Iran is very similar to this situation of Abraham; very similar in many respects. You remember as I read the article it said that H. Ross Perot, when he armed his 15 member commando team, he picked Col. Arthur Bull Simon to be the man to lead, and I think probably the most easy for all of us to get filled in on some background of just what it takes, to take a look at this particular individual and some of the things and exploits that unfortunately will never get into your 7^th and 8^th grade history text because it might excite somebody to be patriotic. So I will give you some background. Obviously “Bull” is a nickname, most mothers don’t name their little kid “Bull.” But this was, when I show you his picture you’ll see why, this was the nature of this particular man that Mr. Perot chose to carry out his mission.

We’re going to go through the background of Col. Simon a little bit, one of his great exploits done in the history of our country, then we’re going to come back to the raid into Iran and then back to a very interesting set of passages in Scripture. I’m going to take you on a little trip and then I’m going to come back at the end of that trip to the Scripture, but after we’re through our trip and we come back to the Scripture I think you’ll be fortified with a little general revelation in some areas that you weren’t before and you’ll be able to read some Scriptures, one of which is sung by our choir very often, and it will mean a lot more to you. So this is why for those ladies who will now tune out because they’re bored with this kind of thing, it’s all right, the men are usually bored so this is their day.

We will cover some of the details of what it takes to make a raid like this. Col. Bull Simon, as it says in the newspaper, was the man who led the unsuccessful attempt to free American prisoners of war from a camp near Hanoi. This particular raid is called in history the Son Tay Raid; it was made into North Vietnam in the fall of 1970; one of the most exciting exploits of the United States forces in Vietnam. The background was this: in the spring of 1970 we had 356 listed men in the POW compounds of North Vietnam. Those men had been shot down or captured on various missions; most of them were pilots who had been shot down. They were some of the finest young men this country has ever produced. The average age of the man in prison at that time was 32 years old; the average man was married and he was the father of two children. We’re not talking about young adventurers, we’re talking about family men who, while everybody else was getting their draft deferment, were out taking it on the line, who were out there fighting for something and they were fighting for something great and you see the result of the collapse of Asia now because we listened to the nitwits rather than listening to men like that. These were the men who were languishing daily and dying daily in those compounds.

If we went through the country in the spring of 1970 and we tallied up the total number of American families who had a relative, who was either listed as MIA (Missing in Action) or POW we would have come out with this figure, for the total number of American families suffering; wives not even knowing whether they were widows or still wives: 4,705 American homes were without a father, an uncle, a relative or a son, all listed in MIA status or POW status. This was the situation in the spring of 70, preceding the raid on Son Tay. Those men, at that point, were going into a status of imprisonment that meant that they would be in prison as POWs longer than any other military men in our entire national history. At no point in our history have we ever left Americans in enemy prisons that long.

Eleven percent of those men had already died in the spring of 1970 and they died for many reasons. Many of the Air Force men and the Navy pilots had died because at the spring of 1970 neither the Navy air or United States Air Force had developed a quick system of tightening up the ropes on the seats so when they pulled the eject lever they went out loose in the sea; usually they have straps that hold them down for maneuvers and so on, but because they would be looking for enemy aircraft they had to loosen up their seat belts to turn around and see what was going on. They would fly in this state and then they would be suddenly hit and they’d have to eject and there was no way at that time to rapidly tighten up the strap, so when the seat blew out the arms and the legs would be flailing around in the air and remember the air stream around aircraft is going four to five hundred miles an hour so you can imagine this pulled arms and legs out of the sockets, and this was the state in which the men left the airplane, leave alone the state which they finally hit the ground. So the men were in no shape to evade or escape even if they had been alive when the hit the ground and some of them never made it to the ground because they burned on escape. Many of the aircraft that they ejected from were doing rolls in the air and so in addition to the foot stream of four hundred miles an hour they were subjected to tremendous roll forces and torque that just literally shredded them on the way out.

Those few men who did try to escape and evade, the longest one evaded, he was captured by some villagers and he broke out and later on evaded capture for max of 21 days. After all, a six foot white westerner doesn’t hide himself too inconspicuously in a five foot five Oriental culture. It’s sort of like David with Goliath and the sword trying to hide in Gath. And this was the position of many of our airmen; they wonder how they lasted as long as they did. But these were fine, fine men; as one man who’s a believer in the service today remarked, it’s just a tragedy that the Vietnam was so screwed up that our greatest heroes were our prisoners.

But nevertheless, one of those men, to give you an example of the kind of fortitude they had… when the villagers would pick these pilots up they’d get mad at them and so they’d take their arms that were already out of a socket and they’d twist them around some more, and this is the kind of torture the men had before they even got to prison. One of those men was the son of the Pacific command; the Pacific commander at the time was Admiral John F. McCain; his son, in a very odd thing in war, his own son was flying a Navy jet and was shot down, so here is the father who is the commander of the theater with his son a POW; it put tremendous strain on Admiral McCain, since he also had to authorize the raid on Son Tay, knowing his own son would never be rescued.

Here’s a little bit about young McCain that I read from Benjamin Schemmer’s book The Raid, Harper and Rowe, 1976. “Young McCain was known to have been seriously wounded when his plane was hit. His wingman saw the North Vietnamese fish him out of a lake in downtown Hanoi, apparently unconscious. In August of 1969 two prisoners who were released early by North Vietnam reported that McCain was near death, tortured beyond the believable limit of human endurance. He had been given only enough medical care to stay alive, sometimes in a semi comatose state, and had been held in solitary confinement for the past 15 months. His captors knew who McCain’s father was and the North Vietnamese had offered him an early return in July of 1968. Jack McCain, however, declined and he was tortured repeatedly because he refused the chance to go home. His fellow prisoners begged him to accept the offer; they were afraid he would die if he was not given better medical care, but McCain did not want the North Vietnamese to propagandize his groveling for an early release as he felt they surely would while fellow POWs languished in Hanoi’s cells.”

So there’s the scene for the Son Tay raid; men, our finest, dying, being tortured. The question here is the same question as Genesis 14; who loves them enough to lay it on the line to go get them. That’s the issue, that’s the only issue. The issue here isn’t just war, the issue here isn’t other subsidiary issues brought in by cranks; the issue is who loves them enough to do something to release them. At that same time you remember that the United States government was progressively becoming paralyzed in its ability to make decisions. We haven’t recovered nationally from that time to this day. National leaders are so petrified about what Walter Cronkite is going to say in his 6:00 o’clock news, or what some columnist character is going to say or comment that they can’t make a decision, always afraid of what somebody is going to say, and the same thing happened in those days. All the peace creeps that went to North Vietnam would get a tour of the hospitals as the POWs said later, that was cute, one man who had had his leg rotated three-quarters of the way around out of its socket, it was already broken in two places, was then put in a cast, placed in one of Hanoi’s hospitals and Jane Fonda was shown, see how we take such wonderful care of our POWs, look, there’s so and so, they gave him medicine to keep him groggy so he couldn’t say anything to her, and see, wonderful bed, beautiful hospital, look at that, what American can complain that we’re manhandling their POWs. And so Jane Fonda bought the line, came back and propagandized it with her husband, Tom Hayden, all over the United States. She the one you all finance when you go to see her films; financing a traitor that ought to be shot. But that’s the kind of person that was the creep that went to North Vietnam during that period of time in our history.

Furthermore, during this same time, in 1968, just prior to this particular incident there was a bombing halt and in the north the air craft were prevented from flying across the boundary between North and South Vietnam, hoping that by halting the bombing we could de-escalate the war, and if we would tie one hand behind our back the enemy would tie one of his hands behind his back. Brilliant philosophy! But during that bombing pause another tragedy occurred that the American press never gave full credence to. Here’s the tragedy. President Johnson had also forbidden any missions to resupply the C.A.S. teams that were operating in North Vietnam at the time. C.A.S. means Controlled American Source teams; these were spies, Vietnamese, trained to infiltrate into the north and take up positions around target areas. This would give us improved navigation; it would give us intelligence as to what was going on in these target areas, and as irony would have it, one of those C.A.S. teams was only two miles down the road from Son Tay, operating on a hillside right near the prison compound. These were to be the eyes and ears; the United States government had spent thousands of dollars training the men, they had picked the top volunteers from the South Vietnamese, men who were willing to die to go in to spy for the war effort. And what happened in the bombing pause: we abandoned every one of those 45 men, never resupplied them, never rescued them, we left them to die on their assignment in North Vietnam.

That was the first of many steps this country has done to abandon men who have given their lives taking us at our Word. President Johnson also forbid any missions to resupply the C.A.S. teams that were operating in North Vietnam at the time. Nine teams, 45 carefully trained Vietnamese had simply been abandoned. For months all they were told in guarded hush-hush radio messages was to hang in there, there were problems with resupply, or they were being worked out. It was one of the biggest and most secret tragedies of the Vietnam War. Eventually all 45 men died or were killed or captured, including the team that was only two miles from the target zone of the raid that they needed later on to plan the raid and didn’t have because they were abandoned.

That’s the background in the spring of 1970. Who initiated the raid? Again, the raid started, not because of Washington, the raid began because of the prisoners themselves. These men, in the small compound 23 miles west of Hanoi were in a place where many of the other POWs weren’t; they weren’t in downtown Hanoi Hilton as it was known; they weren’t inside a highly populated urban area, but as the guards would turn their backs one guy would peak up over the wall, another guy would peak up over the wall and they’re gradually pieced together from memory a map of the terrain around this particular camp and they knew ah, we are out in a countryside and we can get rescued. And so they began to do a very interesting thing. On work details from the prison yard the POWs dug ditches and they moved rocks under the careful eyes of the guards but the guards did not notice that the rocks and the dirt from the excavations were piled up in odd ways. The prisoners were put to work digging a new well since the old one on the compound had dried up, the POWs dug and they dug and they dug; they never reached water level but the dirt was piled up very carefully and very particularly. Allowed to dry their laundry in the prison yard when the sun came out the prisoners hung their clothes in a very unusual way. And later, in the spring of 70 after recon photographs were taken, the prisoners knew this, they knew that once a week SR-71’s, high altitude spy planes were flying over the compound, so they knew they had to communicate to those spy planes that they were there. And what these men did, they piled rocks, dirt and clothes in a position so that one of the photo analysts in Washington who began to look at the spy flights began to see these prints in the yard, from the air it looked like that: S A R K with an arrow and it meant Search and Rescue come and get us in that direction. And so this man knew that there were prisoners there, at the time we didn’t know where all the POWs were.

So here were a group of valiant captives who were seeking deliverance. Keep the picture in mind, these are men tortured and dying and they’re seeking deliverance and they put out the code. Well, the men in the SR-71 and the other spy photos began to prepare, but as always, when the United States prepares for something it takes us a little while, and so although the prisoners pleaded to come get us then, that was early, February and March, and you see in the Orient in this particular part of southeast Asia there’s the monsoon season, and during the winter, in January and February on into the spring you begin to pick up more and more showers and there’s monsoons all summer long with cloudiness over the target area. And so the prisoners realized that if they were moved any time later on SR-71 flights would not pick them up simply because they were being moved under cloud cover. And they also realized, and the Washington people knew this, they couldn’t send in low altitude reconnaissance over the prison because then people would get suspicious that they were looking at the prison. So the prisoners knew and they said come and get us, you’re going to be blind for five months due to the monsoon. Washington took spring, summer and all fall to prepare for the raid; that’s how long it finally took. And of course this is one reason why the raid, when they finally got there, found the compound was empty. They had been moved out during the summer and high altitude intelligence never picked the movement up.

But nevertheless, let’s go on with how this raid took place. The men at the Pentagon began to look around for a man who could lead the raid and they chose a man who had recently come back from Vietnam, Col. Bull Simon, here he is in the press conference and he’s the one that led the ground assault. General Blackburn, who was the pentagon’s special assistant for counter insurgency and special activities, asked him how he was doing since he had a slight stroke before. Simons told him casually that he was back to doing 250 pushups a day; Blackburn looked at him and suspected it might be more like 800 pushups a day. Over lunch Blackburn asked Simons if he would be interested in leading (quote) a very sensitive mission” that might be (quote) “kind of rough.” Simon knew enough not to ask what it was; if Blackburn was involved in it it had to be neat. “Hell yes” he said, “let’s go, I don’t need to know any more about it.”

This is the man that led that raid and here’s his philosophy of leadership. Begin, get exposed, this is real life and this is a man who isn’t just a paper tiger, this is a man who is a combat experienced man and he’s one who has a very definite philosophy of leadership; one that is not respected in our nation today, particularly by Christians. “Death is not that far from me by other causes.” So he immediately saw a little problem, he was going to die anyway so if you die with a bullet it’s not that much different than dying from TB or cancer, so basically that’s how he resolved that problem.

Secondly, he was a man who, though aggressive, was not a fool. He was a professional military man who didn’t just go out for the glory, he went out to get a target, accomplish a mission and do it with a minimum loss of men. So he says: “I don’t want my people to get their ass shot off for nothing,” that expresses his philosophy about losses. “Take only those losses that avoidable if you can’t smart your way out of it. Soldiers are entitled,” and this is a key principle, and I want you to see this, if you’ve never been exposed to military people here’s the way real military people think, and don’t you ever say these people are some sort of a scum of society like some people do in our evangelical circles. This is love coming through in a masculine military way, listen: “Take only those losses that are avoidable if you can’t smart your way out of it. Soldiers are entitled to leadership from men who can smart their way out of it.”

Another point: “Small unit combat is a pretty simple business; the guy who carries the gun wants to know what the hell kind of a man you are and he wants to know you’re there with him, not up front necessarily, but that you know your business, you’ve got control of the son-of-a-bitch and if the thing really goes sour that you’re going to be there with him when it’s time to have it out. His philosophy toward history: “If history is any teacher it teaches you that when you get indifferent and you lose the will to fight some other son-of-a-bitch who had the will to fight will take you over,” (end quote).

This is the man that was chosen to lead the raid on Son Tay. He gathered a fifty man assault force plus some supply people and then their troubles began. And I narrate this for those of you without military experience, those of you with can appreciate and grin, those of you can’t this is the way things, the significant things of our history really get together. They got training at two places, Fort Bragg, North Carolina, the Special Forces place, and then at Eglin Air Force Base Florida which is the Air Force counterpart. They got all the men together and then they discovered something; they couldn’t get the right equipment. So they went through this laborious method called Army Supply. And Army Supply wouldn’t give it to them for six to eight months, can’t get the equipment right now. But the prisoners are over there dying, we need them now, what do we do about it? Sorry, we can’t do it. What they needed was night aiming devices, chain cutters and so on.

So he took some petty cash and he went to hardware stores, sporting good stores, and Sears Roebuck. The Army had spent 18 billion dollars in R&B since the Korean War and they hadn’t thought of the fact that half of the time the sun is setting and you’re fighting at night, so as of the spring of 1970 there wasn’t a real accurate site on guns to fire at night and the whole raid was to take place at night. So Simon went and he pushed and he pulled and he finally got all the sites that the army had, six of them in a crate. The men opened up the crates and they said huh, what are we supposed to do, trade them off, take turns using them during the raid? Well, obviously they’re not going to do that so they found a sporting goods store that had a site in one of their catalogues for 49.50 so he sent his men down and they bought 49.50 sites from the store when the army hadn’t even developed one yet. That was the problem with the weapons. This is how the real world operates, when you get into those kind of situations the men that make things happen are the scroungers. They don’t rely on the system.

Another problem: they had to fly into North Vietnam on this zigzag route to avoid radar. They flew zigzag also because if one of the planes got slow then he could catch them by going in a straight line. And so in this situation they had a long distance to go. The helicopters couldn’t go that long, they needed helicopters but they also needed some mother ships. The problem was, how do you get helicopters that go very slow and four engine aircraft like C-130s that go very fast. So the air problem was this: the C-130 mother ships would have to be like seeing eye dogs with a long flight into Son Tay; both helicopters were so underpowered for the flight that they would have to fly in draft, tucked in close enough behind the C-130 wings to be sucked along in the plane’s vacuum. At 105 knots a fully loaded HH-3 or UH-1 was at the upper boundary of its performance envelope. At 105 knots a C-130 was at the rock bottom of its performance curve. Then adding to the problem, just when they’re ready to pull the raid off they had a typhoon start to approach.

So here again this is the real world, and I want you to see it’s not just hopping on your horse and carrying your flag and off to the glory; there’s a lot more of the mundane details that have to be resolved and these are the kind of men that go through these details. They had the medical problem, what do we feed the POWs, what kind of condition, health wise, are these men going to be in. So they had to scrounge pajamas and Heinz baby food and do it without being noticed in order to get this ready to feed the men if they got them.

Then they had another problem, a very interesting problem, and that had to do with the Russian spy satellite. Over Eglin Air Force Base every 12 hours Cosmos 335, which is a Russian spy satellite, was regularly taking picture of the base. Yet Col. Simon had to have a full scale mockup model of the camp and train his troops against it day after day after day after day with a stop watch to make sure you’ve got to this point by so many seconds, to this point by so many seconds, the helicopters had to get in in so many minutes, out by so many minutes, over and over and over they had to drill but they couldn’t do it underneath the spying eye of Cosmos 335, so their solution was to build a complete mockup on 2 x 4’s in canvas, hinged, and they would set it up every time Cosmos 335 would go by take it down as Cosmos 335 approached. To give you an idea of some camera work of satellite photography, this one is over Texas, it gives you some idea of it in a very crude way. The resolution of these cameras is far better than this; this is Texarkana, this is the Houston area, and this is without any enlargement. The firm is very fine grained and it can be enlarged and the cameras have very high resolution in their lenses. You can see names on a golf ball from 80,000 feet. So this is the kind of spy capabilities that exist. That’s the exotic world of the black boxes. So faced with that kind of situation they had to make this mockup, take it down; put it up and take it down.

Then they had another problem; they had to get in to the supply compound before the guards will kill the soldiers. So in this compound they had all these little buildings, a wall around it and some trees. And they measured out one little circle that was just big enough for the rotor of the smallest helicopter the army had, and that helicopter had to be the first one and it couldn’t land the way a helicopter lands so the pilots worked it out so they’d come over this thing, shut the motor and drop it in. So all the crew on the first helicopter had to have mattresses on the bottom floor, lay prone while the helicopter crashed so they wouldn’t break their bones, then spring out with their guns and fire. All of this had to be timed, down to the second and they had all sorts of problems with the reconnaissance, they had problems with the high level reconnaissance because by the end of the summer in the monsoons they couldn’t get proper pictures. This is why they didn’t spot that the prisoners had left. So they decided to send robot planes in at low level to take photographs and they sent one in and he got shot down; they sent another one in and it didn’t work; they sent a third one in, it didn’t work; they sent a fourth one in, it got shot down, sent the fifth one in, it didn’t work. Sent a sixth one in and they finally got a picture but this thing rolled and they got a beautiful picture of the mountain next to it but not the compound. So because they’d already sent six in they didn’t want to raise any more suspicion so they decided to go without photographic confirmation of it.

Then they had the political problem; they had to consult with the President to get his approval because at that time everybody was in a tizzy about Vietnam. So finally, Admiral Moore briefed President Nixon in the Oval Room and Nixon responded with this: Tom, I know you guys have worked months on this; I want these POWs home too; hell, if this works we could even have them here by Thanksgiving dinner right here in the White House. But I don’t want to put any more into those camps either and I don’t want any more antiwar marches, last time they surrounded the White House, remember. This time they’ll probably knock down the gate and I’ll have a thousand incoherent hippies urinating on the Oval Office rug.” So we have this kind of a problem. All these factors had to be pulled together. This is how men do things in case you’re shocked.

Now the execution of the mission: not until they arrived at this particular location in Thailand did he actually tell the men who were the assault team where their target was. Simon got up and he briefed the men. We’re going to rescue seventy American POWs, maybe more, from a camp called Son Tay. This is something American prisoners, and I want you to notice this, another theme, because this is the basic theme we’re hitting this morning; this is not just military vengeance for the power and the glory; this is a mission that is very humanitarian; as humanitarian as Genesis 14, love of the oppressed and the captive.

Now listen again, here is the model military Tigard type officer and yet listen carefully to his words: We’re going to rescue seventy American POWs, maybe more, from a camp called Son Tay; this is something American prisoners have a right to expect from their fellow soldiers. This is something they have a right to expect. The target is 23 miles west of Hanoi. And there was a great applause among the soldiers as they felt this was a great mission. And then Col. Simon tells about his response as he stood there and he watched the soldiers clapping and cheering that they had this nice mission. The applause made me feel good; they wanted to do it and that was obvious, and damn it, I thought, they ought to want to do it. Again notice the mentality, “they ought to want to do it.” American soldiers have the right to expect this from their fellow Americans. And so they struck; the Navy diversionary strike came in over Hanoi with flares at exactly the same from the east, from the carrier force, and at the same time from the west his choppers came in within 20 miles of downtown Hanoi and they got there at the compound, landed at the wrong one at first, 200 soldiers came out and they massacred them, and went over to the compound they were supposed to find and couldn’t fine any prisoners and had to leave with no prisoners.

They came back to the States and there was a national reaction to this, of course. And of course the quivering federal people were wondering about what someone’s going to think, and so they had a meeting with the President and Secretary of Defense Laird was there and Col. Simon was there. Mr. Laird turns to Simon and he says: Do you think we ought to tell the Americans this story? And of course, versus having it leak out and have a big scandal or something. So again listen to the mentality expressed by this man; this is Col. Simon talking back to our Secretary of Defense. “This is a perfectly legitimate operation. These are American prisoners; this is something that Americans traditionally do for Americans. For Christ’s sake, what is it we’re afraid of.” That puts it perfectly well… perfectly well. What is it that we are afraid of; this is right to do something like this. But along came the moaners and the groaners, J. William Fulbright came out and said: “This was a major escalation of the war, a very provocative act to mount a physical invasion.” Teddy Kennedy: “I deplore the policy that let these men go,” (end quote). Eric Sevareid, commentator on the communist broadcasting system: “A great many cannot help feeling that there was something hair-brained about the concept,” (end quote).

Now in contrast to all the nitwits let’s turn to the people who were the real actors in history and let’s watch their response. We don’t care what Eric Sevareid says, it just takes up time. What we’re interested in is how the Russians reacted; what we’re interested in is how the Chinese reacted, the military people on the other side and most of all, how did the POWs react; did they take Kennedy’s thing, that were going to be beaten more now because we were almost rescued? Oh no, here’s the reaction. Both Moscow and Peking were shook up deeply; the Soviet armed forces became much more intent upon rear areas of security; units were totally reorganized and forces shifted to establish special reaction forces all over the world. Think of the expense that we caused the Soviets. Think of the consternation, the tying down of valuable troops because of one raid. The Chinese proved equally concerned; a lot of construction crews in North Vietnam soon stopped constructing and were placed on guard duty. So this was an effective result of this. And finally, in a survey done of the POWs 70% reported a positive effect on their morale as a result of the raid. Later, the director of the POW affairs said this: “I would hate to see the day when Americans feel we have to have 100% guarantee of success before we try something like this; it would mean” and prophetically I think, “it would mean we would do nothing,” (end quote) and that’s exactly where we are today.

One other feature on this Col. Simon; a good leader does something else; not only does he lead his men, not only does he see they get to the target, but he also sees that they’re properly awarded. The Department of Defense was going to give the Army Commendation Medal to all these people and send Laird down for a big ceremony at Fort Bragg. The army troops affectionately called this particular war the Green Weenie, because that shows you about what it stands for as far as they’re concerned. When Col. Simon heard that Laird was going to come down to Fort Bragg and get all these men out on the parade ground, people who were trained to go into a raid, risked their lives, here’s what he said; he called the Pentagon up, he called one of the Generals that were on duty that day in the Pentagon and he said: “General, some dumb son-of-a-bitch is sending the Secretary of Defense here in a day or two with a box full of green weenies; it might be best if he didn’t come. I’d hate to see some of the men, my men, turn down those decorations in front of a group of reporters. I don’t want to embarrass the Army but these men risked their lives outside of Hanoi, they weren’t on a Boy Scout patrol. Your reward section is handling these decorations as though it were business as usual and we’re holding up their Friday afternoon golf outing. This wasn’t business as usual, these guys laid it all out; every one of them earned at least a silver star. For what they did green weenies are an insult, not a decoration.” And they were all subsequently awarded as Col. Simon recommended.

Tragedy, however, Col. Simon was never promoted; within a year asked to retire and never invited to a military school to lecture about the raid. This is how, again, we treat these kinds of men that give their lives, they are willing to go in and risk their lives, our best people, and we always have the clucks and the clods over them that fake them out. We wonder why, today, we are where we are. This is why: we take these men, who are our real leaders, the men who are analogous to Abraham in our generation, and step all over them, and wonder why we don’t have a great country. Well, some men don’t step all over them.

Ross Perot, Dallas businessman, when he had two of his company employees, he wanted the finest. Where did he go? Ross Perot pulled out two Sunday mornings ago what the United States Government couldn’t do. Isn’t this amazing. One Dallas businessman has two of his company employees held hostage by a foreign power that is in the middle of revolt and turmoil, he gets an airplane, gets a commando squad, goes in and takes them out and the United States, what are we doing? We’re telling the Marines at our Tehran embassy, surrender boys, don’t shoot, when a mob strikes our embassy and under international law I remind you, our embassy is American territory; where the flag flies at the United States embassy that is United States territory. We accepted an invasion by a mob and told our Marines, who are armed with teargas, isn’t that cute, train a Marine how to kill somebody and then here, give them teargas; that’s really smart, some Sergeant, shot a few Iranians and he got arrested for it. Now you wonder why we are where we are; that’s why we are where we are.

Now let’s come back to the Scriptures. In the New Testament we have this phrase: “To him that knows to do good and doeth it not,” I add apocryphally, because of fear of Eric Sevareid or someone else, “to him it is sin.” The person who knows to do something and does it not, to him it is sin. I ask you, when the average person on the street out there who isn’t even a Christian, hears of the raid on Son Tay; hears of the Israeli raid on Entebbe, what is the gut reaction? That’s right! And people interviewed people on the street all over the world and the average person on the street said that’s right. Now what is it with our leaders; oh, I’m so sorry this happened today, we’ve got to make apologies to the U.N. and all the rest of it, yet the average person in the street has it all together; he knows what’s right because it fits. Now why does it fit? This is the application for us as Christians. Do you know why this fits? Because we’re made in God’s image and God is that way. If you get all the human viewpoint cobwebs out of your mind you’re going to respond the way God is because God made us; every one of you is made in God’s image. And what strikes you intuitively as right strikes you that way because it is right, because God is that way.

Turn to Exodus 3 and you recall what Simon’s philosophy of leadership was: that the man with the gun wants to know what kind of a man you are and he wants to know you are there with him. Let’s go back to when God reveals His name. Moses is at the burning bush, he’s commissioned to go down, it’s the same kind of thing, the whole Jewish nation is POW, they’re in captivity, these people. And Moses is commissioned to go down there and deliver him, make a raid and take them out, free them. If you have to kill a couple of Egyptians on the way, kill them but get the people out of there. And Moses says well, what’s your name. Exodus 3:14 tells him what the name is, “I AM,” that’s who I am. But in the Hebrew the force is, and more recent scholarship confirms this, that the sense of the word “I AM” isn’t I exist, the sense of the word “I AM” is I AM (with you)” (parenthesis). You see, it’s the burning bush and the burning bush is never consumed on the side of that mountain. What’s the burning bush all about? It’s the picture of Israel under affliction and the bush that burns and burns and burns and burns never burns up. Why? Because God is with that bush and it never burns, “I AM” with you in your oppression.

Now what comfort does it mean to know that God is a God who is with us in the trial and the pressure and the imprisonment in the POW sense? What does it mean? It means He’s with us and that’s comforting to me in that situation because I know if He’s with me I will be safe; I will be delivered. That’s the comfort this gives.

Turn to Exodus 15, the section the choir sings so often, the section from Handel’s Israel and Egypt, now read Exodus 15:3 after we’ve talked and talked and talked for the last hour on a military raid and we’ve talked everything from sniper scopes at night to C-130s to give you the military fill out of what a raid looks like and takes place and the threat and so on. Now verse 3, and you think like Col. Simon and their philosophy of leadership, and now you read verse 3. “The LORD is a man of war.” Does that mean anything now to you? Is that a side of the character of God maybe some of you raised in sheltered religious circles have never seen before; some of you men, seeing what God is, what Jesus Christ is, that is a legitimate description of the way God thinks. The reason the Entebbe’s and the Son Tay’s and the Perot’s raid in Iran strike you intuitively is right is because they are right. That’s God’s mode of operation and let me give you the key example, the incarnation.

Weren’t there prisoners? Wasn’t the whole human race in darkness and sin and dying and tortured under Satan. And wasn’t there a rescue operation mounted from heaven? And wasn’t there a Son sitting on the throne at one time and then, if you can imagine yourself as one of the angelic attendants, you look up at the throne one time and the Son is gone and you say what happened? He went on a rescue mission. He what? He went on a raid because He’s going to rescue His people. Aren’t you glad, for your own sakes, that there were no Fulbright’s among the angels? Aren’t you glad that there was on one there to say well, this represents a major escalation of the war, Satan is going to be very mad… very mad that we’re going to do something like this. Aren’t you glad there wasn’t a Kennedy who lectured the Father: I deplore the policy that let Him go! Aren’t you glad this kind of activity wasn’t going on in the throne room when your salvation was designed? You think of the trouble those guys had with that chopper, getting it to drop right in the middle of the compound.

Think of the trouble God the Son had of incarnating Himself as a tiny fetus in a woman’s womb; that was His entrance, that’s how He smuggled across the border into the creation. And that’s how He infiltrated the camp of darkness. And how did he ex-filtrate; how was He extracted? Through a bloody cross and resurrection, that’s how He did that. But it was successful; can’t you visualize in the light of what we’ve said this morning, can you visualize the Father coming to the Son some day saying, Son, I have a very sensitive mission, it’s kind of rough. And can’t you visualize Christ saying, Yes, let’s go, I don’t need to know any more about it, because where the Father’s involved interesting. Can’t you visualize the Son saying My people are entitled to leadership from someone who can smart his way out of it? See, it’s the same kind of thing. The love of that military officer, for his soldiers and for those prisoners is just but a finite replica of the love of Jesus Christ for mankind.

That, people, is why it strikes you in the gut as right. Remember what Simon said: The guy who carries the gun wants to know what kind of a man you are and wants to know that you are there with him; if the thing goes sour he wants to know you’re going to be there with him when it’s time to have it out. Was Christ with us? You bet He was, He went all the way to the cross, and to hell. He was there and He had it out, and He walks among His Church.

I hope some of you today have had a chance to see another side of the character of Christ under the military metaphor. If you ever spot, particularly you men, think of Jesus Christ as an officer, as a Deliverer, or tragically some of you may side with the moral impotent and the whimpering pussies of the press. The choice is yours.

We’ll sing……