We have heard with our ears, Oh God, And our fathers have told us, what work thou didst in their days, in the times of old. (Psalm 44:1)

Family and friends in San Antonio were treated last night to an unusual look into the heart of a son whose life was influenced and defined by two great individuals — a faithful father who died when he was only five years old, and a loving mother who spent the remainder of her life schooling her children and progeny in the vision and ideals of her fallen husband. Now at the age of sixty-five, John (“Johnny Boy”) Butler III speaks with enthusiasm of the impact on a young man of a father who took time to exhort him verbally and in writing from the battlefields of Iwo Jima about the meaning of noble manhood. He spoke with tenderness about the special love between his father and mother, and shared some truly profound and intimate letters of devotion between a man and woman sent from the battlefield.

The event, which took place in our home, was the brainchild of one of the faithful servants of the Lord and sons of honor with whom I am privileged to co-labor at the Vision Forum, Wesley Strackbein, who treated us with a poem on manhood he had written and dedicated for the occasion to Mr. Butler. The John Butler story is featured in my article in the July edition of Citizen Magazine and in the up-and-coming film, Faith of Our Fathers. The picture below is of Little Johnny receiving his father’s Navy Cross for valor and heroism on Iwo Jima from an Admiral.

As an aside, we had dinner with John Butler III and his ninety-one-year-old uncle Clinton Butler (brother to John Butler II who died on Iwo Jima) who shared stories from the days he was a mounted United States advisor in the field to Chiang Kai-Shek. (Recall that Chiang Kai-Shek, 1886-1975, first served as chief of staff to Sun Yat-Sen, founder of the Chinese Kuomintang, or Nationalist party. After the death of Dr. Sun in 1925, Chiang took over Kuomintang and ruled mainland China from 1928 to 1949, when the Chinese Communists under Mao won the civil war and instituted an unprecedented reign of death and murder. Chiang, together with the remaining Nationalist forces, moved to the island of Taiwan (Formosa), where he set up a government-in-exile. Had Chiang been successful, China would have likely been very pro-America and very open to Christianity.)