"Viet Nam Encounters" (VNE) is offering "Return Trips" to Vietnam. These healing trips can help you create many great new "positive" memories to replace the bad mental pictures from your past !!! .We are helping our Charlie Company brother to get the word out !!
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___Yep!!_ That’s me (Bob Smoker) just after a heavy fire fight reflecting on what had just happened. ____________________ ______________
“It don’t mean nothin.” Maybe you said it. It was a way to shake off the seeming nonsense of it all. It was a way to ease the despair that could set in doing the same boring thing day after day. It was a way of dealing…a way of burying the pain and loss that is part of combat. ____________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Well it really did mean something. In fact it meant a whole lot and it impacted our lives in huge ways. Most Vietnam vets have led successful lives. Most have not turned out the way Hollywood has portrayed us. Even so there may still be some darkness from those experiences (combat or other) in Vietnam. However many of us have found that new experiences replace old memories and that it is possible to recount traumatic experiences without reliving them. Many who have returned to Vietnam, the place of bad memories, testify of the liberation they found there. Many come home from that new experience empowered to live in real freedom and live a more fruitful life. Many come home from a return trip to Viet Nam having found that it really did mean something after all and now it means a whole lot more. _____________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Here is an excerpt from a fellow Screaming Eagle’s account of what his return trip meant to him. . . . ______________________________________________________________________________________________
"Near total silence! For 37 years if you summed up the time that I mentioned my experience in Vietnam it would not have added up to ten minutes. Why would I mention it? Nobody was interested…Back then (when I returned from Vietnam) Americans were not real impressed with nineteen year old paratroopers that had just survived 12 months of heavy combat with the 101st Airborne Division 12,000 miles away in South Vietnam. Nearly four decades would pass before the full impact of that bad experience would reveal itself. ____________________
…on May 8, 2005 I boarded a plane in Harrisburg, PA bound for Chicago, Hong Kong and finally Ho Chi Minh City in South Vietnam. I was traveling with Pastor Smoker, the pastor’s wife Jean and two other Vietnam veterans…As I passed through Customs at the Ho Chin Minh airport I felt uneasy perhaps even fearful as I looked into the stern eyes of the Communist government agents. But when we cleared the airport and made our way into the streets of the city everything changed. We found ourselves amidst some of the gentlest people in the world and they loved Americans. My return trip to Vietnam had changed my life. ___________________________ ____________________
When I returned home I possessed a new boldness and direction that could only come from God. I was always a timid and reserved Christian never speaking up and certainly never up front in any church ministries. That all changed. On behalf of veterans I became a public speaker at many events throughout Pennsylvania and was privileged to be asked to speak at Ft. Campbell, Kentucky in 2008 and at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Wall in Washington DC in 2009. I have been given opportunities to honor war veterans in our public schools and communities throughout Pennsylvania for Memorial Day and Veterans Day observances. But it doesn’t stop there. I have made my way to prisons, rescue missions and hospitals to pray with and encourage hurting veterans.
None of that would have happened before my return to Vietnam." (Bob Rummel) _______________________________________________________________ ______________________________________________________________________________________________________________ You can read his full story by clicking on the "Testimonial Letters" link below on this page. __________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Maybe you’ve been thinking about a return visit to Vietnam. Maybe this is a new thought and you are beginning to think there is some merit in the idea. I hope you will contact me so we can talk about what such an experience could mean to you? _______________________
______Please feel free to contact me for information: _Bob Smoker bobsmoker1@gmail.com 717 814-2901
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See here is what the guy's have to say, in their own words ... Testimonial Letters
