Words Have Power

Most of my early writing was nonfiction. The first paper I wrote when I was not under duress from the public school system was a paper refuting the claims of the Church of Latter-day Saints.

My first duty assignment after joining the Army, when I was eighteen years old, was to an aviation maintenance unit in West Germany during the Cold War. We were all housed in barracks, much like college dorms. My roommate was a Mormon, and he would have made his church proud. As soon as he got settled, he set out to convert me. It was relentless.

At first, I politely declined to engage, but he persisted. After a couple of weeks of relentless proselytizing, I had had enough. I finally said I would sit down and listen to what he had to say. Doing this was the beginning of my plan to put an end to it all.

Unbeknownst to him, I was raised in a fundamentalist Evangelical Christian church...not by choice...my father was the minister...but I learned something from the mandatory church services. I listened to my Mormon roommate and took copious notes.

The next step was to visit the library to get a copy of the King James Version of the Holy Bible. I didn’t bring one with me. One of my objectives in joining the Army was to separate myself from my father’s teachings. Using my notes from the session with my roommate and research from the Bible, I began writing.

When it was all said and done, I had what amounted to nothing short of an essay several pages long countering all my roommate’s points for joining the Church of Latter-Day Saints. Ironically, I used arguments from another religious viewpoint I didn’t believe either. In the end, I didn’t hear another word on the topic for the remaining year and a half we were roommates.

What I learned from the experience was maybe, just maybe, there was value in what I learned in English classes in high school and that written words have power.