However, I was destined to become a patriarch. Like Abram, I would one day leave forever the land and influence of the family which I was born into. You see, I received the anointing of the Holy Spirit after listening and praying with four young men who came to Hampton when I was eleven years old. After returning from war, it was then, that the Holy Spirit directed my steps in a "round about" way from Virginia to Texas. One of those young men was a man named Bobby Ewing from Waco, Texas and a graduate of Baylor University. That same year, when I received the anointing of the Holy Spirit, I was elected president of my sixth grade class and did very well in school, while witnessing to my classmates and leading some of the troubled boys in my sixth grade class to Christ. Things were really looking up for me and my mother. Although there were deep wounds which Satan had placed in my mother’s soul, as an infant, she was still able to host the bible study, which led me to become born of the Spirit. Shortly after that happened she opened up her home on Sundays to a part time minister named Tom Jones. With my mother’s help and Tom’s leadership, a church named New Covenant was established. That church at 1079 Big Bethel Rd. in Hampton, Virginia is still in existence today. However, my new found commitment in Christ brought more and more tension between myself and my father. Although my father respected Tom Jones tremendously, he wanted nothing to do with confessing Christ Jesus as his Lord. Of course that meant that his entire mind continued to be controlled by Satan and this world. Like Richard King he was a perfectionist and expected perfection in his children. My mother was dealing with so much bondage in her own life that she was unable to temper the evil which controlled him, unlike the more sanctified Henrietta King, who was able to bring some enlightenment to the soul of her unbelieving husband, Richard. Strongholds were strengthened more with time in the minds of my father, my mother, me, my two brothers and also my two sisters. Although my mother and I, at one point, became born of the spirit, we lacked the knowledge to free ourselves from the bondage which held us down. One does not help start a Christian Church, as my mother did, without creating repercussions from Satan. Like so many Christians, my mother, got in over her head, without first allowing the Holy Spirit to deliver her from those terrible wounds. Those terrible wounds were inflicted on her soul, as an infant, beginning while she was still in her mother's womb. My mother's sixteen year old mother was a prostitute living in Covington, Virginia with her mother. She was was also a prostitute. As it happens with so many Christians today, my mother refused all her life to get the deliverance she needed. Let it be enough for me to say that I witnessed much misery over the years, which befell my father, my mother, myself and my four brothers and sisters, which could have been avoided had just one of my parents been freed from the bondage of Satan and this world. Sin makes victims of everyone it touches and at the same time turns those victims into perpetrators. 

    Although I got off to a good start, and in spirit would forever have internal life, my soul was beginning to perish because of my lack of knowledge. I had no understanding whatsoever of the third pillar of Christ. In my early teens, with Satan's help, I sank into the trap of disbelieving everything, which could not be proven by the science of man. As Tom’s church grew and moved into a building the family stopped attending regularly. At the same time the tension between my father and I eased a bit, which I believe helped reinforce these feelings pushing me to become more and more like him. I hated the way he treated me and especially the way he treated my oldest sister but still I was becoming more like him. You see, without God’s intervention and The Holy Spirit’s guidance, we become like the very thing which wrongs us. My father had been wronged as a child and now he was treating his family worse than he had been treated. Repeated sin turns into iniquity (a certain pattern of sin) and iniquities are passed on from one generation to the next. My rebellion toward God was further encouraged by the influence of a high school biology teacher, who was an Atheist. However, the rebellion, itself, was a choice which I made in ignorance. After starting out, as such an ardent believer, and following the voice of The Holy Spirit, I now started listening and following another voice. It was a voice, which had been with me, masquerading as my own thoughts, since I was an infant. It was demonic. It said that I would prove that Jesus was not God and the savior of the world, by performing a very simple act. That act would be to do the following. It is written (John 10:28-29) that no man can pluck one of God’s own from his hand. I would prove that statement to be false by removing my own life from his hand and by doing so, I would be able to prove that the statements of the bible were not the divine word of God. In my troubled mind, when I did this, I would disprove everything the bible has to say. As I accepted this train of thought, it was as if a switch had been flipped, by a very dark side of my personality, which simply took over and suppressed the good things which The Holy Spirit had been doing in my life. Like many Christians today, I had gained some understanding of the first and second pillars of Christ, but I had absolutely no understanding of how the third pillar of Christ frees us to become what we were meant to be. This lack of understanding was soon to bring enormous danger into my life of which there was only one way of escape. I would have to start listening again to the same Holy Spirit which I had now turned my back on.  

    After high school graduation, I was very much looking forward to the freedom college would bring, especially the freedom from my dominating father and manipulating mother although I did not see her as that at this time. She was really that good at it. It seemed to me that my father never had one good thing to say about anything I ever did, no matter how hard I worked around the house to please him. It was a relief for me to get away and work on my Grandfather’s farm in Western Virginia every summer. From that work my Grandfather paid to my mother the proceeds of the sale from one steer a year to be placed in savings for my college and he had been doing this since I started working for him at the age of seven. My Grandfather showed me the statements from the calf sales every year and the accumulated total over the years would have been more than enough to put me completely through four years of college. However, to this day I have no idea what happened to that money. I do know that only a very small amount of it was spent for my education. I was never shown any bank statement balances by my mother. However, I trusted my mother. As high school graduation drew near she learned that the ROTC (Reserve Officer Training Corp.) program at Virginia Tech, where I would be attending, was paying a small monthly sum to members of the Military Corp. She convinced me to sign up by saying that a co-op student, who worked with her, had told her that I would only have to attend drill once a week and attend weekend training once a month. She further implied that I would be able to live my life on campus, as a civilian for most of the time. None of this was true. Furthermore, she encouraged me not to attend summer orientation where I would have discovered the truth of what I was about to do in time to make changes to my enrollment. It would take many years for me to realize that my own mother had a real problem relaying the correct information. Over the years, she had developed such a subtle way of imparting "guilt trips" on the rest of the family. She did this by continually expounding on her own selfless sacrifices for the greater family good. This preconditioned us so that no one, including me, would dare ask a probing question, like how much money did I have in my college fund for fear of appearing to impugn our mother's integrity. Of course, I would never doubt that all the money was there, although my guilty conscience told me that every penny of it was much more richly disserved by our selfless mother, than by me. Because of circumstances which I will explain more fully, my parents paid for only one "fall quarter" of my schooling which was less than one summer's wages. Its very possible that she used my summer income over the years to supplement our big family's growing expenses. 

    When I arrived at Tech for fall quarter, I quickly learned that Instead of being similar to the National Guard, it was more like the military training program at West Point. Freshmen were called Rats and were harassed night and day. We were given no freedom whatsoever. Furthermore we were yelled at by upperclassmen from before sunup to well after sundown. I immediately asked for a transfer to the civilian side of campus, and finally, after six weeks, I got an audience with the Dean of Admissions, who had the authority to grant this request. The answer he gave me still rings in my ears today. “Son”, he said, “I went through the Corps here at Tech. If it was good enough for me then, it’s good enough for you now.” His mind was made up and so was mine. I requested a termination form and signed it in front of him. At this point, the angry Dean spoke into being a curse upon my life, although I did not recognize it as such at the time, and I am sure he did not mean it as such. He, said, "Son this is a decision which you will regret for the rest of your life". He also said I would not be allowed to return to Virginia Tech for a minimum of one year. The Dean's curse was partially right. I did regret the decision to quit school until much later in my life, when I returned to a loving relationship with my God and my eternal Father. At this point in my life, however, the voice that had control over me must have been “jumping for joy” because in just a few short months after dropping out of college, I received my draft notice to report in on June 12, 1966, my mother’s birthday. The thunderhead signaling the arrival of that perfect storm was now within sight.

    The noose I had been tricked into sticking my neck into had now tightened ever so snuggly. Now, it was really starting to weigh heavily on me, as I drove home from the concert. The voice in my head kept repeating over and over, “You are leaving home for the last time. Take a good look at everything and everyone that means anything to you because you will never return”. It went on to say, “You will be the first person in your family to be killed in a war”. I believed everything that this voice said and I had believed it for as long as I could remember.

    This time, what that voice said was backed up by some real life evidence that seemed very credible. The nightly TV news with Walter Cronkite was replete with real broadcasts of jungle shootouts and dead bodies. There were now almost five hundred thousand troops in South Vietnam and almost all of the fighting was being done, not by experienced career soldiers, but by nineteen year old draftees like me, who had had only four and a half months of total military training with only nine weeks of that being ill improvised advanced jungle warfare training, which was supposed to prepare a soldier for what he would be facing in Vietnam. It did not. To top things off, this was a new kind of insurgency war with no front lines. U.S. top military leaders had next to no experience, themselves, in fighting a war like this and the rise in the death toll of young Americans was now starting to reflect that lack of experience. Barry Sadler’s Green Beret song would play on the radio every day and the last verse always pierced a very inward part of my soul with an especially sharp blade of hopelessness when it mentioned a young wife waiting in vain for the return of her Green Beret husband, who had just died in combat. I remember thinking, “At least this soldier in the song had someone who loved him before he died. Although I had my grandparents, my mother and father and my brothers and sisters, I really felt as though I had no one. All this wasn’t true but the voice inside said it was true so I believed it. Now, what seemed to be true was being reinforced by my date who was sound asleep beside me. The voice inside kept up the torment by reminding me over and over that the only neighborhood girl who I had ever liked, was so unenthused by my presence, that she would rather fall asleep, than keep me company on the drive home. “You are a real looser”, the voice said. My already low self-esteem could take no more and for the very first time in my life I lost it. I mean I really lost it. As I approached the entrance of the Hampton Roads Tunnel coming from Norfolk to Hampton I felt the quiet desperation that I had lived with for years rise to the surface and at the same time my self-control started to slip away. I gradually depressed the gas pedal and the powerful Oldsmobile engine responded smoothly by propelling the big sedan through the narrow two-lane tunnel at over 100 miles an hour.

    The hamburger joint was just a blur when I went past it. A few seconds later, however, as I approached the curve on Pembroke, my self-control returned, and I did slow down to the 35 mile an hour speed limit just before seeing the blue and red flashing lights from the patrolman’s cruiser pull in behind me. We both pulled to the side of the road and surprisingly as he approached my driver side window, there was not a hint of anger in his voice, as he ask, for my driver’s license. Instead, I sensed a tone of relief in his voice. I believe now he was very grateful that things had not ended in the tragedy he had imagined. I could tell by his demeanor that retribution was the last thing on his mind. “I see you have not been drinking so I am going to ask you to promise me that you will never speed like this again before I let you go. You had to be doing over a hundred miles an hour when you past me at the hamburger joint. If I could prove that you would be going to jail. Instead I am going to write you up for doing 45 in a 35 mile an hour zone”. Very relieved, I assured him that I most definitely would not speed again and with that we parted company. My date’s house was only a hundred yards or so further on. I pulled over and stopped in front of it. She opened her own door and got out without a word being said by either of us. It was the last time I ever saw her. What a blessing that was, but I didn’t have the good spiritual sense to realize it at the time. Fortunately though, she did. The speeding ticket was dated after the date of my deployment. I never paid it and when I thought about paying it, I remember hearing the voice say, “There is no need to pay the ticket since you will be coming home in a coffin”.

    Just a few days later my parents drove me to the airport. I don’t remember much about that day but I do know that it was the last time I left home as a boy. The airport was located in Norfolk, Virginia. People around us at the airport were able to see me attired in my dress greens with all the ear markings of a new recruit. On the inside, where they couldn’t see, I was clothed in a low grade anger which glowed a little brighter now. I don’t remember the last words that were said between my parents and myself and it is hard to say exactly what they were thinking but this much I do know. Any true understanding of the emotional feelings that my parents may have felt would have been explained away by the voices in their own heads as it always was. Those voices never failed to give them some phony reason why everything happened as it did. This time, why their son was now going to war would be no different. The voices would give them their phony excuse and it would become as truth to them. There would be no twinge of quilt for tricking me with false information to join the cadet program at Virginia Tech. although that was a major reason why I was now headed for the frontlines in Vietnam instead of getting ready to start my second year of college. Furthermore, I can never remember seeing either my father or mother come under condemnation for anything. Every conflict in their long lives, and there were many, were always the other person’s fault. Needless to say I was well on my way to following that same course in life. 

    What am I trying to say here? Am I saying that my parents were bad people? Am I trying to say that they didn’t love me? Absolutely not. What motivates us to do what we do in life is much more complicated than just being a good or a bad person. Here is what I AM saying about my parents and about myself. All three of us were following a destructive script written by Satan. Although my mother and I were now justified from all sins and anointed with the Holy Spirit, that still did not mean that we were able to come to an understanding of how to choose that next right step in life. Isn’t that crazy because the Holy Spirit always makes a way for every Christian to take the next right step. However, to do so, we must stop listening to the voice of all others except Him and believe it or not that is a very hard thing for Christians to do. Secondly, a Holy Spirit anointed believer cannot stop making ever increasingly bad choices unless he or she is able to put the devil in his place and neither my mother, nor I, were able to do this. My father didn’t count since he was not born of the spirit at this point in his life. You see, just because my mother and I were spiritually ignorant about the wiles of the devil was no preventive from us being thrust at the instant of birth into a huge spiritual battlefield. It’s in this battlefield of the mind that Satan springs one ambush after another in our lives by making use of all the spiritually hostile terrain surrounding us. And “Oh Boy” would Vietnam ever become spiritually hostile terrain. Eph.6:12 says, “For we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this age, against spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenly places”. So no, my parents were not bad people. They were victims and Satan is very good at turning victims into perpetrators, especially if we listen and then follow the directions of the wrong voices and all three of us were following the wrong voices.   

    Here is an interesting truth which the reader can bank on. As long as any person, believer or non-believer, obeys the evil voices in their mind, he or she will never come under the condemnation of the devil because the devil won’t accuse and condemn someone who is following his directions. He only condemns those who are trying to do the right thing. Just follow the thoughts that the devil puts in your mind and it will always be someone else’s fault. The three of us, my father, my mother and I never accepted the blame for anything that happened in our life, ever. On that point we were very much in unison while standing at the airport that day waiting for my plane to arrive. I would now depart to follow the Devil’s plans for my life on a foreign battle field and they would continue giving him ground in their minds right here in “The good ole U.S.A.”. Interestingly enough, not only do many people never except responsibility for anything which happens to them, but they also blame God.