My grandfather was a pacifist. He believed it was what Jesus taught. I need no other reasons to remain a pacifist for the rest of my life. The fact is I encounter reasons daily which create a desire to cherish and nurture this Christian Quaker testimony in my life. I pray, I hope and I work for this testimony to become a reality in the world.

Although I do not enjoy speaking in public, I recently accepted several speaking engagements in our community to tell the story of a young man whose death in 1945 matters greatly to the Winchester community today. His story is one of the other reasons I am a pacifist.

John Best was born in 1925, the only child of a 45-year-old Quaker couple here in Winchester, Indiana. He grew up in Winchester, helped his parents in their grocery store, attended meeting for worship at Winchester Friends Church, and played the trumpet. He was an outstanding trumpet player by the time he graduated from high school in May of 1943.

In December of 1943, towards the end of World War II, John was drafted. He went into the army in January 1944. With his trumpet skills, he was assigned as a bugler to the Infantry. After about a year in training camps, he became a part of the 106th Calvary and sailed to Liverpool, England.

Within a month of arriving in England, John’s unit was in the middle of Europe preparing for what was to become the Battle of the Bulge, the bloodiest battle American forces experienced in WWII. The German Ardennes Offensive was thrown in force without warning at the 106th Calvary on December 16, 1944 and John’s unit was the first to report heavy mortar fire from the Germans. Within an hour, the enemy penetrated the unit. John’s division had been on the continent for only 15 days with many new soldiers and an average age of 22 years. There were almost 20,000 Americans killed in the Battle of the Bulge, almost 50,000 wounded, and John was one of the 23,000 captured or missing during the battle.

Another Indiana son, author Kurt Vonnegut, was close to the same age as John Best. His novel Slaughterhouse-Five is largely based on his experiences as a combat infantryman in the 106th Infantry Division. Vonnegut was also one of the soldiers captured during the 106th's defeat at the Battle of the Bulge. He was taken to an underground POW camp in Dresden where he experienced first-hand the Dresden fire-bombing. His experiences as a member of the 106th and a POW heavily influenced many of his early novels.

On January 16, 1945, a year after John went to war his parents received notice their son was missing in action. After weeks of not knowing what happened to their son, on March 7th they received a letter from John, written from a prisoner of war camp in Germany. While John was a prisoner of war, the Yalta Conference took place. Shortly afterward the fire bombing of Germany began. On March 31, 1945, thirty-six British aircraft bombed Halle, Germany from an altitude of 25,000 ft. The British commander reported in his flight diary “flak was meager and inaccurate and all the aircraft returned safely to base with no casualties”.

Except there were casualties on the ground during this air bombing. John was in a prisoner of war camp near Halle, Germany and died that day in the Allied bombing. He died one month before Hitler’s death and two months before the end of the war. When John did not come home at the end of the war, his parents went to post-war Germany and spent 2 months searching for him. They were not able to find him or his body but they did not give up hope he might be alive. Five years after the end of the war, John’s remains were found, identified and brought to Winchester for burial.

Winchester Friends Church is now a steward of the legacy and memory of John’s life. After his parents died, they left their estate to our Meeting, the local hospital and to the school system. For many years, Winchester Friends used their interest income from the trust to help with major building projects and normal expenses. When there was a surplus from the interest income, the meeting invested in certificates of deposit. About 10 years ago the meeting reached consensus not to accumulate more assets for the church, but to be active stewards of the excess annual interest income. For the past 10 years, over $110,000 of the surplus has been distributed outside of the walls of the meetinghouse to make a difference in the world.

Every year the meeting invests a portion of this money in the work of the oldest and largest peace lobby in Washington DC, the Friends Committee on National Legislation. Support of their efforts to work for a world "free of war and the threat of war" seems a fitting way to honor the life and sacrifice of John Best. And I also believe John’s parents would be at peace knowing their legacy and their love for their son is actively working to create hope no other parent will know the pain and loss of a child in war. I do not want this family and their contribution to Winchester and the world to be forgotten. In Africa, we called this “warming the money” and making it alive with the memory of the people who sacrificed to make our lives and our institutions a little better and a little more humane in light of the reality facing the world today.

This month Ron and I will attend the annual meeting of Friends Committee on National Legislation in Washington DC. It is an honor to represent Winchester Friends and Indiana Yearly Meeting and to represent the life and sacrifice of John Best. However, the greatest honor is to be released each day to live out Christ’s intentions for our world and to work for peace.