Hello everybody! Welcome back to another episode of Anabaptist Perspectives.
I'm here with my friend Mike Peck.
We would have actually met in Bible School. What is it? Three years, now? A couple years ago.
Mike is a good friend of mine.
You've had some unusual experiences in your life especially for us as Anabaptists.
It's your typical story. Want to hear a little bit about that today.
The one thing that makes your story a little unique is
you were in the US military for some time before you became saved.
What motivated you to even join the US army?
Were you a Christian? Why did you even do that?
Yeah, I would have professed Christianity. I would have grown up in the Protestant church.
There's still that patriotism there, and so I sort of grew up that way.
My dad was in the military. My mom was actually in the military for a short while.
Pretty much my grandfathers had served. So it was just sort of something that you do.
I had a lot of influences such as video games and movies that I watched.
Sort of influenced the glory of it all I guess you could say.
How old were you?
Well I would have been 20 when I joined.
So yes, give us some details on that. Where were you stationed, and what was your position?
How long were you in the army?
Well, it's actually funny.
My dad was medical in the Navy, and so my mom would have been medical.
They were both corpsman. I had just assumed I would never be in the military.
I don't know. I just didn't think it would ever happen.
It came to a point where my work wasn't really going anywhere.
My dad was about to retire. We were stuck in Hawaii, and so I just started to look into it.
I took what they called the ASVAB which is a test that places you,
or they evaluate where you would be best in the military.
I had sort of scored high enough to do many different jobs,
but because of the glory that I saw in being a foot soldier,
and all the movies, and like I said, the games that I had played where you're on the
front lines, and you're just facing the action.
I decided to go in the infantry which is like one of the lowest ones.
Really? Like as a private?
Yes.
Okay. I'm really curious though,
because you were infantry men, what were you taught about killing? About facing the enemy?
How did that affect you?
I remember struggling with that a little bit because of this "love your neighbor." That was one thing.
"Thou shalt not kill" and certain things like that.
At this point you still would have said, "I'm a Christian, but yet I'm an infantry man."
Yeah. Yeah.
Didn't you feel any kind of contradiction?
That's the thing. I would go and shoot in training.
I went along with it, but then at night it was sort of like this wrestling.
I always remember sitting on my bunk just thinking about, "Okay, they're saying this is right,
but for some reason is it? Why isn't it fully matching up with what I'm reading in Scripture?"
Okay, you were deployed then, correct?
So tell us about where you were deployed to and how many times. What year would this been at this point?
I first would have been deployed in Iraq. That would have been a year-long deployment.
That would have been in 2000 .... I want to say 2010 to 2011.
Our mission was more to what they called win the hearts and minds.
We had come through there and destroyed so much,
so now we were trying to rebuild and help them get back on their own feet.
That was one of the big things.
I didn't necessarily see much of the firefights, but I had done that for a year and saw a few things.
It's interesting, once you're trained, you're trained so much for that, that it becomes everyday.
It's sort of hard to explain it,
but there was a sense where you would wake up in the morning, and you would
look up, and you'd say, "Today is a great day to die."
Wow. Did you actually believe that?
Well, yeah. There's a sense where you do start to sort of....I mean part of it
is you have to let go of the fear, otherwise the mission's not going to get completed.
You have all these brothers with you who are saying the same things
and believing the same things.
It just sort of becomes ingrained in you.
Okay, so after that year in Iraq, what then?
After that year, we came back and you pretty much just
come back for however long until you get orders again.
They usually have a time frame I think for about six months to a year where they just
let you recuperate before the training starts right back up again.
It did for us. I think within a year we were ready to go to Afghanistan.
That was a whole different war zone. Iraq was a lot of mortars, whereas Afghanistan was more firefights.
So you saw clashes?
Yeah, we had seen a few.
Who were you fighting?
I don't really know the groups.
Iraq was sort of like Afghanistan where it was winding down to the point...
our main mission there was to help the Afghanistan police to be able to work on their own.
That way we could ship out, and they could still function and enforce the law in their own country.
So how long were you in Afghanistan?
I would have been in Afghanistan 9 months. So shorter and shorter deportment.
And then back and then after that, where you at that point?
After I had come back, it was towards the tail end of my contract.
I think I had about four to six months left. That was enough time for me to come back and relax
and then pretty much get out.
Did you see action?
Yes. I had seen not a lot of direct
action in Iraq, but in Afghanistan we would have seen a little bit more casualties.
A lot of more innocent casualties.
Were you ever shot at?
There was a few times we were shot at, yes, indirectly and directly, yeah.
There's no thrill like getting shot at. Once the adrenaline kicks in, and you've been trained to do
all these different maneuvers and everything, and it works.
Your muscle memory kicks in, and you just act without even thinking.
Yeah, that's not a story you typically hear from especially a conservative Anabaptist.
Now, the question is how did you go from firefights in Afghanistan to first of all,
becoming a Christian, and then from that becoming non-resistant and now conservative Anabaptist?
What's the story there?
When I was in the military, you had this belief (like I said before) that
tomorrow you were gonna die, so you lived up today.
So there was a lot of drugs. There was a lot of partying. There was a lot of alcohol.
You just lived for that day. Yet at the same time I would have professed still that I was a Christian.
I would have believed that the Lord was watching over me in the battlefield.
Very, very thankful that the Lord didn't, one, ever put me in the position to take another man's life,
but two, that I was able to live through all that, and be where I am now.
It was Afghanistan that I would have had my change of heart and started to reevaluate
everything that I had believed.
So, we were close to coming home. My position at that point was pretty much pulling security.
Officers and other leaders, civilians who were contracted out to do certain jobs there would come
to this little hut, I guess, and they would sign off and take one of us
to provide security for them.
Since we were the combatants it was
our job to go with them and make sure they weren't doing
anything that would put them in harm's way, or be there in case something did happen.
We were going to get ready to leave, and I remember talking to this
photographer, this combat photographer, who was just always around.
If we were there pulling security, then she was probably there taking pictures of whatever was happening.
We had said "hi" to her. She said, "Oh, you know, I'm going out to take photos of this training."
We were just like, "Okay." An average day.
We had went and pulled security for some aircraft contractor
Next thing you know we hear this explosion.
You always hear explosions.
So I get up and I go out to just sort of make sure. Just see what's happening.
There's a big plume of smoke, but again it sort of happens all the time.
So within the next hour we pack up, and we start heading back from that job.
As soon as I get back, people are running around frantic and yelling.
Nothing had happened there, and no one was giving me information.
We just knew after a few minutes that something had happened to one of our soldiers.
We didn't know who it was. A few minutes later we see this truck pulling in.
It was going at full speed and just hits the brakes. Right next to us he opens the door.
This body just falls out, just limp. I knew the moment I saw that the person had passed.
Sure enough, it was the woman we had talked to, the photographer that we had talked to.
So we get her out of the truck.
We get her ready, and they start performing CPR.
We're calling in a helicopter waiting for it to show up.
Finally it showed up, and we put her up into the helicopter.
We knew she was gone, but that changed me in the sense that we were a few months from going home.
She had just talked to her husband and her daughter (her only daughter),
and just about how happy she was, and how happy they were. They just couldn't wait.
We were a few months from leaving.
All those things just sort of hit me, and I started to think back,
and say, "How could this be something that Christ would want?"
I had struggled with that for a long time. I couldn't tell any of my brothers
because if you start showing any signs of weakness, or if you even
give a hint that you're not going to back them up in a firefight, that's trouble.
So finally I broke, and I had talked to my dad who had retired from the Navy.
I assumed he was still patriotic, and so even talking to him was a little scary.
Well at that time he had been going through his own journey and discovered non-resistance,
and ran into Anabaptists. That's where he would have learned --- listening to Dean Taylor.
I'd just told him everything. Everything I was feeling, and this just doesn't seem right.
To my surprise he said, "Oh, hey, well guess what? Here's the journey that I'm on."
He started giving me all this stuff.
I'll tell you the biggest thing for me was this idea and concept:
it's so mind-blowing, but it's just reading the Bible for what it says.
For me, the churches that I had gone to, it was you would bring your Bible with you,
and sometimes you wouldn't even open it, and you just look up at the projector,
and the pastor would put some scripture on, but he would tell you what it means.
I guess I sort of got used to always trying to find a
translation for what I was reading as opposed to just reading it for what it said.
Just that concept opened my eyes to think that "thou shalt not kill"
means "thou shalt not kill" was just sort of mind blowing for me.
Another thing was it was so freeing. Right there while I was in Afghanistan, I
remember I got down on my knees and rededicated my life to Christ.
The most interesting thing was shortly after that we had to give up all of our weapons
because we have to get back to the States at the same time all of our weapons do.
They go by ship, so it takes a lot longer for them to get back.
So it was so great that I was so terrified of "How am I going to do this?"
Here I am in a war zone. My job is to kill people, and I've had a change of heart.
It was taken out of my hands. I didn't have to worry about it.
So, there's a couple questions: Did your fellow soldiers find out about these beliefs?
Did your commanding officers?
With all of that, what were the challenges you faced?
You're in Afghanistan. You're reading scripture and it says, "Love your enemies."
The US military probably isn't going to be too happy about that. What happened?
Well, like I said, I pretty much kept it in a sense to myself as opposed to my parents.
When we did get back, and I was out of the war zone, and I had nothing to worry about in that sense,
my contract was coming to an end. I had six months left. That was when I started to tell people because
I had assumed, "Well, I'm gonna get out of this, go home, and just go into the Anabaptist church."
Telling my friends that, they just thought I had lost it I think.
Wow. Did they ridicule you at all? Was it just kind of like, "Okay, that's a little strange"?
It was sort of like "that's just a little strange."
Obviously they poked fun. Like you said, that band of brothers.
We always want what's best for them, for each other.
With my friends, no, it wasn't too bad. Of course my family had already made this switch
or joined the Anabaptist church.
So maybe extended family, I'm guessing, even today is not on board with some of this?
Yeah.
When did you leave Afghanistan? Do you remember when that was?
Yeah, I would have left Afghanistan in the fall of 2012 and gotten out of the military.
Less than five years.
Yeah.
So let's bring it home to something a little more practical.
What would you say to someone who's in the military
or thinking of joining the military or maybe even knows someone in the military?
What would you say to them who is maybe struggling with some of this?
What's your advice?
I guess for someone who's in already, I'd have to say, "Just look at what you're doing.
Are you really able to do what you're doing to the glory of God?"
For those who are thinking about it: you see so much glory.
You watch movies, and you see all this stuff of these war heroes.
There's a lot of people who you could really sit down and talk to especially if you're
thinking about going combat, that could tell you some stories.
Even now, there's times where a noise will bring back that PTSD.
It's pretty crippling sometimes. It's just sort of like, "Is it all worth that?"
If you are a Christian, you should be fighting for God's Kingdom. Are you actually doing that?
Obviously, you came to the conclusion you weren't.
Sometimes, people I wonder if they're always honest with themselves.
Thank you for sharing your story and your journey and some of the things you've learned along the way.
Obviously, it wasn't easy. I'm sure there's still a lot of things ahead too for you.
I appreciate that. Appreciate you taking the time.
Thank you, everyone, for watching. If you have any questions for Mike, put them in the comments below.
Maybe I'll email them to him, and he can give a response.
We can maybe even do a follow-up video. I'm really curious what the response would be to what you shared.
If you liked what you saw, we have new episodes each week.
Come back for more content like this. We will see you in the next video.
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