The Christmas Delivery

Christmas Delivery

PTSD Patrol
Kathie Costos
December 22, 2018

This time of year it seems as if everyone is either doing the holiday or the Holy Day. Big difference when you think about it. The holiday is tied to buying stuff, eating stuff and having fun. The Holy Day is remembering why the day came to be in the first place.

The Christmas Delivery did not come on Christmas day but it is the day we celebrate the delivery arriving into the world.

The Christmas Delivery did not come on a jet, or in a grand way at all. This Delivery came on the back of a donkey, with Mary and Joseph. Oh, sure you know the rest of the story and the gifts that the Wisemen brought. But did you ever think of the rest of the story?

The birth of Jesus was not meant to be anything other than what it was. He came into this world to deliver a message, and then, deliver His life as payment for what sins He never committed, because we managed to do all of them.

There are so many other things to be said about what Jesus was, including, a homeless person depending on the kindness of strangers. But what He inspired, was clear even in war.

Radio-telephone operator Stephen Lovejoy was wounded in the open. Chaplain Capodanno ran through the withering fire, grabbed Lovejoy by the strap of his radio and dragged him to a hastily established perimeter near the top of the hill.

The chaplain immediately began attending to the dead and the dying, administering the Last Rites. Harton felt someone touch him. Father Capodanno spoke to him in a soft voice: “Stay calm, Marine, someone will be here to help. God is with us all this day.”

These Medal of Honor recipients were men of God

Vietnam Magazine
By: Ray Pezzoli Jr.
December 21, 2018

Vincent Capodanno leads field prayer services, Sept. 11, 1966 , during "Operation Fresno, for A Company, 1st Battalion, 7th Marines (Reinforced), in Quang Ngai Province. (Marine Corps Archives & Special Collections)

Chaplains don’t usually come to mind when the words “combat soldier” are mentioned.

Yet 16 American chaplains lost their lives in the line of duty during the Vietnam War. Two of them, both Catholic priests, Navy Lt. Vincent Robert Capodanno and Army Maj. Charles Joseph Watters, posthumously received the Medal of Honor for their heroism and valor on the battlefield.

Father Capodanno, a man many Marines have called a saint, is now in fact a candidate for canonization. Capodanno was known to the troops as the “Grunt Padre.”

Marine veteran Ray Harton remembers meeting him in a base mess tent: “He was just like one of the Marines… . His voice was what set him off from the rest, soft-spoken yet gruff enough to get your attention. He prayed with us and let us know he was there.”

Retired Marine Col. Gerald H. Turley described Capodanno as “a humble person, obviously at peace with himself in a place where war was going on.”

read more here

For Christmas my wish for you is to discover the miracle that is inside of you, because while everyone else can be hit by PTSD from just one event, so could you as a human, but unlike the rest of us, you made it your mission in your life to do whatever it took to try to save others.

Your life is a gift that you were willing to sacrifice and it is time for you to see that gift is still there, under the pain you are carrying because of what you were willing to do for the sake of everyone else.