I sent a letter to Lynn recently to thank her and Jim for all their hard work during the family reunion. In it, I included two stories that I failed to share with everyone else. I want to make sure that I relay them now.

Grandpa shared a neat story with me and I wanted to make sure I wrote it down. During the war he refueled P-38’s. He always wanted to get a ride in one. Even though it wasn’t an “approved” practice the pilots would sometimes take maintainers up on sorties. One pilot agreed to take Grandpa up with him and a time was agreed upon for the following day. Well, the time to meet came and went and Grandpa could not find his pilot friend on the flight line. He went looking for him and discovered that the pilot had to leave on the sortie without Grandpa, and it was the last one he would ever take as he was shot down. Grandpa confided in me that he felt he was protected that day. Now, take a moment and reflect on all the smiling faces at the reunion. Indeed he was protected that day.

I know that you prayed for me while I was deployed and I truly felt the blessings. One sortie in particular we were taking a pre-assigned route into Afghanistan in support of Operation Enduring Freedom. This route took us over some air refueling (AR) tracks that weren’t supposed to even be active (in use) that day. The weather was crap and visibility was less than a mile at our assigned altitude. I felt the need to adjust our route in such a way that it would take us around the AR tracks. I didn’t feel it was a prompting at the time. I saw that it wouldn’t affect our mission objective and I just wanted to change the route. The pilot agreed and shortly after we were clear of the AR tracks we got an advisory call from the Controlling agency informing us that those tracks were indeed active and due to poor weather they were in use at our altitude. I immediately felt the spirit bear witness that I had been prompted to alter our route of flight. Otherwise, if we had come beak to beak with a somebody there would have been precious little time to react due to the poor visibility. Thank you again for your prayers, I was truly being watched over.