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Major (Retired) Neal Whitman, Canadian Army is a Jesus follower, husband, father, and Pastor. He has been deployed to Haiti, Afghanistan, Canadas North with the Canadian Rangers, Israel, and Kuwait. Neal has seen combat in Afghanistan and has had to go through life battles with his family and with being a Christian in the military. In this podcast Neal is very candid about his walk with God and how that walk from a young age has molded and changed him throughout his life and career.
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Major (Retired) Neal Whitman, Canadian Army is a Jesus follower, husband, father, and Pastor. He has been deployed to Haiti, Afghanistan, Canadas North with the Canadian Rangers, Israel, and Kuwait. Neal has seen combat in Afghanistan and has had to go through life battles with his family and with being a Christian in the military. In this podcast Neal is very candid about his walk with God and how that walk from a young age has molded and changed him throughout his life and career.
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Rick Campbell and Neil Whitman discuss their experiences with the recent eclipse. Neil shares about his background growing up in New Brunswick and joining the Army. He talks about his deployments to Haiti and Afghanistan and his time with the Rangers. Neil also mentions his involvement in churches and his unexpected journey to becoming a pastor. He talks about his faith journey, growing up in a mixed Christian household and his skepticism towards Christianity. He shares how encounters with Owen, a fellow church member, and their new pastor challenged his beliefs and ultimately led him to a deeper faith in Christ. Neil also mentions his family and recent wedding of his oldest daughter. Hi, my name is Rick Campbell, and I'm with DP One, and today we have Neil Whitman on with us. Hello, Neil. Hello. How are you doing, Rick? Pretty good, yeah. Pretty good, yeah? I see you survived the eclipse. Yeah. Yeah, we did get to see it. It was nice to have a very clear day for it, so that we had a good vision of it. Yeah. Yeah. We had a great day down here, too, but I don't think it got as dark as it did up your way. No, we actually fell right into the band of the total eclipse, yeah. Yeah. Well, that's cool. So, Neil, can you tell us a little bit about yourself? Yeah, what's to say? I grew up in New Brunswick, out in the woods. I came to Christ by conviction when I was 17, which is the same year I ended up joining the Army. Went off to military college. It's actually where I met my lovely wife, who was a naval cadet there. Did four years at military college. Went to the Royal Canadian Regiment's 2nd Battalion in Gagetown. Was able to, as a platoon commander, deploy to Haiti in 2004. And in 2007, I went over to Afghanistan as a lab captain in India Company. After returning, I got to go up and spend some time with the Rangers for three years, working with the 1st Canadian Ranger Patrol Group. Yeah, then was posted back to Gagetown, even though that wasn't really what I was looking for. But that's obviously what God intended. Yes. And did another, I guess, four years at 2nd Battalion, as the adjutant of OC Combat Support and then of a rifle company, OC Golf. And then went to Israel for a year. Wow. When I was in Israel, I also went to Kuwait for three months when I was in Kilo Company, which was kind of a weird job. I was there working with General Dynamics on a bid for selling lab vehicles to the Kuwaiti government. That was kind of an interesting little treat, too. But yeah, either way, in the background of all that military stuff, I kind of was, by God's grace, consistently involved in churches, whether it was here in Yellowknife or even when I was in Kingston. And, you know, I don't know if it's part of the introduction or not, but I didn't exactly intend to end up as a pastor, but that's where God put me, as far as I can tell. I see. I remember when I first went off to military college, I started off, as many of us probably did when we joined the Army, enjoying some of those freedoms that I probably shouldn't have, you know. And my older brother at one point kind of rebuked me for, as he ought to have, you know, not being faithful to the attention of God that he deserved and enjoying the bottle a bit too much. So, anyway, I ended up going to the Military Christian Fellowship Bible Study groups after I basically avoided them for my first semester, saying I was too busy for that. You know, I went to church on Sunday. That should be plenty, right? Yeah, there you go. It wasn't very long before Julian, who was kind of running as the president of the organization at that time, said, yeah, you're going to have to leave one of these Bible studies, Neil, next year. And I thought that was pretty silly. But, yeah, I came in my second year. He was serious. He's like, you're going to run one of the Bible studies. So I did. And then at the end of that year, without actually talking to me, he just said, oh, by the way, everybody, Neil's the president next year. Oh, wow. Just thrown right into the fire. So I didn't mean for that to happen, but I ended up running the – we had about eight different Bible study groups, and so all the Bible study leaders and I would meet once a week, and then I ran my own Bible study as well. We had a good group of guys there. And so when I did get posted to Gagetown, I started coming here to this church I'm now pastoring in. And Perry was quite – he was the pastor at the time – quite quick to say, oh, well, obviously you've got experienced teaching, so you're going to take the adult Sunday school class. Twenty-one years old. There you go. The wisdom and maturity for that, but there you go. And yeah, so I've been a lay preacher here really as an elder since I came back in 2011 from being up north. And when I was away in Israel, God kind of laid it on my heart that I should not be reengaging after my contract was up at the end of 20 years. And so I signed off saying I wasn't going to, and I finished seminary education while I was at the Five Div Training Center for my last three years running a training company there for basic soldiers, and now here I am. And I've been blessed to have a lovely wife and six children and just married my oldest daughter off two weeks ago, three weeks ago now. You're a busy man. Yeah. So God's really used you throughout your life then. Well, in spite of myself, he has seen fit to have work for me to do, yeah. Nice. How did you come to faith in Christ? Hmm. Good question, he says. Yeah. I mean, I grew up in a Christian household, but it was a bit of a mixed experience. My mother, very faithful, very prayerful, and my father, when they got married, was I think not a believer, you know, religions sort of culturally speaking as an Anglican growing up, I think, and in kind of the more liberal branches of that organization, you know. And he did make a profession when he was probably, I don't know, when I would have been very young, but the church we were in had lots of problems. And, you know, the pastor who had kind of led him to that was with some political machinations driven out of the church, and there were some real issues with the church that was there. And so he was quite embittered about that, and I think with good reason. I'm not sure it's ever profitable to be bitter, but I mean, there was not a good situation in the church I grew up in. And I grew up kind of being, believing there was a God, believing that, you know, Jesus was the Son of God, sure, you know, kind of, why not? But I was a universalist, really. I mean, when I was in junior high school, I really embraced that fully to say that, yeah, sure, there's, you know, there's a God, and Christianity's good, but there's obviously all roads lead to God. That was my conviction at the time, you know. And I would say only increased in that, and became more skeptical of the scriptures and anything that I was taught. I still liked going to church because it was a fun place, or, you know, it felt good. But I didn't believe... What's that? Seemed fun at the time, right? Yeah, exactly. Like, I didn't see any reason not to go, and it made me feel like a good person, you know. So I went, but I didn't believe that any of it was necessarily true. Yeah, I actually did get baptized when I was seven. I still remember that. I'd, you know, prayed the prayer, and I went in to talk to the pastor who was there at the time, and he gave me a multiple-choice book with some pictures in it. And he didn't even talk to me. I just sat at a little table. He's like, okay, here's the test. And I went through, and I circled the answers. You know, I would have been in grade two. And he went over it, and he's like, yeah, you passed, so we're going to baptize you in two weeks. Wow. Yeah, I don't even know where that came from, man. But, yeah, so when I was, I guess, 16, there was one of the guys who had grown up in the church but had been gone for years. I remembered him when I was younger, but he was kind of a punk teenager, you know. Right. But he'd come back and was quite a different man and newly married. And he took over the Sunday school class for the teenagers, the high school kids. Okay. And, I mean, I thought I was quite clever, and I was certainly a very arrogant fellow. And I liked to play games and sort of feel superior to people by being a mocker. And I was very sarcastic, and it drove most people away who I wanted driven away, but not Owen. He thought that was quite fun. He was quite willing to engage in wits, and, I don't know, he challenged me, right, because I wasn't driving him away and I couldn't impress him with my snideness that I was unsavable. He just would laugh heartily with his old belly laugh and say, all right, let's do this, man. All right. And engage in a battle of wits with a smile on his face. And, yeah, and then we got a new pastor, and, you know, this suddenly was a man who seemed to just act like, you know, the Bible was true, true. And you did things because the Bible said you did them, and you didn't do things because the Bible said you don't do them. You know, that was strange to me, that somebody would take it that seriously. And, yeah, I think it's strange to a lot of people in the church, too. But he was also, you know, he was an athlete, and he was, I don't know, he just, he was a guy that, he was strange to me, and I didn't quite know what to make of him. And, you know, he did Bible studies with us for our youth group nights when we'd get together and, like, light things on fire. And, you know, I'd play football in the cemetery. Oh, wow. Pick each other up, and, you know, because we were hillbillies, Hicks, and it was fun. It was pretty rough. But, yeah, he would challenge us with the Bible. And I remember at one point, because I'd been training at that stage in my life, because my brother, being in cadets, had gone off and done the airborne or the paracourse, and he'd come back very fit, and I was not to be outdone, so I figured I'd surpass him, and, you know, I'd gotten good grades. Sounds like you guys were competitive. Oh, yeah. With your brothers. Oh, well, we got on really well, though. We did. But, yeah, we were competitive. And I was showing off at one point that I could do 100 pushups in a row, and Guy had basically looked at me and said, you know, that's cool. That's pretty tough, man. I am impressed by that. But, you know, what would be really impressive, and I dare you, is to show how much discipline you have by reading the book of James every night for the next month. Now, that's a challenge. And I was like, okay, okay, yeah, okay, you know, I'll do that. I can do that. And I did. I couldn't put a point in it as to when that happened, but at the end of that month, I just knew that I didn't just believe in God anymore. Like, I knew that God was, and that Jesus was his son, and that I had to absolutely change how I was approaching him. And, yeah, I mean, God had brought out a real repentance in me through that. And I just saw in it that I was the man who looked at the mirror and walked away and forgot who he was. I was like the demons. I believed in God, but had nothing of my life conforming to what that meant, you know. I, unlike the demons, didn't even have the sense to shudder when I said God is one and didn't let it change me. So, yeah, that's how I came to Christ. Sorry if that's a bit long. That's okay. That's what we want to hear about. So, you're currently part of a church family, obviously. You're a pastor of a church. How's that going? How does it feel to be a pastor instead of a soldier? It's a lot harder. Ah, interesting. Yeah. Well, I love the church, the Bride of Christ, you know, that we are a member of. It's of far greater worth than the fraternity of soldiers. I did love being in the Army. I had a great career, you know. And I was very blessed to know a lot of people that challenged me and were solid friends, brothers in arms, and had some marvelous experiences. But, you know, that stuff passes away. Yeah. And the church remains. It was there for me in the midst of all of that, and it will be here long after I'm gone unless Christ returns. True. And the world's not going to stand against the church, though it might hurt it here or there. It's always going to increase. And, I mean, to be in the church and to be laboring in the church is to be— Well, I am never going to hear of the church invisible, invincible, that, whoops, all of your efforts have basically come to nothing in this or that place, you know. We've had to withdraw and abandon all of our people there, you know, because God will never abandon his people. No. In any of his places that he's put them, even if they die, you know, we're more than conquerors through our Lord Jesus Christ. And so, I don't know, there's just a sure hope in this work. You say it's tougher than the Army. In what way? The Army's pretty tough. I mean, especially if you're an infantryman and a captain, too. Well, I'm not going to lie to you. Every morning that I wake up in November and I walk outside and the, you know, the rain is coming down and it's hovering right at zero. And, you know, I know that it had dropped below zero last night. I smile, take a deep breath, and just think to myself, isn't it great not to be out in the fields in a swamp right now? Walk to my car and drive to my warm office. Yep, so that's not harder, I'll tell you that. No, no. Well, I mean, it's hard to explain, but things matter more, if that's possible. I mean, the Army was life and death, and that's not trivial, but I don't need, I never needed as an officer to concern myself with every one of my soldiers, you know, conformity of their personal lives to what was most good for them. Does that make sense? I certainly cared to be a counselor in those things wherever I was asked to be, but at the end of the day, my job was not to make everybody a morally good person. It wasn't to give counsel about how to deal with the grief of life in the most healthy and productive way for themselves, right? It's not that I didn't try again to do those things wherever I was welcomed to do them, but, you know, as an infantry officer, your job is to equip and train your soldiers and maintain a discipline in your soldiers such that they are able to close with and destroy the enemy. Right. You know? And if you want to do that effectively, then you better do it in such a way as demonstrates that you care about these people and that you actually, you do put your soldiers first because that is putting the mission first, you know? Yeah. And then if you want it to work well, they better know by your example that you care about them and you are willing to suffer even for them, you know? But their concern primarily is that you come up with a good tactical plan, a good training plan that is effective, that helps them and doesn't hurt or hinder them. And leads towards success. So it's just less complete of a commitment, if that makes any kind of sense. Okay. And the Army asks a lot of you and certainly of your time, but not necessarily as much of yourself. Okay. Now, here as a pastor, there's also the fact that when somebody was acting in a way that was destructive for themselves or others in the Army, we had a really wonderful way of dealing with that, you know? Which started with the Sergeant Major using some extra duties and, you know, the low-level stuff. And if it came to it, then you get to be hauled in front of the Major for a summary trial. Oh, boy. And punishments doled out. If that didn't work, I mean, there was the administrative process to just remove somebody from being able to cause further harm, you know? You realize being in the church, it's not like that, you know? You don't necessarily have as much authority in the church as people will give you over themselves. And yet your responsibility for their well-being is far greater than it ever was as an officer in the military. You know, and so I – it's – yeah, I mean, the burden's heavy. It's unmanageable because it's – you know, we have to give it to Christ. Right. It's too heavy for us. We know we can't carry it. And that humility requires that we bring it to God. But, yeah, it's just – it's a very different kind of weight. So I – yeah, and you couldn't force somebody to do what was actually spiritually good for themselves anyway. It just makes me pray a lot more. How's that? Maybe a better way of putting it is you're depending on God a lot more. Yeah, I think that's fair. Yeah. Well, it's true, right? I've often said it now that you say that since coming out is that I don't want to be arrogant. Maybe some people who've worked with me might disagree, but I was pretty good at my job, you know, as an officer. And I didn't necessarily need supernatural help to do well, you know. I mean, there's a way in which that's not true because we all do at all times. But, like, my natural aptitude for what I was asked to do was – apart from, you know, administration. But you always have two ICs for that stuff. There you go. No, it didn't require me all the time to be asking for the Holy Spirit's help to make sure that this company attack went well, you know. I didn't need to have mystical insight to know how to read the grounds and read the enemy and come up with a snap plan that worked. But every time I walk up the steps to that pulpit to preach, I know I'm not good enough to do that. Like, I need the Holy Spirit to be talking, not Neil. So that's just different. Okay. How do you keep close to Christ? I wish I could say that I always did. But, I mean, the reading of God's Word is absolutely necessary. And I don't think we do it enough or often do it well. But, yeah, attentiveness. And it's not necessarily just the reading of it. It's the intentional reflection on it. You know, lots of people haven't had the Bible for thousands of years. But we have the access to it, so read it. But it's about writing it on your heart, I think. And for me, I think it's been a process of learning to confront a situation and actually say, what is the words speaking to this situation? What would be a biblical response to what I'm addressing right now? And to, you know, I mean, it's kind of silly, the WWJD bracelet thing, maybe. But really, it's just what does the Word say whenever I'm confronting a thing? And often repenting, you know. I think there's a great practice that the Eastern Church has of the Jesus Prayer, you know, which is to just say, Jesus, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner. As many times as you need to until you actually mean it. And then start your prayer. Ah, okay. You know, and I think I've learned something from that, too, just to be, I think, reflective in a penitent way as I'm looking at what I've even just done today. And, you know, as I complete a task, sometimes I have to say, you know, Lord, have mercy on me and forgive me for my inattentiveness and help me to do better. And I think those things help me. Just prayerfulness and meditation on God's Word. Okay. And it sounds like you are a very humble man coming before the Lord, too. It sounds like you need that humbleness before you can get really close to Him. Is that fair to say? You know, Rick, I am going to tell you a story. So when I was in Afghanistan, we spent the first couple of months there at Patrol Base Wilson. And when I went to Haiti, it was hard. It changed me in a lot of ways. And yet those natural, I don't know what you'd call them, psychological coping mechanisms where you learn to just become numb, I don't even think it's a choice necessarily. It's just a physiological response to too much hurting over empathizing. It's like your body just says no and closes the empathy door so that you can't anymore. And I remember when I was first in Afghanistan, it was like the first or second day I was at Patrol Base Wilson and got out there. We had a little medical detachment in my command post there. And so I was sitting there and a little girl came in who was maybe five or six, which was about the age of my daughter at the time, my oldest daughter. And yeah, she had a leg missing from stepping on a landmine. And I felt it. It was like I almost felt the feeling of it just cut off. Like a tear rolled down my cheek and that was the last thing I felt when I was there of that sort of sadness and empathy. And there's a point, we'd been there just a little while and I woke up and I just had like a Hessian curtain between me and the main room. And then my radio room was off to the right and then the medics had their little medic station on the other side. And anyway, the cook had a little kitchen trailer out back, but we only ate fresh meals about once every two days, I guess, once every 48 hours. And I woke up to the smell of roasting pork and I thought, wow, I didn't think we had a fresh meal today. And my stomach was grumbling and I threw my pants on and I stepped out through the Hessian curtain and there were three kids roasted on the floor. I'd get caught in an incendiary device, which supposedly they'd been throwing into the fire, but who knows? I mean, could have been injured by their dad making the bombs, who knows, right? Whatever happens, they got burned real bad and they were for sure all three of them dead. But they weren't dead yet. The one closest to me was, had stopped moving anyway. The one in the center caught, I remember looking at me with those eyes of pleading that it's a child in immense pain because his body was like 70% third degree burns is what they assessed. And he's looking at me with these eyes that are just like pleading for, hey, adult, fix this, make it stop. And I looked over and my radio operator was sitting there looking at me with an arched eyebrow and I said something that was meant to be comical. That, you know, about this not being lunch after all. And I laughed and she laughed and I stepped right over that dying child and the next one walked outside, stodged my pipe and went for a stroll and didn't care at all and did laugh at this dying child. Go ahead, Rick. Seems like it's brought some, just the whole thing brought some numbness on. Yeah, which is true and it's true that a little bit of dark humor is, I think the way we cope with really horrible things doesn't make it good. And I fell into quite a deep depression over that. I didn't really know what it was or where it was coming from, but this was not right away. It didn't hit me until quite a while later when I was up in Yellowknife, which, you know, probably 18 months after I'd come back from Afghanistan. But that thing that I'd done, it just stuck in my brain and I couldn't quite deal with it, you know. And the long story short is I had a good friend who challenged me about why I was, I guess, destroying myself through depression. And I said, I don't really know, and he just looked at me and he's like, Neil, let me ask you a question. I said, yeah, what? He said, do you believe that the Holy Spirit lives in you? And I said, yeah. He's like, no, you're not listening to me. Do you believe that the Holy Spirit lives in you? And I said, well, yeah. He's like, no, I'm asking you if you actually believe that the eternal God who created all things and sustains all things is literally living in union with you. And I said, well, I believe that. He's like, well, no, you don't, because you're not acting like it. And you need to go and you need to pray until God helps you understand that the Holy Spirit is actually living in you. And I did. And God answered my prayer after a couple of weeks of praying that silly prayer that didn't make any sense to me until it was like a light came on that, oh, I actually serve a sovereign God who is in control of all things. And even though I am wretched, he is able and willing not just to use me, but to be, sorry, to be in union with me, you know? Yeah, I get it. To wrap himself around me. And yeah, so yeah, I guess God has taught me humility. He's taught me that a wretched person can be made holy by his help, but I sure do need him. Well, I think that answers the question of keeping close to God. I think that, you know, that's a lot of stuff to go through. Sorry. Okay, no, it's good. That's good. I want to ask some questions about your family or family life. Are there any other members of your family who know Christ too, like your immediate family? Yeah, so I mean, as I said kind of earlier, my mother has always throughout my life been faithful and a very, yeah, a very faithful prayer warrior, that lady. My dad too knows the Lord, and despite his struggles in my youth trying to come to terms with the fact that the church is full of wretched people, he is a faithful man who loves deeply and cares about others and particularly cares to share with those who would not otherwise hear that there is a God in heaven that cares about them. So I'm blessed with that. My brother Andrew, he's a believer, he's a chaplain actually in the military and certainly an exemplar of faithfulness. My older sister as well has walked with the Lord her whole life and my younger sister too. So, you know, we've all had our various trials obviously, but no, I don't know why. I don't think there's a magic formula for that. I'm sure it would probably frustrate people who knew how we were raised. But no, all of us have ended up following the Lord, so yeah, in that sense. Obviously my own family, my wife is faithful far more than I am. She's just a champion, that one. I met her, she was just contending with Christ when we met in a kind of, I want to be a Christian but not quite sure the path through the door. And she had been raised very, very much in opposition to Christianity and anything like what she's chosen for her life. Suffice to say, I don't know if I should tell that story or not, but when she had first been to college, my wife called her parents and basically had told them that she was pursuing an alternate lifestyle. And they were like, that's so great, that's wonderful, and we're so supportive of you. And six months later she called them to tell them that she was being baptized because she'd come to Christ and they were horrified. That's all that needs to be said. So anyway, yeah, she's awesome, and God has helped me much through her. And my children thus far seem to be following the Lord, so time tells in many of those things, but God has seemed to be working in our family. So how do you keep your family close to Christ, or how do they stay close to Christ? That's an interesting question. I've always struggled with knowing the best way. I don't know that there is a best way. It's funny. So reading this tome by Wilhelmus O'Brien, The Christian's Reasonable Service, which is a really worthwhile read. But there's a certain rigidity to the old Dutch Reformed labs, which sometimes makes me laugh. Because he was quite insistent that, as the pater familius, that the father of the household, if he didn't essentially hold morning and evening service in his house every day, that he was falling short in his duty to raise his children for God. He meant that you sing a hymn together, you pray, you... Sorry, he probably wouldn't have said hymn, maybe a psalm. And then you actually preach the words to your family. And it's like, I don't think every person has the aptitudes or the gifting for that preaching of the words in the sense of, you know, preaching. Okay. And I'm not sure that there's one model that works, but I have tried several times to do what we call devotions within my family from the early days, where, you know, I would take a passage and try to explain it after dinner or something. And then I, you know, it just didn't seem to connect. And I tried the, you know, the written Reforma devotionals that other people had written, and you read them out and, you know, talk about them. In the end, I just, you know, after much talk with my wife, we just told our children to read the Bibles. And, you know, for the younger ones who were still needing that, we'd read for them every night. But then, you know, I'd have my kids read to me. So my older kids who could read, they'd just read their scriptures to me every night before they went to bed and then tell me what they thought it meant. And then I'd give them a hug and send them off to bed with a prayer. And, you know, sometimes that took an hour and a half when I'm doing one after the other, but it usually didn't. But, you know, if there was a lot they wanted to talk about, but it just let me be individually engaged with each of them where they were. Rather than me trying to tell them, you know, I just asked them to figure it out for themselves and to approach God themselves. And then I could help them maybe with their understanding a bit. And then, you know, beyond that, it's just, and I don't do that with my kids who are older. Like, I just tell them to keep reading their Bibles and then talk to me when they have a question. And, you know, I might ask them a couple of times a week, like, what are you into these days or what are you reading and what have you understood from it? You know, but I'm not getting them to sit down and read by road. It's trying to get them to build the habit of not needing to be forced to or looked over their shoulder. But then it's just whenever something comes up, you know, whether it's a trial or tribulation, a good thing, you know, we try to address it biblically as the family, you know. Like, what is the right response? Or if we watch a show together, like, we'll talk about the themes and the worldview in the show. And, you know, if something in the show was really subversively attacking something true, then we'd talk afterwards, you know, and say, what about that? What do you think about that and what would you, how would you respond to that? And we just try to be real and conversational, I guess. I think the word that comes to my mind is involvement. You've taken and involved yourself in your kids and you still involve yourself with your kids. And it's like you said, you're not pushing them to do something, you're letting them sort of take the lead and, you know, come to you or learn on their own too. Is that fair? Yes. Okay. Good. What experiences have you and your family faced where you've seen God in your lives or God has worked in your lives? There's many things, obviously. I mean, the fact that I have a family means God worked in our lives. And he's obviously worked in your life too. You know, he's given you a wonderful wife and you have six children. Yeah, there's a story that, that's a story, there's an experience that I had when I was overseas in Afghanistan, which, of course, you know, Rick, because I've already told you it, but... That's okay. That is... The... The... So I'd been there for about a month and a half, I think. And my wife told me, oh, I don't know, two weeks before I left for Afghanistan for a six-month tour with, you know, two weeks of handover on either end, so that's seven months. Okay. That she was pregnant, you know, and so... Same time? Yeah. And, you know, the doctor confirmed that she was pregnant in about two months, so that meant, like, I was gone and I was going to return around nine months and one week, I think, after the date they assumed. So that's, you know, that's a little bit of stress as you're rolling out the door into a combat mission, obviously. Yeah. And at that point, that was our third child, because we had Belle already, who was three months old when I went on my first deployment to Haiti, and Wolf. Wolf had been born with a heart condition where his heart is actually backwards in his chest, and the aorta and pulmonary artery are actually grown into the wrong side, as are all of the coronary arteries, which feed the heart. So they had to operate on him when he was... It was less than a week, anyway. They didn't know when he was born, and they didn't pick it up when he was born, either. I was holding him, and he started to turn blue, and I called for a nurse. The nurse actually told me it was no big deal. Not all the words exchanged in that particular conversation are ones I would necessarily want, you know, repeated on my Sunday morning. Yeah, I hear you. I hear you. But at the end of the day, God was merciful, and the doctor who came in at the ruckus, because the nurse was basically yelling at me to put the child in the basket so she could put it in the nursery, and I was trying to contend with her that this child was not right and was, you know, well... Circulation was really bad, and the doctor came and looked at the child, cursed, grabbed him, and said, I know what this is. I have to go. And he, like, put him in the cart and, like, ran down the hallway, and I didn't, you know... Wow. Both standing there bewildered. But praise God, he did know exactly what it was, and he administered the hormone that was necessary to keep a duct in the heart open that's there in utero. So, like, then he was down to the... Yeah. You know, the surgeon came in and she said 70% of kids survive this surgery. Those aren't great odds, like, if you want to learn that you are powerless to affect what you would like to affect in the lives of your children and your family, that's a great experience to help you realize that. When you hear that, you know, your son who has just been born is going into surgery, nothing you can do can impact the effectiveness of that surgery. You know, you cannot possibly do anything to increase or decrease even his likelihood of being alive tomorrow. And it's about two out of three that he might live. Okay. Those aren't great odds, man. No. When you're talking about the life of your child. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, like, you learn to depend on God. And, you know, and coming out of that because the fact that he lived was not a guarantee that he would continue to live or that he would live well or long if he did. So we got to take him home and he was a lunatic of a child because he had open heart surgery when he was, you know, born and was healing from an incision through his chest for the early months of his life because he was on machines in a coma for like a month, basically. Right. You know, we got to take him home and he was a savage beast who didn't seem to have any concept of what pain was because it was just a constant in his life. So he was real interesting once he got to crawling around and jamming his fingers and things and riding things down the stairs and whatnot. So, yeah, we learned to be attentive and to be prayerful. So when I went to Afghanistan to go back to the beginning of this, my wife was two months pregnant. And that seems like a lot, but okay, we're going to trust God with this, you know, because that's all we got. So she was there at home with my, I'm going to say, how old would that have been? Five, I guess. Four. And Wolf would have been two. And pregnant. And I'm going to run off for seven months, which is, you know, from the wife's perspective, not the most easy thing in the world to do. No, not the most often we've done. And then shortly after I got there, the doctor had done the ultrasounds for a first kind of checkup and said, there are real problems here. And strongly urged the termination of pregnancy, which my wife was obviously upset about. We talked about it. Not that we considered the doing of it, just I had to talk her down from, she was so upset, obviously, to hear the doctor basically say that our child would almost certainly be born stillborn. And if she lived, would most likely not be able to engage with her environment in any meaningful way, as in a vegetable. And so, yeah, so obviously that was hard, but we prayed about it. And the next appointment Crystal had, it got reinforced. And then the next one, it got reinforced again until I was quite fed up with having to, you know, cope with that every time. And I called the doctor who was quite churlish with me about the whole thing. And well, the conversation revealed she assumed I was forcing my wife not to abort the child. And I said, look, lady, my wife wouldn't abort her child if I demanded it of her, because she believes that is a living person and that her duty to God is to care for that person as long as she's able. Like, this has nothing to do with my forcing her, but I am over here in Afghanistan in a really difficult situation away from my wife. And I would really love it if you would stop harassing her about her own religious conviction on this matter and just leave it alone. She said, sir, you don't understand. Your child is going to be born dead and the psychological damage to your wife is going to be worse than if we would just solve it now. And I said, look, you're wrong about these things sometimes. And she said, well, I'll grant you that sometimes we're wrong, but I'm telling you that of the markers for Down syndrome, we have ten markers, I think she said, and eight of them are in the non-viable category, which would be bad enough. Non-viable as in this person will not be able to thrive and live. But also the left hemisphere of the brain isn't there. Wow. Well, that's pretty rough, but nevertheless, we're leaving it with God. So please stop harassing my wife, you know. And then that was like the day before. And then I ended up getting into a huge firefight by myself. The local police got caught in an ambush and I was moving convoys back and forth. There's a schoolhouse that we were actually converting into a police checkpoint. But anyway, I won't get into that. Yeah, so I ran out to get eyes on, but the platoon, which was then tasked to follow me, the lead vehicle thought he could drive over a mud and stick bridge and collapse the entire road. So there was a big firefight with me out in a field basically with a bunch of A&P guys with my crew. So my last crew. Okay. Inclusively speaking there. And quite funny actually because, I'm sorry, it's funny if you're me anyway, but it was the only time that my vehicle actually personally fired. Because it's the last captain. For one thing, the Taliban knew well enough to stay away from the 75mm cannons if they could because they're a devastating weapon for personnel. But also whenever we did have occasion and opportunity, I was controlling the company's fighting vehicles. So, you know, you don't jump right into the middle of it. Generally you would send firing lines and set them up and let other people engage and try to manage the battle. But in this case, we were just there by ourselves. So we fired a bunch and solved the problem. But on the way to the schoolhouse, my gunner said to my driver, hey man, do you want to switch it up? Because they were both qualified on both roles in the vehicle. He's like, do you want to switch it up or are you getting tired of driving? And he's like, yeah, that'd be awesome. And so my gunner got into my driver's hatch and my driver got into the gunner's seats. And then we got into a firefight and we're shooting away and my gunner was like, I can't believe this. I'm in the driver's seat. I'm in the driver's seat for the whole thing. Anyway, it was just silliness. But yeah, so that all happened. I went back. It was quite exhilarating in a certain way to go and be in combat, for real, the two-way range and walk out. And, you know, we did help our allies in that case and it was a positive experience. And then I called home to talk to my wife and she was crying and said that I needed to call a doctor. But, yeah, I get it's kind of hazy now. Someone had left a message for me and it was the pathoid, Marty, had left a message for me that I needed to call and that the doctor had called. And I called my wife first and she said I needed to call and she didn't really know. And I talked to him and he was the doctor who had done the checkup when they did the annual checkup for the hearts patients from IWK and he'd seen Wolf and he told me that, yeah, your son has a lump on his aorta and we see it on the ultrasounds. We're not sure what it is. It could be that it's a tumor and that sometimes happens with scar tissue because it can, you know, whatever. Right. Whether it's malignant or benign because we can't cut it out and if it's growing that's going to kill your son, you know. Wow, that's rough. And then I said, is it possible it's anything else? And he said, yeah, well, it is very possible it's a blood clot which could have accumulated there because it's at the site of the incision, you know, because of eddies in the bloodstream possibly. But if it is, then you need to realize that that means it could break free at any point and then cause a stroke or an immediate failure. So you really do need to come home right now. And I was like, I was dealing with a lot and that was hard, obviously, and I was alone. You know, I had a company of guys there, but I was alone. My boss told me to basically not bother him with my problems but go deal with them myself. And I got an early HLTA and went back to camp. I talked to my old boss who was the DCO and he's a great guy. He said, yeah, man, this is terrible and it's hard. I already talked to the guys because the support guys back at Battalion had been engaged, I guess, at some level. So, yeah, he basically said, get home, tell us what's up. You know, if things are bad, you're not coming back. And I was like, yeah, I get it, but I'll do an assessment. And I went to talk to, cause I didn't, I had some friends there on camp for sure, but they weren't around or they were busy doing, you know, the operations that we were doing. So I went to go see my friend Steele, who was a padre, and he wasn't in. So I thought I'd just sit and wait for him because I had nothing else to do and I just didn't know what else to do. So I sat in the back of the chapel that was there and there was a marine, a Southern Baptist, Black Baptist choir. It's kind of a funny thing to see a whole bunch of, like, I guess they were security personnel for the base, for the Canterbury Airfield, but a whole bunch of, like, I don't know, six foot plus giant dudes in their disruptive camouflage swaying back and forth and clapping their hands and playing gospel music together. Yeah, that's kind of unusual for an air base. Yeah, that's right, for an air base, but it was good and I sat down and I just put my head on the pew and I listened and, I mean, it just kind of all hit me and I was sitting there. And, yeah, I felt hopeless, you know, like, I didn't know why God was doing this. I didn't know what it was supposed to accomplish and what its outcome was going to be. So I just sat there and cried, right? It sounded like I was going to lose my son and my daughter was not going to live, who was in the womb, and my wife was going to be crushed. You know, we'd already lost to miscarriage and I knew the pain of that. But, anyway, it just, it felt too much and I said, I don't understand God. I just remember feeling this big hand on my shoulder as I was there and that voice, Brother, why are you crying? And, you know, I don't know what the rank properly is, but Sergeant, you know, standing there looking down at me with concern on his face and I said, oh, just things are pretty hard and, you know, he pressed me and I told him what was up and he looked at me and he looked, there you go again, he looked at me long and hard and he just said, do you believe in Jesus? I said, and he said, do you believe that he's the Son of God and that he's forgiven your sins on the cross? I said, yeah. Do you claim he's your Lord and Savior? I said, yeah. He said, then, Brother, why are you crying? And he just, like, grabbed me and held me up and I, you know, I wasn't really attentive, but the whole group of them, some, like, I don't remember, more than a dozen as I remember it, were there, like, just all of a sudden all around me and they all had hands on me and they just started praying and, you know, this guy, he just put his hand on my shoulder and he just said, Lord, this brother's hurting, but we know that he is going to see a miracle, you know, and that you are healing his son and his daughter. You know, I'm a Reformed Baptist. I'm not a charismatic. God speaks, though, when we need to hear. So, spoke to that man, spoke through that man, and I just knew it was true. Like, he prayed and my heart came to peace. I was like, yeah, I do believe in Jesus and I do trust in him. So, yeah, okay. Okay, this is, like, this is okay. It's going to be okay. God's got it. And I went home and I had this, like, I was afraid almost to think it, but I was like, I think God is going to take this away. And I went in, like, I think it was the third day I was home, maybe. It was very shortly after I arrived. We went into Crystal's appointment for her ultrasound, which was just regular. And the ultrasound technician was there looking and growing increasingly agitated, looking over her shoulder at me. And I just had a grin on my face. I was like, I knew it. I knew it. And she got up and she walked out of the room. And the doctor, who I had been talking to on the phone, came in. She looked at me, smiling, and she sat down at the station and went through the pictures that the ultrasound technician had taken. And I just saw, like, her shoulder slump. And she stood up and she turned around and she looked at me and she said, your daughter is fine, there's nothing on these pictures that shows anything wrong. But I wasn't wrong. And her development wasn't natural. And there's probably still going to be disabilities and problems that we can't see on this ultrasound. And then she turned around and stomped out of the room and slammed the door. Which was a strange experience. I'm not going to lie. And your daughter is doing fine now? Oh, yeah. No, she's brilliant. She's a brilliant 16-year-old girl. Awesome. Whose mind works just fine as she pulls her 90s out of every course she takes. So, no issues there. And then we went to the IWK and it was like, I knew, you know. The church here had been praying. The church in Grounds Flat had been praying. The church in Sheet Harbor had been praying. Faithful men had been praying. Faithful women had been praying. Probably more praying from the faithful women than the men. Seems to be off the case. But, yeah. So, went down to the IWK and the doctor did the thing with the ultrasound down the throat. Went out for a few minutes, came back like 15 minutes later with a big grin on his face and he smiled at me and he said, Sir, are you a praying man? I said, yeah. He's like, I thought so. You had to be because we slapped these three pictures up on that light board and said, I have three pictures of this from three angles. They're not artifacts. It was there, but it's gone. Whatever it was, it's not there anymore. That was only like two weeks later, maybe three from the first pictures. So, yeah. So, it was like, okay. God was saying he has this and we can trust him with it. So, yeah. Like to answer your question much more succinctly, God has shown us that he is able. And he doesn't always take away the hard things, you know. He doesn't always take away the sorrows. But he's shown us, I think, as a family that when he gives us promises like we will never be tempted beyond what we can bear. When he promises us that trials are actually for our good, that we might be made perfect and lacking in nothing through the perseverance in them. That he does all things to the good of those who love him, who are sanctified according to his calling. These are true things. That he will not ever confront something in our lives which is outside of his control. And therefore, we can trust that those promises are true. So, when it seems hard and it seems like too much, we're going to look back and see how God has actually set that out for our good. So, you could say that looking at your past helps a lot with right now or looking at the future too. Yeah. Yeah. Especially where you see what God has brought you through. Interesting. There's many more experiences I could talk about, but we don't have ten hours, so. We can get you back on again. That's not a problem. But the truth of God's word is there. Yes. I'm going to switch it up a bit regarding work. You know, were there tensions or challenges in being a Christian in the military? Yeah, of course. I think that's got to be true no matter where you are. They're just different ones. For most of my military career, I would have said that the challenges were that, you know, if you try to live righteously and acknowledge God, then that is an offense to those who hate Christ. And there are many who do. Not everyone, by any stretch. You know, I mean, in some sense, biblically, we acknowledge that everyone who is not a Christian by faith is an enemy of God. But there's people who are, let's just say, there's SS soldiers in Satan's army and then there's the guy in the factory making bombs but not really wanting to use them, you know. Most people that you come across are, they're civilians in the opposing side, but sometimes you find somebody who's very openly and angrily hostile towards Christianity. And I've had my share of those, which is hard when you particularly have a hierarchical structure where, you know, you might fall under the command of somebody who really wants directly to attack your faith. Which they're not allowed to do, obviously, but then what are you going to do about it? You know, work with them, because that's a sure way to make sure you've destroyed your own career and shown yourself to be weak, you know. Certainly, you're not going to do that in the infantry, for crying out loud. So, yeah, like, one of the mechanisms, I think, that always had been in the infantry and the combat arms in general that we have for kind of testing each other is you're always harassing and insulting each other, you know. And it's mostly in good fun, but it's also, you know, you want to see who's going to crack under pressure, you know, before it happens when you're relying on them in a firefight, you know what I mean? So, there's a bit of a character testing thing going on. So, you definitely don't show people that you're weak and can't stand to be even bullied or harassed, you know. That was kind of the culture at the time. So, yeah, I did have a boss who hated that I was Christian when I was a young platoon commander, and that was really hard, you know. He harassed me quite a bit, and I didn't, like, I didn't take my faith to work and harass people about it. I wasn't a proselytizer. I didn't abstain from the mass activities and the social life of the military, but, you know, I also had my limits, and I was unapologetic about my faith. I attended the chapel services when we had them in the field. I was faithful to go out on Sundays to church and Wednesday evenings when I could, and he knew that, and it bothered him. And also, since I'd come to 2RCR, some of the guys who were Christians and I, we started doing a Bible study when we could together. So, we'd meet at a coffee shop downtown and just sit down and have our Bible study on, like, a Wednesday over lunch. I remember, like, my boss came up, and he saw us there, and he lost his mind and started yelling at us for having Bibles out in public. As government employees, we were not allowed to read our Bibles during work hours. I stood up and said, sir, you're making a fool of yourself. We're on our private time right now. We're allowed to read our Bibles. And he said, no, you're not. You're not, as a member of the military, allowed to read your Bible. Not in uniform. That's like, sir, you're wrong. Please, drop this, because I'm going to back down. And he got quite snarly about it, but he did, because it was a public place. Like, there were people watching. We're not going to do this right now, sir, but he's my direct supervisor. So, you know, obviously, he didn't follow up on that with me, because I assume he actually had talked to somebody. It was like, no, you can't do that. But he then tried to make things very specifically difficult and tried to construe situations. There was, you know, he tried to have a brunch at his house on Sunday morning and said that we had to go. And I said, sir, I mean, I don't have a problem working on Sunday when I have to work on Sunday, but why can't we just do it at 1300? You know I go to church in the morning. He's like, no, you will be there at my house at 10, and you'll show where your loyalties lie. And I was like, well, if that's the game, then my loyalties lie with God, so I'm not going to be there. And he was incensed. And he actually told me at the end of the year, it was kind of funny, because I admire him for this much. When he handed me my P.E.R., he said, you know, Neil, it's not a secret I don't like you, and I don't like your faith. I was like, no, I caught that. He's like, here's your P.E.R., and it's good because you earned it. I tried to make you fail, but I did not succeed, and you've obviously performed just fine, so I have to recognize your capability and performance. So there it is. There you go. And so, you know, right on. Good for him, but maybe not everything in between. So there was some of that, you know, and I would say typically most experiences were not that hostile, but I found myself often segregated to some extent, you know, in the social circles of work. You know, guys would have a lot of activities that they'd get together and do that I might not be invited to, because, well, because I didn't play along in all of it, right? It was like, you'd sit at the Mass on Friday night, and I was definitely a faithful Mass goer. You know, it was one of the things my wife and I agreed that was an appropriate place for, you know, for building of relationships, which is part of, you know, service to God, right? That's part of what I'm supposed to do as an officer anyway. So I was faithful in that, and don't get me wrong. I had a lot of good friends in the Army. Things were not generally hostile with most guys I worked with, but even with my friends, when we'd sit around the table, you know, the guys I connected with well and had lots of life experience with, you'd go around the table and guys are, you know, complaining about family stuff and life stuff. And sometimes it even just got said. Like, after everybody got whining and I just didn't speak, then someone would look over, I'm thinking of someone in particular, but he'd be like, yeah, yeah, Neil, we know, you don't have any of our problems, because you're pissed. It's true, but like, I don't actually have those problems, because I don't live my life that way, but... It is what it is. It is what it is. Like, take it or leave it. Might be evidence there's something here, right? So, like, there's a little bit of that, you know, even your friends kind of recognize your difference and it's... That's fine, you know, you get on with that stuff. But I would say, you know, to speak more to the... It's changed a lot, right? Like, when I came in in 99, I would have said one of the hardest things about being a Christian was that refusing to participate in collective evil, you know, in the sense of, like, if you're on tour, even out in the field, and you go to the toilet, there's a stack of porn mags as tall as I am, you know, waiting outside for you to relieve yourself if you feel the need, right? That's not an easy temptation when you're months away from your family, you know, to be faced with. So, that's hard, you know, like, the incitement to drunkenness and alcoholism was culturally very strong. So, you know, like, those were challenges, obviously. Things have changed, though, you know, I think since the beginning, they've put so much pressure on trying to push all of that, shall we say, sexualized culture down, and now they've imposed a whole lot of expectation of affirmation onto people, you know, of things which may be accomplished, of things which maybe a Christian cannot affirm. Okay, I get what you're saying, yeah. So, you know, I remember towards the very end that I had a soldier in one of the courses I was running who was transgender, which, you know, they weren't a problem. I remember having a conversation, because there was a request for accommodation that, as a woman transitioning to a man, so, this being the problem, that I would say she had asked to be accommodated to be housed in the male barracks, which were communal living spaces, and to use the male ablutions was a bit problematic, given that, you know, no physical alterations had been made to her appearance, and, you know, so she was not surgically altered in any way. She'd only just started taking the hormone stuff, which is a really stupid thing to put somebody on that, and then put them in a high-stress environment like a basic course, but that's not her fault. In any case, like, I had an interview when she came in with her, because, who called herself he, because, you know, she had requested that accommodation, and I had to reasonably deny it, and I explained to her, you know, that fully respects your desire for self-identification, but to put you in that situation would potentially be a danger to yourself, or to others, you know, might be hard for them. For sure. And so, what we'd like to offer you is to put you in your own living space, if that's preferable, or you could stay with the females, but I understand if you don't want to, but just because of your physiological state in the process, it's not appropriate to put you in with the men, so we could give you a solo room, and you can use the, there's a staff shower, so we could let you use that, and totally accommodating, no offense was taken, totally understood. This was not a Justice Warrior kind of person, that was out to cause trouble, they just, that's what they understood about themselves at that time, and we had no conflict, you know, like this is another soldier, I've worked with soldiers of every different stripe of depravity, and I'm not better than they are, you know, like, I'm not saying that, so nevertheless, at the end of the course, you know, the course report comes to me, and I have to sign it, and it's like, you know, the pronoun he is being applied to a female person. Right. And I, others may disagree with me on this, and that's fine, like, you know, but I think people have to be obedient to their conscience in these things. I struggled greatly with signing a document, a legal document, affirming that this person was a man in what I thought was a destructive ideology of saying that somebody can transform their physical self because they have a mental or emotional understanding. Right. I, for myself, don't see anywhere that it is appropriate to break God's design because you struggle with it or, yeah, anyway, I'll leave it with that. The point is, I went to my boss and said, I can't sign this, sir. He's like, he just looked at me because he knew me. We have a good relationship. But he didn't, he didn't love Christianity, but we had a good relationship, and he respected me, and I respected him enormously. We had many conversations, but he looked at me, and he looked at this form, and he just, and he rocked back and forth in his chair for a bit. And he's like, I know you, Neil. I know you care for your soldiers. I know you're not a, what are these, a bigoted, expletive, expletive kind of person. I know that you don't discriminate against people on any grounds, and you treat everyone equally, and I also already know everything you're going to say to me, even though I hate it. So, all I'm going to say is, you're not going to sign this paper, so walk out of my office and don't ask any questions. And it's like, sir, I'm not asking you to, he's like, just leave my office, Neil. And I left, and I never saw that form again. So, like, I was covered for in that case, but, you know, that's hard. Like, you're going to confront stuff like that, working in the military, I think, today, where even with the, you know, they did, and I know there's more of it now than when I was there, but there's a lot of, like, online training and courses where you're being told stuff, and then you have to fill out the multiple choice question and give the correct answers of how to understand correct application of gender-based policy making, and, you know, stuff like that. And it's like, I did that, and I clicked through, and it's like, well, I will answer the questions according to what you have just told me is correct, I guess, because this is a government policy that I'm being asked to prove that I understand. But, man, I don't agree with it at all, you know. And I think that stuff's real tricky. Like, you have to walk a fine line there to, when you're constantly being asked to affirm things which are not good or true, you know. Before, if somebody told you to affirm that you had to approve of strip clubs or pornography as good, you know, nobody would have said that. And if they did, and you said no, then you might get kind of ostracized as we're going to the strip club, but you weren't, like, actually fired for it. You know what I mean? But that is the case now. I think this is a real danger to your career if you make public that you don't affirm things which are sins. Right. Good point. How did being a Christian in the CAF help with your work life? Yeah. Well, I mean, I know not every Christian is going to have the same conviction as my wife and I on what Christian family looks like or Christian marriage, but certainly we saw that the two become one flesh, you know, and the integration of our collective efforts together was such that, like, we really talked as though, okay, my career is her career also. And, you know, there was a unity of purpose and effort that I think was enormously helpful to me as an officer and a soldier and vice versa, right? Like, my wife, very smart lady, yeah, her devotion was to homeschooling kids and to many other works, but we joined our efforts in whatever we committed to and we committed to it as a... You know, if I was out, it wasn't in defiance of my wife on a Friday night, it was with the support of my wife and she was there as often as was appropriate for her to be there, too, because, you know, this is our place to show Christ to the dying, you know, and stuff like that. So, that was very helpful, but I would say more generally, you know, I've already kind of talked a little bit about the progress. I think that if you saw me in my very young years as a platoon commander, I'm not sure if it would have been terribly obvious that it helped me at all, you know, it might have helped me in the sense of I didn't think I was better than my soldiers. Right. You know, I kind of went into relationship accepting hierarchy, but recognizing the equal worth of all men, and I do think that translates, you know, so people see when you actually consider them to be worthwhile people, and I think that I had built many good relationships on that grounds, and in fact, my first platoon was basically guys who weren't deployable twice in a row, kind of collected into one place, and I got what might have been called the riffraff, but men together, they formed an awesome platoon, and we went overseas to Haiti together, and, you know, what a gang they were, but in part it was just because, I think a few of them, quite a few of them, including some of the NCOs, were just accustomed to being regarded according to a reputation they'd earned, or cast aside because of being embittered over certain things, so by and large, they were a sarcastic lot that pushed the boundaries of propriety all the time, and I was just a sarcastic back-up that invited it, you know, I invited criticism, and was willing to make decisions and stand, and so we ended up, I built some, like, lasting relationships and friendships out of that, without ever dropping into first names or getting into personal life stuff, it just, you know, that came later, you know, but just by being willing to live together as people with different roles and equal worth, and so I wasn't ever threatened by being shown that I was wrong about something, I was like, yeah, I expect I'm going to be wrong about lots of things, like, these guys have tons of experience, and, you know, at the end of the day, they also are going to be wrong about some things, because I have different perspectives, so we worked together, and that helped. I think, excuse me. Go ahead. The biggest way, though, probably the most profound thing that I have been helped in, is to deal with the hard realities, betrayals, traumas of a military life. I think that having a correct worldview matters a lot, when you confront the hard things of the trade that we're in. I mean, it's a tough trade. It is a tough trade. And it's not just, you know, and people underappreciate this, and they might say, you know, soldiers, they seem to get PTSD a lot, but paramedics and nurses and firefighters, they seem to get less PTSD and see more constantly terrible things, and you can't really make that comparison. Maybe police officers, because they're always dealing with really horrible stuff. I'm amazed any police officers survive, but with any kind of mental stability intact, think of, you're a police officer, you see terrible evil happening, you intervene, but you missed some fine print of some rule, and so that guy gets off and you get punished. And then you go and you're dealing with a domestic dispute, and you know that guy is hurting his wife and his children, because you read body language and you have experience and wisdom, but you have to walk away, because criteria have not been met for you to arrest him. And then that continues, and later on you find out how much they've hurt you. How much that person has hurt her and his family, and you know, you could have done something, but you weren't allowed to. Like, that kind of stuff hurts. You want to talk about hurt? Afghanistan was hard, but not particularly hard morally, in the sense that if you didn't believe we should have been there in the first place, obviously that's going to hurt, because, you know, what's the point of going there and hurting people, killing people to no purpose, you know, to no profitable purpose. Obviously that's going to be a moral injury, but for myself, like going and recognizing that there's still many flaws in what we wanted to do there, but at the end of the day, there's nothing to be gained from Afghanistan except stability in the region that's strategically valuable maybe. But most of the efforts were really quite altruistic. Misguided maybe, but, you know, the NGOs weren't there for some political machination for the most part. They're there because they want to see girls educated, you know, they want to see women's not being lit on fire because they showed their face in public, by other women typically. You know, they want to see a culture shift that brings more freedom to those people. It's hard to really, you know, they want to see more prosperity, less starvation, you know, they want to maybe see people dependent on actually thriving off of crops that aren't opium, you know, et cetera, et cetera. Like, that's not very objectionable. And the Taliban, they are very objectionable, so I didn't find a conflict there. And when people came to fight, and I did pull the trigger and shoot people, it wasn't personal, you know. Like, it's sad. There's a tragedy to that as a Christian that unless that person knows the Lord, like, they don't get another chance after that, you know. But also, I'm not just out slaughtering people. Like, that was, we were there, and they came. They elected to come to that fight. They put their life on the line and they lost, like, and so did I, you know. And so, fair's fair. I found, though, you know, I mean, obviously the harder thing is, I think for a lot of people that they may have shot when they shouldn't have and they know it because they were afraid and they, you know, considered their lives to be more valuable than others. And afterwards, that doesn't hold up. Like, you can dehumanize the locals all you want when you're there to make it justifiable to do things that preserve your life at the expense of others, but you'll not be able to live with that. Right. So, a lot of that stuff, I think, carries. But it's the technical crap, to be frank, that really hurts people. It's the going into Bosnia, being told you're there to help keep the peace. Spending your days, you know, prying babies frozen to their mothers' corpses out of mass graves so you can bury them separately. Seeing the horror of everything that's gone on and is going on. And every time there's actually an opportunity to do something, being told you're not allowed because of this or that condition that we have politically agreed to. You know, you've been told that you're going to bring goods, but when you actually see the ability to bring good or to stop evil, you're not allowed because it's not politically expedient. And I think that's what really crushes people, right? So, to be able to approach this work and say, no, I believe in the total depravity of man. Yeah. Right there. Seen it, and when I see it again, it hurts, but it doesn't break me because it doesn't shatter anything that I've put trust in. None of those are weight-bearing walls. You know, when I see the Canadian government do something despicable, which is often when you're a soldier, you know, and you have to carry out. And I'm not just saying present government, like all governments, because, you know, it's not judging individual people, rulers, whatever. It's just there's blind obedience to policy, there's political expedience, there's all kinds of stuff that you're going to confront this, and it's like, that's just gross. And I was a part of it, even though I didn't see it coming, you know. But then you say, well, no surprise, right? Because it's fallen sinful men, whether intentionally or unintentionally, they are going to bring harm in this world. And I can live with that. It doesn't, I am not losing my foundation and sinking into the sand over that. And when I see that I do something terrible, like laughing at a dying child, that did break me. It did, until I was able to take that stupidly placed foundation stone of Neil is able to be righteous in his own strength, and, you know, realized that my house was falling because I'd put that there instead of God is able to make me stand. And when I threw that foundation stone out and put the right one there, then all of a sudden things were better. So, I think when you align yourself on the truth, part of what makes life hard is that you don't know where to put your feet, right? But if you align yourself on the truth, and you, you know, Hebrews 12 says, you're in the unshakable kingdom, right? So stand there and don't let any of the supporting structures in your life be not from truth. Depending upon political leaders or governments or the army, my land, how many people worship the army with their whole life and are crushed in their retirement to realize that the God they worship doesn't care about them at all. Wow, that's rough. So, long answer to a short question, but there you go. That's okay. I'm going to summarize everything up with this final question then. How did you and how do you show your faith to others when asked if the opportunity arises to talk about it? So, I think I, when I was younger, maybe in light of what I just said, depended an awful lot on my own cleverness and rightness to be able to argue people into the kingdom of God, you know? Okay. And was often frustrated after thoroughly trouncing people in conversation on any matter apologetic that, you know, they were obviously defeated, like maybe even admitted defeat, but didn't change at all, you know, didn't suddenly become interested. And I don't think it's that I didn't try to love people, I don't think it's that I didn't try to love people at that time. But, you know, it's easy to depend on intellectual arguments and appeals rather than actually trusting that God will use a life devoted to Him in love and love towards people. So, the answer then is what I've come to is to understand that when you just love people and you unapologetically love God in such a way that does not fail to humbly recognize that you do neither well, they're going to ask why. They're going to ask you why you're different, why you act the way that you do. I think, you know, examples are hard, but it would be like being on a progress review board with a lot of your listeners, I think most will understand what I'm saying. So, being on a progress review board is one of the panel, and soldiers marched in because they had failed on a course a number of times, and now you're assessing whether or not they should be allowed to be given another choice, another chance to succeed. And so often these become feedback loops of mockery and hatred, right? And you get people in a room and they're like sharks that want to tear this poor soul to pieces in front of them who's now isolated with, you know, you get some private standing there and there's like probably four majors and sergeant majors in the room just attacking him to see if he'll fall and bleed on the floor in front of them. Wow, that is tough. And it shouldn't happen that way, but it often does, you know. But if you are the guy on that panel who always actually demonstrates a care for the person in front of you, but also is willing to exercise justice as is, you know, necessary for the good of the Army and that person, and to say, you know, never be treating them like a commodity, but like a person, and entering into the conversation the idea that it would not actually be profitable for this one to continue because they're not ready, you know, as opposed to what a scumbag lets destroy him. Demonstrate a care for the person, you know, like that stuff communicates. When you just won't play the game of bloodthirstiness, when you won't insult your boss, when you won't gossip, because you gossip all the time in the Army, you know, and you won't, you know, when you'll communicate about somebody being posted here or there and try to give an honest assessment of the person without ever degrading them or dehumanizing them, like those kind of things communicate. And so I think it's just being a man of integrity, you know, or a woman of integrity, and standing on the virtues that God has given us with a heart that embraces those things as true and right, you know. Like, it's not a small thing to actually love your neighbor as yourself. If you embrace, that's your obligation to everyone, even the guy across the desk from you who's now on his third DUI. Like, I've had guys come in when I was an LC, you know, they did some pretty despicable things, and they come in head on while expecting a blast. And the truth is, I think I was somewhat notorious for being hard in that I released a lot of people, but in reality, that was because most people didn't want to deal with the problems, so they shuffled them off somewhere. And, you know, when it was necessary and appropriate, I did follow through to recommend release where it was demonstrably required. But typically, it was never personal. It's like, you know, you're in here, and okay, so you get caught doing a bunch of cocaine. Okay, well, brother, like, there are consequences to our actions. And, you know, I always and meaningfully say, I'm not better than you. Like, I'm not standing here in judgment of you, because I too have done many things wrong in my life. But there are consequences to our actions, and what you've done, you know, has now created the situation that we're in. So, you know, there's a process that we're going to go through here to evaluate whether or not you are salvageable, you know, and I'm encouraging you to participate in this process. And I'll even help you in this process, however I can, to represent yourself well and honestly, and to also direct you in the things that, if you want to stay, will best enable you to do that, you know. And I did actually help a lot of guys, to great frustration of others, who by most conceptions had no chance of sticking around, because they did want to change, and they did want to be kept. I helped them do it, even though I was the one recommending the release, you know. But it's just caring about people, and treating them like you're not better than they are. And, you know, if the guy you're dealing with in the infantry is 300 pounds and can't run a kilometer, you know, you have to have an honest conversation with him and say, like, brother, it's not personal. And I know that I was a very gifted runner, not so much anymore, because I broke basically everything. But, you know, that doesn't make me a better person, just because I can slam out a half marathon in, I don't know, what, an hour three or something. Well, like, not an hour three, an hour 33. But, yeah, like, that doesn't make me better than you. But the fact is that you're probably not in the best place if you can't physically do the job. So, you know, you're going to hurt yourself, and you're going to hurt other people. So you need to do something else if you can't be something other than this, physiologically, right? So, yeah, I don't know if that answers your question at all. Just to say that you love people. And eventually, when that is evidence that you care about people, they will ask, you know, they'll say, why, why are you like this? I remember, like, I had a 2IC, great guy. I came to be good friends with him. But when I first, we first started working together, we were together, like, three weeks. And he came into my office, bewildered at one point. And he was like, sir, yeah, he's like, how do you, I don't even remember how it came up. He overheard me or someone told him. But he's like, you're a Christian? And I was like, yeah. And you're studying to be a pastor? Yeah, that's right. I didn't like throw that around, throw it in people's face or anything. But he's like, I don't understand. I said, what do you mean? He said, well, you seem like a very sane and intelligent person. So how is it that you are buying into this Christian crap and want to be a pastor? And it's like, well, if you really want to know, I can explain it to you. And, you know, that opened the door there where there was an invitation. But I guess that's my encouragement to guys who are serving is just be excellent. Be excellent soldiers. Be devoted. Do that thing that we're told in Scripture, which is to serve our earthly masters as unto Christ, even the unjust ones. You know, demand our rights so much as we demand that Christ be honored in our lives. And be faithful in everything that God gives us and wait and see how he will use you. Nice. Yeah. Neil, thank you. I appreciate your time and I appreciate your candidness. I think people will definitely take something away from this interview. And I know I have. I really appreciate your service and I appreciate your service to the Lord, too. I think he's using you in a whole different way now, but he's still using you. He's able. He's able. Even for one like me. It's really, really good to know you. Yeah, well, pleasure to have made your acquaintance, too, Rick. So, God bless you in the work and yeah, chances are we'll chat again sometime. We will, my friend. We will. Thank you. Okay. Recording stopped.
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