Author	: Bill Kochman
Publish	: Dec. 1, 2025
Update	: Dec. 1, 2025
Parts	: 03

Synopsis:



Continuing our discussion from part one, having now shared with you the primary causes behind human warfare, and also having revealed to you what ought to be the proper attitude of all God-fearing, Bible-believing Christians towards war, let us backtrack to our previous discussion concerning the Vietnam War. For those of my readers who may be too young to know, a lot of those teenagers in the late 1960s and in the early 1970s most certainly did NOT want to be shipped off to fight and die in the Vietnam War. However, sadly, they had few options, because during that period of time, the draft was still very much in effect, and there were very negative consequences for those young boys who dared to defy the law.

Of course, some boys did manage to evade the draft. In some cases, they were able to get an educational deferment. Other guys were the sons of influential families who had money, so they too found a way to escape the hellhole that was the war in Vietnam. Some people also had serious medical conditions which spared them from that awful war. Then, of course, there were also the draft dodgers who fled to Mexico, Canada, or to some other country. Eventually, in fulfillment of a campaign promise he had made, on January 21, 1977, and only a single day after his presidential inauguration, U.S. President Jimmy Carter issued an unconditional pardon, and granted amnesty to the Vietnam War draft dodgers. This executive order was known as Proclamation 4483.

While Carter's EO granted amnesty to all of the teenagers who had managed to evade the draft, it didn't pardon the military deserters. In other words, the young men who had ALREADY been drafted, and who were ALREADY serving in the military, were NOT pardoned. As was to be expected, Proclamation 4483 caused quite an uproar, both within the government itself, as well as with the American public. Some people strongly supported the president's decision, while others found it embarrassing and quite disgraceful that a US president would even do such a thing. However, the uproar eventually died down and the EO -- Executive Order -- was just accepted as a matter of fact.

However, what you may find particularly interesting is the fact that despite President Carter's pardon, many thousands of American young men still refused to return to the U.S.A., preferring instead to remain as expatriates in foreign lands. Canada was a popular place of new residence, not only due to its proximity to the United States, but also because many of the young boys who had fled the country came from well-to-do families. This of course meant that they were well-educated. As a result, it was very easy for them to acquire employment in Canada, which readily accepted them into its workforce.

As I briefly mention in a few other BBB articles, I myself was a teenager in high school at the time of the Vietnam War. Sadly, when my draft number was assigned to me -- it was by a lottery-type method as I seem to recall -- I ended up in the top thirty-three per cent. What that meant was that it was a sure thing that I would eventually be called up and ordered to report for military duty, and thus be sent to that awful hellhole of a war. Well, sometime in 1972, after graduating from high school the previous year, I received my induction letter in which I was informed to immediately report to the draft board in my home town.

By this point in my young life, I had already formed strong, Bible-based, Christian values and personal convictions. Thus, based on my understanding of the Scriptures, I was completely against war, and fighting against people who I did not even know, and with whom I did not have a personal problem. I was a complete pacifist. In fact, while my dad was a very macho hunter who each winter would proudly bring home a number of dead rabbits for my poor mom to cook, I did NOT like rifles or guns, and much less hunting. In fact, to this very day, I have never owned a single gun or rifle. God has taken care of me for the past seventy-two years, and my life has never been seriously threatened by another individual.

Of course, I already know that there will be some patriotic individuals who may possibly read this current article, who strongly support Second Amendment gun rights. There will also undoubtedly be certain Christians amongst them as well. These people will probably be quick to retort, "Well, Bill, what if this happens to you? Or what if that happens to you? Just how in the world will you even manage to defend yourself against such an attack?" Well, it is for people such as those that I authored a few of my BBB articles, such as "Owning Guns: What Saith the Scriptures?", and likewise "School Shootings: The Second Amendment Controversy". You will find both of them listed at the end of this same article with clickable links.

Now, if you happen to be a Christian who embraces the views I just mentioned, then I must tell you that in my view, you are thinking in the ways of the world, and NOT as a firm believer who trusts in God, who trusts in His Word, and who trusts in His divine protection. Instead, you are trusting in the arm of the flesh, and in your guns, just like the children of the world do. Let me share with you again what King David wrote in the Book of Psalms:

"Some trust in chariots, and some in horses: but we will remember the name of the LORD our God."


"The angel of the LORD encampeth round about them that fear him, and delivereth them."


As I point out in the aforementioned articles, as well as in the article entitled "Divine Protection: Do You Have Fear or Faith?", that is where my personal faith lies, and frankly, it has served me well for over seven decades now. As such, I don't see any need to change my current stance. The Lord has honored my faith in His protection, so why should I alter my position now? It just makes no sense whatsoever. Now if you, as a Christian, want to trust in your guns instead of in the Lord, that is, of course, up to you, and between you and the Lord. However, I do feel compelled to tell you the following.

While some of you may not realize it, your lives are actually ruled by fear of the unknown. And let me tell you, if there is one thing of which I am certain, it is that an environment and atmosphere of fear and paranoia has gripped the United States for a number of years now. Seriously. When you hear of people sleeping with a gun underneath their pillow, you just know that something is seriously wrong somewhere. The fact of the matter is that the Devil uses fear as his tool and weapon to weaken people, and to bring them into bondage. This is in fact one of the issues I discuss in articles such as "Free From the Fear of Death: Law and Works vs Grace" and "Dracula, Nosferatu, Twilight: The Vampire Fad". But guess what, folks? The Bible says the following:

"For God hath not given us the spirit of fear; but of power, and of love, and of a sound mind."


"Casting all your care upon him; for he careth for you."


"There is no fear in love; but perfect love casteth out fear: because fear hath torment. He that feareth is not made perfect in love."


My friends, in a word, if you truly trust in God's love for you, then you will not fear. Instead, you will simply trust Him for your very life, for your well-being, and even for your future. You just will not worry about any of it. I most certainly don't. And guess what folks? Following that simple advice will likewise help you to live longer as well. Or you can allow Satan to keep you wrapped up in fear your entire life if you like. It is really your choice.

Returning to my Vietnam War story, as I was saying, by the time I received my induction notice for the Vietnam War in 1972, based on my personal understanding of the Scriptures, I had already formed strong, personal convictions regarding violence, killing and war. I hated it all. As I said, and as I explain in a few other articles as well, I was a pacifist. Not only that, but I was very shy and introverted as well. I loved nature and animals, and I was totally against hunting and killing animals. That is why I detested my macho hunter dad bringing home his winter catch of rabbits which we kids then had to eat.

It may interest some of you to know that in a recent FaceTime chat with my 90-year-old mom, she informed me that she hated having to prepare those rabbits for our dinner. Despite doing her very best to remove it, we kids were still left with some amount of buckshot in our mouths when we chewed the meat. I never really liked the wild game taste of rabbit either. Thus, biting down into buckshot made dinnertime even worse. Well, to make matters worse, when my older brother was in his teens, my dad did what many macho dads did back then. He bought him a BB gun.

My dad's annual hunting habits were bad enough. Now my older brother was absolutely delighted to have a BB gun, with which he promptly began shooting at wild birds in our neighborhood, just for the "fun" of it. He would injure robins, and I don't recall what else now. But it really angered me, and it broke my heart to see those small creatures suffer like that. I do recall trying to save one particular robin. I can't remember now how it ended up because it occurred over fifty-five years ago.

Anyway, those anecdotes should give you a good idea regarding where my head was at, at the time that I had to appear before the draft board in my home town. I really had no idea what was going to happen. All I could do was pray and trust the Lord to take care of the situation by keeping me out of the military. As it turned out, it wasn't actually a draft board, it was a middle-aged woman, as I vaguely recall, who sat behind a desk. I obviously don't recall my exact words to her now. After all, this event in my life occurred some fifty-three years ago. At any rate, I wasn't haughty or belligerent. I simply shared my Christian beliefs with her regarding violence, killing and war. What else could I do? It was in the Lord's hands.

Well, needless-to-say, the Lord was with me, and rather than order me to report for military duty, this woman advised me to report my whereabouts to her office every so often. It may have been every six months. That was exactly how my interview concluded. I wasn't given an actual deferment, but neither was I ordered to immediately report for military duty. I guess it was kind of a gray area. As to what caused that dear woman to make that determination, I could say that she looked at this 18-year-old, skinny runt of a kid who only weighed 128 pounds, and who was also near-sighted with astigmatism in both eyes, and who already showed clear signs of kyphosis -- curvature of the spine -- and then thought to herself, "Man, we send this kid to Vietnam, and he is surely dead meat on the first day."

However, I prefer to believe that the Lord did a miracle on that day so many years ago, and that He delivered me from the mouth of the dragon, and from that god of murder, destruction and war. I believe that God touched that dear woman's heart, and that it had to be His miracle. Why? Because military folks who are constantly looking for fresh, new meat to send off as cannon fodder for their latest war, are not exactly known for being soft, kind or friendly. They've got a quota to fill, and by golly, they will fill it. At least that is the way it was back then. I really have no idea what it is like now, being as we have supposedly had voluntary military forces in the United States since 1973 when the draft was terminated.

However, what I discovered while writing this article is that signing up for Selective Service within thirty days of one's eighteenth birthday is still a requirement for men between the ages of 18 and 25. In addition, failure to comply can result in serious consequences. This includes being charged with a felony and fined up to $250,000, and/or being sent to prison for five years. Furthermore, such an individual will remain ineligible for certain federal jobs and federal job training, and may also be denied state-based student loans and grants. But for me personally, what really doesn't seem to make much sense, and which seems like a lot of nonsensical government double-speak, is the following statement that I found on the usa.gov website where Selective Service information is posted:

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"Military service in the U.S. is voluntary. But most young men must register with Selective Service."

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Seriously, does that make any sense at all? How in the world is military service in the USA voluntary when if you fail to ever comply with registering with the Selective Service, very nasty things will surely happen to you. Or maybe they are saying that if you fail to voluntarily comply by signing up, they will just interpret that as meaning that you voluntarily agree to be sent to prison, heavily fined, or whatever. Yes, I am being snarky. I read all of their online explanations regarding this issue, but it still seems like confusing double-speak. After all, if they ever were to re-implement the draft due to some national emergency, your name would already be listed in the Selective Service as a potential draftee, so what is the difference?

Returning again to the draft board situation in my home town, I honestly don't know what that woman's political or religious views were. Neither do I know her name, or anything else about her. I wonder if she is still alive fifty-three years since I encountered her at that military office. I only saw her for a short while. I do not even know if she was a Christian or not. Regardless, I hope that the Lord blessed her in some small way for at least making the right decision to allow this child of God to be free from the hellfires of violence, war and death in the Vietnam War.

As per her instructions, for the next few years, I kept her office abreast of my location about every six months. During that time, I never heard from them a single time. As such, I can only assume that they either forgot about me, or possibly didn't consider me worthy cannon fodder. Or maybe, just maybe, that dear woman in some sort of way simply made my personal file "disappear" from her archives of eligible cannon fodder. I honestly don't know, of course. I am just guessing here and being a little bit sarcastic and playful at the same time.

At any rate, feeling quite relieved and seeming to be cleared from going to Vietnam, I continued to pursue my evangelical endeavors at the time. You see, I had been traveling around the country preaching the Gospel, passing out Gospel tracts, and taking odd jobs now and then to support myself. It was in late 1973 that I met a Mexican-American couple in Denver who had a burden for lost souls in Mexico. They both spoke fluent Spanish. As I have mentioned before, I had studied Spanish a total of three years in high school. So, when they invited me to go to Mexico with them on one of their missionary trips, I accepted. Thus, in early 1974, for the very first time in my young life, I crossed over into Mexico with them.

Well, I certainly didn't know God's future plans for me, but as it turned out, I ended up spending a total of approximately six years in Mexico, returning to the Tex-Mex border to renew my visa every six months. During that period, I became rather fluent in speaking, reading and writing Mexican Spanish. This was followed by another three years sharing the Gospel on city corners along the same Tex-Mex border. Eventually, I became enamored with Japan after watching a television mini-series in 1980 called "Shogun", starring Richard Chamberlain, Toshirô Mifune and Yôko Shimada. Thus, in 1983, a friend and I set off for Japan to preach the Gospel of Jesus Christ. I didn't know a single word of Japanese at the time. However, I eventually learned to speak basic Japanese, and I could also read and write both Hiragana and Katakana, but no Kanji.

The last of my nation-hopping evangelical endeavors occurred when my three-year Japanese cultural visa expired. I really had no burden to return to the continental United States, so I ended up on this tropical Pacific island, where I have been for the past forty years. As I explain in other BBB articles, it was here in fact where I began my online ministry. First, with a BBS -- or Bulletin Board Service -- in 1993 during the days before the Internet really took off. Later, in the year 2000, I set up my first actual website, which took the name Endtime Prophecy Net for the next sixteen years. And lastly, in 2016, when I changed the name of Endtime Prophecy Net to Bill's Bible Basics. All of this is explained in my article called "The Internet: Our Final Frontier; Your Last Chance?".

But what I want you to see from previous accounts is how the Lord had taken control of my life from a very young age. Even though the Devil wanted to snag me for his secular army, and force me to go off and kill people in some foreign land who I did not even know, or have a problem with, God had quite a different plan for my life. Rather than be an instrument of death to people, He wanted me to be a bringer of life through faith in Jesus Christ. And so, He used that woman in 1972 to free me from the burden of military service, and a sure death in Vietnam, and I continued as a laborer and soldier in the Lord's army instead. This I have continued to do since that time, and God has provided for me every step of the way.

Let me also add here that I truly feel sorry for the many boys of my youthful era who were in fact shipped off to Vietnam in contradiction to their own desire. It did not matter what they thought about the war -- that is to say, whether they actually supported it or opposed it -- or if they even understood what the war was about. If Uncle Sam said that your number was up, then your number was up, and you had to go and possibly offer up your life as a sacrifice on the altar of war, for a cause you did not even believe in. Oh what a tragedy! As we have already discussed, a lot of those young boys never returned home. Others returned to their home country, but with missing arms, legs, genitals and eyes, with disfigured faces, with totally messed up minds, etc. Many had also become addicted to drugs -- which I strongly suspect the military provided to them -- just so they would be in a mental state where they'd be willing to kill the Vietnamese with whom they really had no quarrel.

Part of the Vietnam War tragedy is also the fact that despite being forced to go to Vietnam due to the military draft, by the time some of those boys returned home, America's attitude towards that terrible war had changed significantly. As some of my older readers will no doubt already know, there was a very strong anti-war sentiment in the United States at that time. There were protests, anti-war songs, marches, etc. Of course, at the center of it all was the now-famous Woodstock Music and Art Fair, which took place from August 15-18, 1969 in Bethel, New York. One of the most powerful lyrics of that time was "And it's one, two, three, what are we fightin' for? Don't ask me, I don't give a damn, next stop is Vietnam." It was taken from a song by Country Joe and the Fish called "I Feel Like I'm Fixin' to Die Rag". Many years ago, even I sang it at times.

As a result of the strong anti-war sentiment, when those young boys returned to the USA, so many of them were stigmatized. In other words, instead of being welcomed as heroes, they were in fact treated with much disapproval, disgrace, indifference and hostility. It's my understanding that even getting VA benefits proved to be very difficult for some of them. While I did not approve of the war, nevertheless, even I see the injustice in the way that they were treated. In fact, as some of my readers will know, I have been quite the poet since 2014, and I've now composed over 1,030 poems. Many of these I have since converted to actual songs using Artificial Intelligence technology. Here is one I wrote in July of 2020 called "Another War". I hope you enjoy it:

ANOTHER WAR

by Bill Kochman

07-02-2020

For their nation they all fought,
Just like countless wars before,
Blood flowed thick in the fields,
So much pain one could not ignore.

Many weren't much older than boys,
You could almost smell their fear,
As the enemy began their charge,
A boy asked "What am I doing here?"

That young man had been a farmer,
He'd only known the ways of peace,
No quarrel he had with the enemy,
He wished the violence would cease.

Government claimed to know better,
So those boys marched thru the mud,
As the bullets made many men fall,
The earth sucked up their blood.

At last the war was finally over,
A great victory had been achieved,
The nation celebrated with parades,
While parents at home just grieved.

Their child would never celebrate,
He too had fallen on that sad day,
For a cause he did not understand,
With his life he was forced to pay.

So often this same story is repeated,
Government always finds a new fight,
When a nation is constantly at war,
Clearly something is just not right.

Rather blessed are the peacemakers,
This is what our Lord clearly said,
If we choose to take up the sword,
By that weapon we may end up dead.

If you would like to listen to the two song versions of my poem, please click or tap the play buttons below. Thanks!

Song version 1:

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Song version 2:

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As I mentioned previously, while the aforementioned military woman who interviewed me may have never even realized it, by allowing me to escape America's deadly war machine, and not being sent off to die in Vietnam -- as I surely would have if they had actually forced me to go over there -- she in fact made it possible for me to actually continue my enlistment in ANOTHER army.

I am sure that many of my Christian readers already understand exactly what I'm talking about. For any of my secular readers who do not understand, allow me to explain. While I've spoken a lot about human violence and warfare, unbeknownst to quite a few secular-minded people, there is another war which is being fought, and which has been fought, for literally thousands of years now. It is a spiritual war between God and the forces of Light, and the Devil and the forces of darkness. While earth's war forces fight, kill and destroy for a piece of land, or for natural resources, or to extend a nation's sphere of control and influence, the Bible informs us that God's war is against darkness, evil, rebellion, lies, deception, sin and death. The purpose of God's war is to save souls -- not kill them -- and to bring them to the Light of Jesus Christ, so that they might obtain Salvation, and thus live eternally in His holy Kingdom. Consider the following group of Bible verses which confirm this very doctrine:

"For the Son of man is NOT COME TO DESTROY MEN’S LIVES, BUT TO SAVE ‭THEM‭. and they went to another village.‭"


"The Lord is not slack concerning his promise, as some men count slackness; but is longsuffering to us-ward, NOT WILLING THAT ANY SHOULD PERISH, but that all should come to repentance."


"Have I any pleasure at all that the wicked should die? saith the Lord GOD: and not THAT HE SHOULD RETURN FROM HIS WAYS, AND LIVE?"


"Say unto them, As I live, saith the Lord GOD, I HAVE NO PLEASURE IN THE DEATH OF THE WICKED; BUT THAT THE WICKED TURN FROM HIS WAY AND LIVE: turn ye, turn ye from your evil ways; for why will ye die, O house of Israel?"


"For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him SHOULD NOT PERISH, but have everlasting life. For God sent not his Son into the world to condemn the world; BUT THAT THE WORLD THROUGH HIM MIGHT BE SAVED."


To continue then, when we embrace Jesus Christ as our Lord and Savior, and accept His sacrifice as atonement for our sins, not only are we forgiven, saved, redeemed, reconciled and inherit Eternal Life, but we are likewise inducted into His spiritual army. We become foot soldiers and ambassadors for the Kingdom of God. Furthermore, in the Epistle to the Hebrews, the Apostle Paul refers to Jesus as "the captain of their salvation" -- meaning, of course, our salvation as well -- as we can easily determine by the following verse:

"For it became him, for whom are all things, and by whom are all things, in bringing many sons unto glory, to make THE CAPTAIN OF THEIR SALVATION perfect through sufferings."


Please go to part three for the conclusion of this series.

⇒ Go To The Next Part . . .

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