On May 18, 2017, I posted “My War,” by Frank Hooper, aka Fleabaggs. It’s the best thing I’ve posted on this site. The response on SLL and The Burning Platform, where it was also posted, was overwhelming, heartfelt, and particularly poignant among the many vets who commented. The beggar picture served as inspiration for a passage in my work-in-progress next novel, The Gray Radiance. As my tribute to Frank I’ve put that passage below, after “My War”.
My War, by Fleabaggs
This is the most important story SLL will post this month, or maybe ever. It’s an honor to post it. Read it beginning to end and study the pictures. This is the story Americans don’t want to hear, and these are pictures from which they avert their eyes. From Fleabaggs, a Vietnam War veteran:
I have started to write this a hundred times in 49 years. I would like to have used Our War but don’t want to presume to speak for all us Nam Vets still alive who were really there for a year or more. Nor can I speak for all the families of Nam Vets and all the millions of Vietnamese whose major crime was living in Vietnam at the time.
I do presume to speak for myself and my dead buddies who told me their stories as we commiserated in a dark corner of a seedy gin mill where we had been banished. I do presume to speak for some of the families I knew and my mother and the civilians who had an impact on me while I was there. I’m going to show you a picture of a few whose story never made it to the U.S. It’s shocking so stop here if you want to remain comfortably absolved in your sweet fantasy of non-involvement. This is not about “ME,” it’s about us.
Please indulge me while I set the terms of engagement here. I’m not worried about what you think of me or my views. When I say ‘THEY’ you know who “THEY” are so don’t jerk my chain with that kind of stuff. Go back to the Miley video you were watching. When I say “YOU” you know if you are “YOU” or not. If you are not “YOU,” but are offended that I might mean you, go to your therapist and ask her how you became such a thin-skinned oversensitive little prick.
This is not a Rambo story either. For the majority of us guys who were there from Jan. 68 onward, shooting and being shot at was the easy part. The hard part was the rest of what war is about. If you were in Khe Son in 68 or something like that, then yes that was hard. And just to qualify that I know what I’m talking about, I’ve been pinned so low by some guy with a 47 that I was scooping a hole with my cheekbone to get my head lower as my hair was being parted. I was also on my feet moving around 22 or 23 hours a day with very little food. When we got 1 or 2 hours to rest we were so wired we couldn’t sleep. We found a spot to lay down and listen to our heart pound and then back on our feet for 3 weeks straight. TWICE.
Combine that with having seen the proof that it was all staged and I cracked up. When I came to I was trying to choke a buddy and I just started bawling uncontrollably. I was never the same again. In hindsight I realize I made a choice to never feel ever again and set out to do just that.
One of my closest buddies from school got drafted and found himself in Bumdeal Vietnam where nothing ever happened. He’s standing in a wet trench in the Monsoon for hours every day waiting for nothing to happen. Then he gets to go back to a smelly sandbag hooch to rest and his buddy is escaping to La La Land with some pot and a squeeze tube of morphine from a kit. 3 months later he’s sharpening his needle on a nail file and cooking smack over a Zippo, wondering how this happened. He’ll be able to quit pretty easy when he gets home he thought. But I just can’t go back out there tonight without it. Just 8 more months. On the flight home he gathered up what little dignity and self-respect he had left, thinking that he was still a hero for sticking it out. A month later that little shred of hope was gone.
He had no idea how he killed that many old women and babies without remembering at least some of the details. So much for the quitting. 2 years later he died with a needle in his arm. I’m not excusing our bad decisions after we saw the farce that it was. I’m saying that was what happened and that we had lots of help getting to that point. We were not going to disgrace our families by deserting or going to Leavenworth and getting a BCD. So we put on our best pair of man pants, sucked it up and muddled through.
We were typical of the other vets I knew who are gone or are so far into the psychiatric machine they will likely never resurface. We all fell off a Norman Rockwell calendar and into a bankers’ war. It never occurred to us that the government would lie to start a war. Why should we? Our parents would think God lied before they would believe the government would lie. Presidents and Congressman lied sometimes, but not the U.S. government.
We left thinking we were heroes. Our moms gushed with pride at us in our uniforms, the girls went ga ga, we were part of something we could believe in, we marched to John Philip Sousa in boot camp, life was good. Here is something I posted to describe what it was like for me and so many others I knew. Some people online were giving what I thought were moralizing sermons when they commented on the anniversary of the Mar.16 My Lai massacre and Lt. Calley.
I was there for the 68 TET offensive, the counter offensive and 2 mini Tets. I would never dream of sitting down next to a woman who is 8 months pregnant in the august heat and say “I know how you feel Darlin”. when you’ve been shot at from 50 ft. by someone you can’t see and are required to call in for permission to shoot back. When 2 little boys blow themselves up while trying to blow you up, when you see one of their arms twitching 30 ft. away. When you go without sleep or food while on your feet moving around for 3 weeks twice. When you see Westy dining with Raquel Welch in the light of a patio and you’re heart and guts and balls ache so bad you cry inside. when someone at the airport tries to gently tell you that you have white hippy spit down the back of your Dress Blues. When 45 years later that same liberal hippy wearing birkenstocks extends his faggy hand and says “THANK YOU FOR YOUR SERVICE”. When your family is ashamed of you. When you are treated like a freak at the VA Hospital and you have to see a shrink just to get medical attention. When you no longer have anything to believe in and you fall into booze and drug induced self pity, laying in the gutter with your pants full of crap and you piss yourself just for the warm feeling. When you’re down to 100 pounds with no teeth in a dark parking lot trying to give a blowjob for a drink or a hit. When you cry your heart out wondering what the hell is wrong with you. When you just murdered your dog for protecting your sweet mother over not giving you more drinking money. When she looks at you with hurt and despair and says “how could anything like you come out of my womb. When you’ve turned your back on a desperate woman begging for money with a dead baby because you were brainwashed into thinking she was going to buy weapons with a crummy dollar while never thinking she may have a live baby to feed in an alley somewhere. Then I’ll talk to you about Lt. Cally. You didn’t rob my buddy and the rest of us of what little dignity we had remaining. You ripped it out of our souls violently and left a gaping sucking wound that never healed. It scabbed over a little but we could always feel it. Meanwhile you let the bankers off free. Some of you didn’t mistreat us but you didn’t defend us. How many of you canceled you accounts in protest or sold your stocks or did anything but lower your eyes and say “I don’t want to hear about that”.
Most of that was from my own story but others turned it inwardly. I never had the opportunity to do what Calley did while on duty. But after my crack up I did indeed take the low road off duty with some American civilians because I knew I could, so I don’t claim sainthood. I was young and wanted to repay someone or anyone. I took the evil and the evil took me. It made me it’s Bitch. It took me places I didn’t want to go and did things I didn’t want to do with people I didn’t want to do it with.
Many more committed a 100 forms of suicide. Violence, drugs, booze, etc. Few did what I did. Before any of that happened though I would like to show you some pictures of what we saw frequently after Tet. Refugees coming in by the thousands from burned out villages with nowhere to go except to the next large village until they reached the bigger cities. We had no idea how to cope with what we saw. 3 months of SERE training don’t prepare you for this kind of suffering. An old man and 2 old women in an alley where he is offering sex with them in desperation. The look on their faces. The woman I mentioned with the dead baby. She was too old to sell her body but not old enough to get the pity of an old Mama San. When I got home people told me I was exaggerating or lying. Do you have any idea how bad that knife feels. The 2 kids in the top picture would most likely end up like the one in the bottom. This was done to him purposely. We saw hundreds of these kids who were maybe 9 or 10. How the one in this picture lived this long is a genuine miracle. They had their bones broken and reset in the most horrible positions but always with one hand able to beg for money. Then they were starved to the point where a leg would look like your thumb. After that they were dragged out at daylight and dragged in at dark for the rest of their unfortunate lives. They were wherever there were Americans with money. This was done with our full knowledge and consent. How? All the reporters, politicians, bureaucrats, USO performers and Top Brass saw this and yet it never got reported to my knowledge. The kids who were cute and unscarred were sold to the sex vendors for sex and torture or anything the new owner wanted. If we break down into chaos because of any of the 100 train wrecks coming and you are separated from your kids and you don’t think this will happen to them, you might want to rethink that. Make arrangements for them even if you don’t believe it will happen here. If you had the money you could buy anything in Saigon. I’ll give you just one of many reasons I know what I know. I shacked up with the sister of the vice president’s mistress for 3 months. There was no welfare or self pity checks over there. Life would chew you up in a New York minute. She had a kid in a convent to pay for in the Philippines. I’m not willing to incriminate myself explaining the money for that or where I got so much info on the real deal. I was young, adventurous, outgoing and curious and people have always wanted to confide in me. I never ask, I let them talk and I don’t violate their inner sanctuary by laughing or putting them down or analyzing them by running it through my sick mind and telling them what they really just said.
Then there were the feral children all over. In spite of my determination not to feel again they always won our hearts over. The affection and care they had for each other in spite of everything was heart warming. They knew the deal and they weren’t about to be caught by the goon squads. No one that I knew could avoid seeing these kinds of things very long and after 3 months here we all knew how phony it all was. Seeing all these people suffer over it just made it harder for us to cope with. After we got home and endured the abuse heaped on us there was no longer anything to believe in for most of us. The results of that kind of demoralization was felt by our families in ways we will never fully know. I went to visit the parents of some of my buddies before the funeral as was the custom for close friends. It’s impossible to describe the hurt and despair. These were the nice guys, not the selfish wretches like me.
I think it’s timely that I waited this long to write this. We haven’t learned from watching this new group of our youth coming home perhaps even more messed up than we were. We seem hell bent on sending even more “over there” to make the world safe. Our own country is nearing civil war and I read comments online of a kind of eagerness to see it that troubles me. I don’t think that group of people knows what that will be like. Killing a fellow human being is incredibly hard, ugly and messy. It will follow you forever and if you do it because you could instead of because you had to, which many will do. I can only pray that it won’t be one of you reading this. There is a fine line between defense and just meanness because you know you can get away with it.
I’m done now. I wanted to write more but it’s not there. I made a promise to God that I would do whatever I thought he wanted me to do fearlessly for the rest of my life to make up for the evil I did in the old one. I don’t know if I have yet but when I do face him shortly I will be able to say I was no coward in these 35 years of peace he has given this undeserving wretch. I was never presumptuous enough to ask him to let me in heaven, I only asked for freedom from the torment in this life and he granted it. I have never taken a dime of anyone’s crazy money or the meds that go with it. Please don’t insult me with that welcome home stuff or thank you for your service stuff. I don’t play that.
I would like to thank Mr. Robert Gore of Straight Line Logic and gifted wordsmith who will soon be the first N.Y. Times best selling author residing in Gitmo for helping me with this and getting it posted. Also the people on TBP who encouraged me to do it.
Sincerely,
Crazy uncle Frankie Fleabaggs who lives in the attic.
From The Gray Radiance
When Nick tried to pay with piasters, the old man shook his head. “Dollar.”
Nick handed him a dollar, wondering if the locals had to pay with dollars and if he had been overcharged. The man gave him back a quarter. Perhaps he hadn’t been overcharged. He left the quarter on the counter and walked out on the street.
There were beggars everywhere, but one was so different, so grotesquely distorted, that all Nick could do was stare. He was on a board with wheels. It looked like a skateboard, but the board was bigger, maybe three feet by two feet. At first Nick couldn’t make out the geography of the body, a randomly put together stick-figure doll. He was dressed only in a dirty cloth of indistinguishable color around his midsection. You couldn’t say if the beggar was sitting or lying on the board. He rested on his elbows, his arms emaciated twigs that might snap under the load. One hand was folded back at an acute angle to the wrist, an angle so severe a normal hand couldn’t form it without breaking bones. The other hand was outstretched, the language of begging. His entire rib cage was visible. At the knee of one straw-thin leg it looked as if the lower part had been attached backward; the foot pointed in the opposite direction of the knee. His other foot somehow rested on the small of his back, his leg positioned in a way no contortionist could match.
The beggar was anywhere from thirty to fifty-years old. There was something timeless in the dark eyes that watched Nick. Not imploring, no bitterness, no hate. They were a vessel, a summation. Of what? Malevolence that could break a man, or boy, cripple and mutilate, turn his body into a prison, leaving him fit for one occupation: alms. Acceptance of an intolerable fate? Somebody had broken him and put him back together and was profiting from his condition. At the end of the day, what happened to the beggar’s bowl? Where was he wheeled? Who took his money?
Look at me if you will, the beggar’s impassive eyes seemed to say, but this is the way of the world. You are just as misshapen as I.
They stared at each other for a long time. Nick pulled out his wallet, took a dollar and put it in the bowl. Ever so slightly, the beggar nodded. It wasn’t gratitude. Acknowledgement? Maybe. Because he had looked at him, seen him? Probably. Most passers-by wouldn’t muster more than a glance before they hurried on.
Rest in peace, Fleabaggs; you’re with God now.
STRAIGHT LINE LOGIC 
Robert –
Thank you for this. I found these two images archived with your post of 2017/05/18, on Wayback Machine, at:
https://web.archive.org/web/20190825042529/https://straightlinelogic.com/2017/05/18/my-war-by-fleabaggs/
You can download and save them., or I would be pleased to email them to you.
Jim
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mudman1
Thanks. I figured out how to reproduce them and they are now in the article.
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Such as it was for us.
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You pays your money, and you takes your chances. I didn’t know I was being hustled when I was 18, to be humping the jungle at 19, and back in the US at 20, trying to figure it all out. Stayed with the Army for a long time, got hurt, and got tossed. It is what it is. I decided at some point, to try and find something like beauty and light, and worthwhile to put my attention to, because I already saw what concentrating on ugliness brings. That, has been my rehabilitation. I stopped holding the hurt and the badness, because any crutch you use will be the one you’re known by. There is plenty of blame to go around, but you can’t spend your days worthlessly by blaming. And you only get so long to figure that out. Look around you, laugh, do some good, try for better, rather than wallow in filth and despair. I can see that other side, where the sun shines bright. And if I can help someone, I do. Someone helped me.
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I believe you emerged from it stronger than most.
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He’s been hardened by fire, knows reality, and has the heart of a caring human. It’s a big circle not all have to go thru.
I’d stand at his side any day.
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Frank Hooper was a Nut Case to begin with, before he ever went to ‘Nam, in my humble opinion. Many a fine man went and saw the same combat and steeled themselves against the ensuing inhumanity of it all, regardless of the politics behind it and the reasons they were there, and they didn’t return home to be reduced to blubbering, weak, whining things, less than men and giving blowjobs in a “dark parking lot” for “drinks or hits” of drugs.
Hooper gets no sympathy from me. If his family was ashamed of him and he couldn’t pull himself up by his own bootstraps and get on with the living of life, as so many others did, it was due to his own lack of will, his own bad choices and his own actions.
Bad things happen in all wars. Not every engagement is a war crime as You and Hooper would have America believe and Vietnam wasn’t something of America’s making; it was never as black and white as people like Hooper and the communist amerikkan anti-War Movement tried to make it, as they consistently painted America with the broad brush of the imperialistic, greedy monster. The truth is America was trying to help a people remain free.
So long Frank Hooper. At least Your out of You misery here on earth. Hopefully You found redemption and salvation before crossin’ on over Jordan.
But as far as I’m concerned, Ol’ Fleabaggs has been a walkin’ talkin’ piece of shit for most of his life. So GOOD RIDDANCE to Bad Rubbish.
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Still brainwashed after 50+ years?, that’s really sad you never let down your denial of being a pawn for the MIC.
I woke up before the 70’s were over, never ever will I see the gov’t as being on the side of right and freedom, they use us to make money, from the day they charge you for your initial uniform issue to the day they pay for your coffin, they make money off our sorry asses. And you’re too dumb to see it.
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Thanks for saving me the trouble of responding.
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For many, it’s easier to wave the flag than it is to educate yourself and admit you were used by the MIC. People have an aversion to being awakened, and learning from it, instead they hurl insults of ignorance.
Most Americans got off easier than the Vietnamese, Iraqi’s and Afghans who fell victim to the Freedom Express.
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If you’re letting Semper Fi’s response serve as Your own, You not only are a coward, but just as ignorant. And to think I once respected you as a writer.
If you honestly believe Fi’s tripe, you’re beyond help and twice as ignorant. The blind leading the blind.
Try a little honesty. C’mon. You can do it.
Robert Gore = Intellectually Dishonest.
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I honestly believe Fi’s tripe. When Vietnam was partitioned in 1954, we promised elections in 1956. We installed a Catholic puppet, Diem, in a Buhddist country and imported a million or so Catholics from North Vietnam to shore him up. Diem and his brother Nhu ran a very profitable opium operation, which the CIA aided and from which it took a cut (see The Politics of Heroin, CIA Complicity In the Global Drug Trade, by Alfred W. McCoy). The election of 1956 was never held, because Ho Chi Minh would have won easily. From that point the Vietnamese knew we didn’t give a shit about the “democracy” we touted. These were Eisenhower years, need I remind you. Diem’s support steadily faded and in 1963 we deposed and murdered him. From there a freedom loving and completely not corrupted junta ruled Vietnam until Nguyen Van Thieu took over in 1967. He also was an opium trade profiteer. During this time U.S. military escalation was constant, as were the generals’ assurances that victory was just around the corner (very reminiscent of another military scam, Afghanistan). The only ones who were really happy with the situation were the defense and intelligence contractors, and the U.S. military personnel making good money running drugs, weapons, women, and children. Morale among the regular U.S. military plummeted and drug addiction and suicides skyrocketed. The CIA instituted Operation Phoenix, which gave a free hand to the South Vietnamese secret police to intimidate, extort, and brutalize the locals, on mere suspicion based on specious accusation that they were VC or VC sympathizers. “Kill anything that moves” became the order of battle in the countryside (see Nick Turse’s book of that name).
Now I’m sure there were military people who thought they were defending freedom and trying to give the South Vietnamese its blessings. But the reality was–and most Americans still don’t want to examine it or ponder it’s implications–that the South Vietnamese government was corrupt to the core, substantial elements of the U.S. presence were as well, we alienated far more Vietnamese hearts and minds than we won, particularly after the Tet offensive (even though from a military standpoint we won), and the U.S. government lied every step of the way. I feel sorry for those who got sucked into it by the propaganda, and even more so for those who were drafted into it. It was a very dirty, very ugly war (just about all of them are, when you cut through the patriotic bullshit), and a lot of lives, American and Vietnamese, were sacrificed for nothing. And no, I’ve never been in the military, but I’ve read a lot from all sides about Vietnam and formed my own conclusions.
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“Too dumb” You say as You resort to an ad hominem attack rather than focusing on what was stated in the article and seeing my comment in that context. Seems to me that You and Mr Gore aren’t the brightest bulbs in the batch.
You’ve fallen for the Leftist propaganda that was pushed out by The NYTimes and WaPo and others during that era, the propaganda of known liars like Woodard and John Kerry, who tried to portray all U.S. soldiers as “baby murderers” when the truth was the exact opposite. More times than not, our soldiers were saving South Vietnamese civilians from the Cong, and incidents like My Lai were the exception and an aberration.
If Kennedy and Johnson both had fought to win, rather than playing politics with the war, we would have ended it in a few years with a whole lot less loss of life. But they kept playing it as a support action for he South Vietnam military, rather than taking the lead and stopping Ho when it would have been so much more easier. And then there’s Nixon who by all accounts from the North Vietnamese generals had them within two weeks of surrendering, through his bombing campaign that he ended due to the Leftist anti-war movements pressure on American society.
If 50,000 Americans died in that war, you can thank the Democratic Party leadership for their indecisiveness and lack of backbone in the face of an advancing communist army supported by both China and Russian communists. You and idiots like You fail to understand that there really is evil in the world, and when we do nothing and it wins, that leaves us just a little bit more isolated and knocked back on our heels with new enemies advancing upon us and encircling us, because they want to see us defeated and in submission to them and paying tribute, as they bleed us dry.
That I prefer to see us win over one of the most evil ideologies ever to spread across the globe — an ideology responsible for over 160 million murders since 1848 — doesn’t make me “a pawn” to anybody, much less the Military Industrial Complex. It makes me a Free Born American who will do what he can to help others remain free and a man who aims to stay free in his own country too.
The fact remains that after we completed our hasty retreat, some 2.5 million South Vietnamese civilians who opposed Ho Chi Minh and communism were murdered. The communists did much as Mao had done and they murdered all the elite leaders of the communities — the teachers, doctors, engineers and on and on. And pressured by China, the genocide continued on into Cambodia where two million more were murdered by the communists, and Laos too.
If we’d had real leadership and a population that was brighter, rather than a bunch of mental-midgets, much like yourself, we’d have won quickly in Vietnam with many thousands less in casualties and saving millions of lives across Southeast Asia.
I’ve never been a proponent for war, but I do believe in any people’s right to self-defense to prevent being subjugated.
And although I normally subscribe to the view that the U.S. stay out of foreign wars, the times and the weaponry changed to the point that it demanded a shift in that viewpoint, especially in the face of an advancing ideology seeking world domination in the manner of Marxism.
We may see the wisdom in isolationism, but sometimes circumstances make our involvement unavoidable. And sometimes good common sense tells us we must join a cause. Just think what the world would look like today if we’d sat back and allowed Japan and Germany to achieve all their goals of conquest unanswered.
War is never so simple as simpletons like you would have people believe. Now you can remove your head from your own ass, take in some sunshine and smell the roses. And you might want to try speaking the truth for a change.
Truth be known, you were probably a Sad Sack marine, a Profile, a Pogue who never had a bullet fired at you in anger to hear the buzz of it as it passed an ear, and never in your life have you stepped from your own comfort to defend the defenseless or someone in need, serving anything or any cause greater than yourself. It’s little small-minded man-boys like you who would see the whole world in chains before you cried out to whoever was left, “save me, save me”.
Bitch!
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Ho chi Minh only sided with the communists after the allies reneged on their promise to hand Vietnam back to the Vietnamese people after they helped the allies against Japan in ww2, and instead gave it back to France. Sometimes we create the enemy that we end up fighting. Much like the rise of Nazism because of the subjugation of Germany after ww1. The rise of communism because of ww1 removing the power of the monarchy. The rise of isis because of the Iraq war. I don’t think there are many wars that were unavoidable, just the greed and vanity of individuals that were not hindered by ordinary men who surrounded them. I believe only Christ can deliver us from ourselves. If we only followed Christ’s instruction to love Him and each other then there would be much less war and pain. Unfortunately on alot of occasions we choose rebellion and self over God’s will. My point is we have all fallen short, we have all sinned and are guilty. Arguing over who is more guilty is not what Jesus taught. Forgive and accept forgiveness through Christ’s sacrifice. So if some seem weaker than ourselves, we are not to deride them, but rather use our strengths to help them in their weakness. God bless and keep fighting the good fight.
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Maybe drug addiction, abusing civilians and narcissistic self-pity make more sense to an unstable conscript with no morals or agency, but any street criminal could repeat a similar story.
When I came back from Iraq for the first time I dipped into an American Legion. The Vietnam generation was unfriendly. In hindsight it makes sense. There were a lot of conscripts in their time. What must that sort of person make of professional soldiers who volunteered to deploy over and over?
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It’s very rare that someone from the era acknowledges that Vietnam was a bankers war, nothing more than an opportunity to blow shit up so favored contractors could make more at 3x the price.
I was never in Vietnam, but I was in the Philippines from 1967-1969 at Clark AFB. My memory is that no one had a clue as to what was going on or why. Now we know, it was nothing but a sham, killing for the same reason we went to Afghanistan and murdered millions there, for contractors profit.
America is ruled by evil psychopaths and most pretend they don’t know nothing bout nothin. Good luck with that….
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An Hoa, Hotel, 2/5, 1970. I’m 72 now. It never left me.
And I never left it.
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One of my best friends in the Corps was with M 3/27 and A 1/5 (68-69) at An Hoa, told me of his time at Go Noi Island and crossing the river to get to the Arizona Territory.
Sadly, he died alone last year, choked on his dinner.
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Wasn’t there, but sense the tragedy that generation had to endure (I was AF 77 to 81). Sad we can’t put it into a bitter pill to educate this generation; war is glamorous again. I appreciate your high recommendation of spreading this around, cut my teeth years ago on The Burning Platform, but there’s been a heavy amount of “internet outages” when I post there now; still the best in educating the population concerning where we are and how we got here.
Thanks for posting.
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Thanks for the reminder Robert.
And all the ones who can carry a conversation without the posturing and name calling.
we hear you.
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Watched Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee last night. Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, and now Ukraine. Same as it ever was. I used to believe the BS propaganda. Merica, Merica!!! No longer. I missed being drafted for Vietnam by a few months. Thank God. I finally awakened to the scam about 20 years ago. Last Federal election I participated in was Obama’s first term. I voted for Chuck Baldwin. I was tired of always voting for the lesser evil. I love America. I love the Constitution and the Founding Fathers that gave us the experiment. I loath the United States government that has become an evil empire.
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This sentence is the biggest mistake in this complete story along with the comments. “I was never presumptuous enough to ask him to let me in heaven, I only asked for freedom from the torment in this life and he granted it. “In KJV Bible, Paul was originally Saul. Saul persecuted and murdered Christians. God wanted Sauls remorse, repentance. Thats when Saul became a new person Paul. He suffers his sins, but is forgiven. God wants you to ask for forgiveness. No matter what you’ve done. . Some think God was evil as he destroyed nations of people early in the bible. They were not exactly “just people” they were a hybrid being, he did not create. Born from human and fallen angels. They really existed and do exist.. Its more than Bankers, MIC, Communist that is at war with us. You can’t bomb your way out of this war, but ask God, Jesus’s forgiveness as he wants you to. The torment in this life does not compare to what God has in store fore those that do not seek him. I write this for me to read and you, as its easy to get caught up in these debates sometimes.
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