It has amazed me many times how quickly our brain can flow from one thought to another, until sometimes you're not even sure how your mind got to where it has landed.  Then there's those rare times my thoughts flow and fly to a place of, dare I say, epiphany.  For example, today I was listening to some 1960's folk ballads when Buffy Sainte-Marie's "Universal Soldier" came on.  Honestly, I wasn't paying much attention to the song, as I've heard various versions of it hundreds of times over the years.  

Then one line jumped out at me like I'd never heard it before: "He's the one who must decide who's to live and who's to die." Honestly, this line hasn't aged well.  In the larger context of the whole song, the song writer was saying that the  soldiers themselves could have stopped the war in Vietnam if they simply didn't fight.  With all the naievity of bsby-boom flower children, today the song sounds as simplistic as "What if they gave a war, and nobody came."  I consider myself a pascifist Christian, but it's a much more complex issue than Ms. Sainte-Marie makes it sound.  But that is not where my train of thought stopped.

I thought about my father.  Known affectionately as "Pa" to us kids, he was a tank sargeant in Europe in World War Two.  Specifically, I thought about a story Pa told several times from he was in the European theatre.  Somehow, he happened upon a German soldier,  My dad held him at gunpoint and ordered him to put his hands up.  The German put his hands on his head, clearly hiding something.  My dad warned him again, and the German lifted his hands.  He was not concealing a grenade or a hand gun.  He was hiding a piece of bread.  It seems he wanted to make sure that, no matter what happened, he'd have something to eat when he got really hungry.

My fahter brought the soldier back to the base, where the commanding officer asked Pa, "Why'd you bring him back alive?"  Noone would have blamed my father if he shot this enemy soldiier.  His CO, in fact, would have preferred it.  No doubt, Pa had to kill some people during the war: it was World War Two after all. But when it wasn't in self defense or in defense of a comrade; when my dad had the  chance - as Ms. Sainte-Marie sings - "to decide who's to live and who's to die" he chose to let the man live.  

But this wasn't my epiphany.  With all the speed of my brain neurons or the Holy Spirit, my thoughts went to sometihng I'd never thought about before. I suddenly realized that, today in Germany, it is likely  there are some men and women who, like me and my brothers, are facing, if not the winters of their lives, certainly late autumn, and the only reason they're alive at all is that my father let their father live that day somewhere in Europe.  

I wonder if they are men or women. I wonder how many there are. I wonder if they laughed and played as much as my brothers and I did when we were  kids. I wonder if they rolled their eyes when their parents told them to do their homework. And  I wonder if they were told the story of a kind young American GI who spared their father's life when noone would have batted an eye if he shot their father in cold blood.  I wonder if they know my dad even let their dad keep his piece of bread.  I wonder how many grandchildren and great grandchildren have been born due to Pa's kindness.  I wonder if these younger generations have also heard this story.

I hope they have, and I hope they pass it on to their children and their children's children.