Tomorrow marks the 61st anniversary of my father’s still CIA-classified death in Vietnam. As I reflect, I’m drawn to the 400 letters he wrote that I discovered in my mother’s bottom dresser drawer 26 years after his mysterious death as a passenger on a CIA Air America plane. These letters became the impetus for my award-winning investigative memoir, “Because: A CIA Coverup and a Son’s Odyssey to Find the Father he Never Knew,” and fueled my ongoing legal battle with the CIA over their refusal to respond to my FOIA requests for more than a decade. Astonishingly, these letters show how faith and a profound love for the Episcopal Church transformed a warrior into a humanitarian, a whistleblower, and a man determined to confront the consequences of state-sponsored violence and corruption. Even as a young man, my father recognized how faith and his deep connection to the Episcopal Church provided him with a theological and ethical framework to grapple with warfare, corruption, and the government’s disregard for innocent civilians. For example, in one letter, or rather a prayer, to his older brother Isaac, also a WWII combat veteran, which I recount in my memoir, he writes:
But you know I’ve never seen a battle or war fought to victory on prayer so I work like hell, drink like hell, and say oh God of God light of light forgive me for my hate but perhaps you will understand part of this hate is for the love of you. Amen, and life goes on another drink another fight another prayer. Mixed up world. But I can say the Episcopal Church has taught me that my Christ was sent to earth to love forgive and understand sinners like me. Finding the church has given me an answer I never had as a Boy you know I only wish I could obtain the faith of Betty and my children. Because their faith is the greatest faith I have seen in a hell of a long time.
To better understand how his faith sustained him, I’ve come to see that the Episcopal tradition offers a compelling ethical framework for confronting war, government corruption, and the disregard for innocent life. Rooted in the Baptismal Covenant’s call to seek justice, love neighbors, and respect the dignity of every human being, Episcopalians are summoned to challenge injustice as central to their faith. Through advocacy, transparency, and solidarity with the global Anglican Communion, Episcopalians unite their worship of God with active defense of the vulnerable and ongoing resistance to systems that devalue life, making social justice inseparable from spiritual practice. Finally, the Church’s theology critiques both the moral failures of war and the systemic sins of state-sponsored violence and corruption, urging believers to act as prophetic voices holding governments accountable.
His prophetic voice cost him his life but granted him an everlasting life with an unending, intimate relationship with God. When confronted by his superiors to change his reports and lie in them, he wrote my mother:
I am a little angry. I am doing a survey for USOM on the security problem of the Refugee Program. Well, what will be will be. We give the VN officials money food etc. for the refugees – they lie and say there are 10,000 when there is 1,000 and they won’t give them the food or money – hoping they (the refugees) will move on. We must take over the issuing of these commodities or the people will never get a dam thing. I bet one thing – if the VC caught one of their men cheating they would cut his head off. But here Betty the rich get richer and the poor get poorer and the fat ass Americans do nothing about it because they have no backbone or are afraid to work. But as long as I work I’ll call a spade a spade and no man will get me to write a white paper unless it’s the truth.
No one, but no one gets out with the people and sees that they get food or what they have coming.
Must close for now.
Because,
Jack
