When you have lived into what we might call the autumn of life, do you look back and marvel at the friends, helpers or angels who stepped into your life just when you needed one? Perhaps if you are meant to be born in a certain era and place, God has even worked to bring it about before you were born. My words won’t mean much to any who do not believe in God. Without Him in the equation, life is an accident about to happen.
Dad and Mother, Neal and Durell Dickerson Justus, were temporarily living in the attic of Papa Jesse and Mama Lela Justus. I was on the way to being born but Mother had problems and went to stay with her parents, Dock and Effie Welborn Dickerson, in the Bridge Creek area of Rabun County, Ga. Effie – dear Nanny to us grandkids – was a well-known midwife in those days and expert with handling births. As I was a first born grandson, Nanny called in Dr. Dover for my arrival.
Tornado at Burton Lake bridge
Three weeks before my birth, March 17, 1932, a huge tornado touched down at the Burton Lake bridge and tore up a mile-wide strip clear across Rabun County to the Rabun Gap area. The tornado by-passed the Bridge Creek area but roared through Germany Valley, destroying or damaging several homes and barns, along with orchards and crops.
Papa, a strong believer in God and wise, always looked at the evening sky before going to bed each night. He told Neal not to sleep upstairs as the western sky looked ominous. When the tornado took off the entire roof that night and the side rooms added to the log house built in 1875, the great room surrounded by notched and hewed chestnut logs held together. Everyone in it were saved. I was born safely on Bridge Creek April 10, 1932, during a wild thunderstorm.
Survival overseas
I went on my life’s trail and in 1950, after finishing Truett-McConnell College in Cleveland, Ga., I joined the Air Force. From my entry I kept fairly detailed records of my life through 22 years of service. In Korea I got by ok until the Asiatic flu put me in the hospital for about three weeks.
In two ocean voyages, one to Korea and the other to the Philippines, a sailor on each one befriended me and made my journey one of pleasure and discovery. On a later assignment to Vietnam, two of my pals were medics. I visited native tribes they ministered to and they kept sure I got all the vaccines I needed to ward of dire diseases. Then, one wild night when I was in the latrine reading a western novel, shooting and explosions sent me racing in my shorts and t-shirt for my M-16 and trusty old 45 automatic pistol. A bullet put two holes in my t-shirt and through my upper left arm, shattering the bone. I became a casualty and learned a phase of life I needed to know.
The two medics – my angels – were right there and in a few minutes had me on a C-130 transport – my favorite – to the hospital in Saigon. After operations there I was airlifted in a hospital plane to a military hospital near Tokyo. There, to make a long story short, I spent about two months receiving more operations and rehab. A wonderful specialist, a lady, helped bring me out of my self-pity. She coupled me in rehab work with a 12-year-old lovely girl, a child of a military family, who was badly burned in a gas explosion, to lift me into the sunshine again.
