Greater love has no one than this, that he lay down his life for his friends.
Jesus
The peace and security that you and I have enjoyed for the past ten years is easy to take for granted. There have been terrorist attacks and attempted attacks. The Fort Hood massacre stands out in memory along with the wanna be martyr shoe bomber and the underwear bomber and Times Square bomber attempts at mass murder. Many other smaller, one man operations perpetrated by Muslims against people of various faiths and no faith at all have been carried out since 9-11. But no plot with the coordination and scale of 9-11 has succeeded. Thus most of us live without fear. We complain and make jokes about airport security, wonder if our rights are being abused by the phone companies, yawn lazily and go to bed not worrying if the world will still be the same tomorrow.
That is due in large part to the dedicated professionalism of the men and women of America’s Special Forces, the CIA and other clandestine services. They are invisible to most of us, avoiding the limelight by necessity as well as by preference. We hear about them occasionally, most notably Seal Team 6’s successful mission against Osama bin Laden. But then the headlines fade and we forget.
I’m writing this today to ask you not to forget these brave men and women. Their task is Biblical: “He is God’s servant, an agent of wrath to bring punishment on the evil doer.” (Romans 13:4). Theirs is a dirty job that requires a lifetime of dedication to personal discipline and the honing of warrior skills that are unknown to the rest of us. The training itself is often as dangerous as the missions and goes on unseen and unheralded for years, sometimes decades, before the moment arrives and a chief executive finds – as the President did with the bin Laden mission - that he has the tools to defend us.
I’m afraid I’m not doing this subject justice so let me encourage you to learn on your own about these brave men and women who lay down their lives for us every day. The two books I’ve read are: Masters of Chaos: The Secret History of the Special Forces by Linda Robinson and The Night Stalkers: Top Secret Missions of the U.S. Army’s Special Operations Aviation Regiment. There are others. After you’ve read them you won’t forget to pray for the warriors who protect us from the terrors.
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