Gary Cooper, sixty four, sees his job as taking his outreach ministry to the streets.

He says that the Lord has assigned him mostly to the veterans, and being a combat veteran himself, he knows firsthand what they’ve been through. He battled with a lot of the same things.

Cooper joined the Marines as an infantry man in 1964 and fought in Vietnam in 1965 and 1966. He recalls that the first thing they were encouraged to do was to follow orders without asking questions. He has a memory from when he first arrived in Vietnam of advancing up a hill and then spending the next several nights sleeping on a tombstone. During that firs night on the tombstone, Cooper had nightmares about someone telling him to move off and find his own grave. Even today he still doesn’t like graveyards, and the sight of white roses at military sites often brings him to tears.

During his ten months in Vietnam, Cooper, although not yet a man of religion, asked God to help him through a difficult time. On returning home, he felt rejected and not embraced by society as today’s veterans have been. Some were spat upon or called baby killers, and most didn’t return home as a unit, but as individuals, which made it so much harder to reintegrate. “When I got back I didn’t want to be around anything military at all, said Cooper, “for thirty-nine years.”
Cooper’s marriage quickly broke up, he couldn’t go to school, and he couldn’t keep a job because he didn’t want anyone telling him what to do anymore. Memories of his friends who died after doing what they were told were too fresh in his mind. He struggled for a time to lead a normal life. Finally, twenty-five years ago, he formed a relationship with God, remarried, held a stable job, and raised a family. It has now been fifteen years since he decided to become a minister.

In 1965 in Vietnam he was manning his anti-tank gun and saw his friend Stanley Kochinsky coming toward him to talk and share a break. Kochinsky was passing under a shady tree when Cooper saw someone else who was walking away from the tree step on a landline. The subsequent explosion took off the back of Kochinsky’s head. The memories of his friend’s life draining away in his arms affected Cooper profoundly. He and Kochisnky had promised to visit each other’s family if one of them was killed. But Cooper said he could never seem to get up the courage to visit the Kochinsky family.

But Cooper did find the Kochinsky family, and they embraced him like a long-lost son. To his surprise, he learned that they had been trying to contact him for thirty-nine years. On the day Gary Cooper dies, he will know he fulfilled his obligation to his friend and be at peace.

PHOTO AND TEXT SOURCE: Portraits Of Service, Looking into the Faces of Veterans, by Robert Miller and Andrew Wakeford.

www.amazon.com/Portraits-Service-Looki…/…/ref=sr_1_1…