Walk With Me Paperback - 2015

In September, 1984, I was one of the 50 veterans of the deactivated Second World War 106th Infantry Division of the U.S. Army who spent 10 days in the then Soviet union, the USSR, as guests of the Soviet War Veterans Committee. I had served as a Chaplain in training and in combat with the 424th Regiment of the 106th. Veterans of the 106th were the first of the allied armies invited to observe the 40th anniversary of the end of the Second World War because many in the division who had been taken prisoners of the end war had been freed by the Russians, and the high combat casualties were similar to that of the USSR. The 106th had lost three out of every four men in the first three days of the battle of the Ardennes Bulge, the USSR had suffered 22 to 26 million dead in that war, half of them civilian. We met groups of Soviet veterans and their families in Moscow, Volgograd, St. Petersburg (then called Leningrad) and Tallinn in Estonia. We laid wreaths at their battlefield memorials and mass graves. They knew I was the only Canadian and cleric in the group, but I was astonished when asked by the Soviet veterans to pray for peace and justice at official memorials in that communist country. No one took the obligatory lectures on the glories of atheism versus the failures of religion seriously. We found those with whom we spoke concerned with the possibility of a nuclear first strike by the western powers. When in the next Mikhail Gorbachev became USSR's last president and talked about diplomacy and reconciliation, I knew why they had asked me to pray for world peace and justice; Marxism had failed, and we had experienced the beginning of the transition period. I compared it to Stalin appealing to the churches for help when the Nazi hordes threatened to overwhelm the USSR. Back in 1984, the Soviet War Veterans Committee, funded by and really a part of the government, wanted to hear prayers for peace and justice. The understanding of what brings peace to the world, peace to any community, peace between any persons is a truth that is overwhelming. B to me meant BROTHERHOOD (unconditional love). To anyone who thinks at all about paradise and the Kingdom of God/Heaven or contentment of society this is ENLIGHTENMENT! I was excited and wanted the world to know all about it. In my dream I had put together what humans had sought since the beginning; justice factored by, or multiplied by brotherhood brings, would bring, peace to any group, to nations, to the world.