By Ray Dupere

To this day I cannot remember why or how I got involved in skydiving. I only remember that it happened right after jump school at Fort Benning, Georgia. As a young single Second Lieutenant, I had some time on my hands during the Infantry Basic Course, so skydiving was one of the ways I filled up my Saturdays and Sundays. Since I had just completed jump school, my instructor did not take a lot of time teaching me the finer points of the sport. He briefly explained how to get out on the step of the small plane and then push off and form a spread-eagle position while I waited for the static line to open the parachute. I’m pretty sure I completed my static line jumps and my first five free falls in one weekend … and once I did, I was hooked.

I say he did not take a lot of time to teach me the finer points of sports jumping, but to be fair, I’m not sure that’s totally accurate. I only know that on my third free fall jump I ended up on my back as I was falling to earth, and no amount of kicking and jerking of my arms and legs was any help in getting my body to roll over into the proper face-down position. So, sensing that time was ticking away, I pulled my ripcord and soon enough I was jerked into the appropriate feet-to-earth orientation. I then looked up and discovered that my parachute was simply one big jumbled-up mess otherwise known as a malfunction. And that is when I discovered that the routine boring repetitious training that we had at jump school actually worked. I reached down and put my left hand over my reserve parachute and pulled the cord. I then took the spare chute in my hand fluffed it out until the wind caught it and it billowed up and it was time to start preparing to land. Upon landing my instructor explained that the way to right oneself was to simply arch your back and form a spread-eagle position again … and with that he sent me right back up for my final two free fall jumps.

From there I bought my own sports parachute gear and for the next four years I brought my gear with me wherever I went hoping to find a jump club where I could systematically start filling up my log book with a record of all my various and sundry jumps. While stationed with the Berlin Brigade in Berlin, Germany, I had occasion to jump in a number of different venues. Jumping in West Berlin was never going to happen for obvious reasons, but I did find a German jump club in Braunschweig, West Germany, which was about a two and a half hour drive away. It meant that I had drive through East Germany to get there, and I had to apply for a weekend pass whenever I wanted to go, but as long as I was judicious in how often I asked, my battalion commander was willing to accommodate my new-found passion.

The other person I had to be careful with was my wife, Avril, of course. Looking back on it now, I realize that she was a lot more accommodating of my jumping habits than I realized at the time. Not only did she let me go away on those occasional weekends to Braunschweig, but she also allowed me to crisscross Europe on our vacations looking for jump opportunities. The result was that by the time my Berlin tour was over, I had logged-in jumps not only in Germany, but also in Spa, Belgium, and at a jump club near Salisbury, England, and even at an obscure drop-zone somewhere in Northern France. We had been to England for a couple of weeks, and as we were driving back to Berlin across France we passed by an open field that had a sign that read “Baptime de l’Aire”. Even though I had taken French at West Point I did not immediately recognize the phrase as relating to skydiving; but it did not take me too long to imagine that it might.

So, with Avril’s permission I turned the car around and went back to check it out, and sure enough it was a jump club. The French jumpers were more than happy to let me make a couple of jumps with them that day before we continued on our way.

All of the above explains how I ended up with my jump gear in Vietnam. When it was my turn to go to Vietnam in the Fall of 1971, I was due to fly out of McChord Air Force Base in Washington State. As it turned out, my roommate from our Firstie year was in medical school in Seattle. Also, there was at the time a huge skydiving center in nearby Snohomish, Washington, so I took all my jump gear with me. I stayed with John a few days and did some jumping and Space Needle sightseeing, and then headed off to Vietnam with my jump gear in tow.

I was in Vietnam towards the end of American involvement there, so I ended up with several different assignments. I started out with the 101st Airborne Division up in Phu Bai, and from there I went to Long Binh before finally ending up in Cam Rahn Bay. Wherever I went I had my jump gear in tow, with the one exception being when I was at Firebase Jack – for obvious reasons. I never intended nor expected to get the opportunity to jump, of course, but having brought my gear with me to jump near Seattle, I had to take it with me the rest of the way. Oh, I just remembered, I did not take it with me on R&R in Hawaii, either. I’m pretty sure that was one occasion when Avril would not have been so understanding; and to be honest I really didn’t have jumping on my mind then, in any case.

Fast forward to my last week in Vietnam. I was sitting at a table in the Cam Rahn Bay Officer’s Club with several other guys drinking whatever; and somehow the subject turned to skydiving. As it happened, a number of the other guys either had been or still were skydivers. I’m pretty sure I’m the one who then confessed to the absurdity of the fact that I happened to have my jump gear with me in Vietnam. Imagine the shock when two other guys at the table confessed that they too had their jump gear with them! And as if that wasn’t shock enough, two of the remaining guys were Huey pilots and as a matter-of-fact asked the three of us if we would like to make a jump! What? How could that be possible? They simply said that if we wanting to make a jump, we should meet them at 0700 the next morning at a designated hanger, and they would take us up.

We didn’t need to be told twice. At 0700, there we were right where they told us to be, dressed in our jump gear with our chutes on our back, ready to board their chopper. They told us that they would take us out into the boonies and up to about 12,000 feet and let us jump. They also told us that since there was no telling who or what might be out there we should immediately prepare to be picked up once we landed. The other two jumpers were more experienced than me, so they told me to jump first and then they would follow and hook up with me. It all went like clockwork. When the pilots gave us the go signal, I jumped out and did the best spread-eagle position I knew how; and the other two guys came and hooked up with me. We probably held the three-pointed star for about 20-30 seconds and then pulled our ripcords and landed and scooped up our chutes and waited for the chopper. The pilots came down and whisked us away back to the Cam Rahn airfield thus ending my one and only “combat” parachute jump … far and away the most memorable one in my log book!

Truth be told, I shouldn’t be a West Point grad looking forward to his 50th reunion in 2019. My freshman year of high school was horrible, though I did rebound and end up with three years on the honor roll to follow. And my freshman year at the University of North Carolina was also pretty bad by USMA standards. And as it turned out, I barely got in on my second try earning a qualified alternate appointment. I recently served on an interview board for one of our Connecticut Congresswomen, and every candidate we interviewed was far better qualified for West Point than I ever was. So, I have always looked back on the opportunity I had to attend the Academy as a gift from God.

That’s why many of the things that mean the most to me in life almost 50 years later I attribute to either West Point or to my wife, whom I met at West Point. One of those things is my love for “The Beautiful Game” or football as the world knows it or soccer as it is called in the U.S. It all began in early September of our Plebe year when I was assigned to the D-3 intramural soccer team. As I remember it, we were gathered together on one of the playing fields down at the North Athletic Fields along the Hudson River. The Firstie in charge asked the 15 or so Plebes standing around if anyone had ever played soccer before and I think three said they had. So, they were automatically assigned to whatever position they said they were good at. When he asked if anyone wanted to play goalie I raised my hand.

I had been a baseball catcher so I thought maybe I could be a goalie, and that was it. It turns out I was actually pretty good at it! I seem to recollect that our Yearling year we made it to the Brigade championship but lost when one of our defenders accidentally deflected the ball into our own goal.

I didn’t have much opportunity to watch or play soccer once we left our Highland home, but I never lost my love for the game. After leaving active duty we moved to Vermont where I played in an adult Saturday morning summer league. I wasn’t as good as most of the younger college players, but I had fun none-the-less. And when we moved to Dallas to attend seminary I played in another league on our seminary team. I had to give up playing goalie in those leagues and played defender instead. At 5 ft. 8 in. I was never destined to be a true goalie in any case. Even while we were in Dallas I never attended a Cowboys game, but I do recall watching the U.S. National Soccer Team play Russia (I think) in the Cowboys’ stadium.

I suppose it goes without saying that my two kids, Jeremy and Lindsay, never had a choice when it came to what they were going to play growing up. They were both introduced to soccer before either of them even knew there were other options; and as it turned out they were both fairly good. They played travel soccer quite a bit and started every game of their high school careers, though they didn’t end up doing anything with it after that. But to this day my son, who’s now 40 still enjoys watching it when he can. At one point in his younger days he even imagined that he wanted to work in the brand new Major League Soccer that was just getting started in the U.S. in the mid-1990’s. He had the opportunity to spend the summer of 1997 as an intern working in the media office of the Tampa Bay Mutiny, which was one of the original teams that no longer exists now. I remember how excited I was for him when that opportunity presented itself … not knowing that one day I would have the opportunity for a similar experience myself.

The story of how that all came about is too long to tell here but suffice it to say that in all my wildest imaginings, I could never have predicted that beginning in late 2003 I would get the chance to work for three years in professional soccer in England! SCORE, which is now Sports Chaplaincy UK, consisted of two people. John, my boss, had started the organization almost 25 years earlier; and besides his full-time work as the director of SCORE, he was also the volunteer chaplain for Manchester United (ManU) Football Club. He oversaw the work of SCORE and represented the ministry in the northern half of England and to the sporting world beyond. I represented SCORE in the southern half of England and primarily worked in soccer, but we also sought to expand the concept of sports chaplaincy into other sports like rugby, cricket, tennis, motor sports, the Olympics, etc. John was the chaplain of ManU; I was the chaplain of Watford Football Club which now plays in the Premier League but was in the next lower league back then.

Basically, we helped local pastors become officially recognized as volunteer chaplains to professional sports teams throughout England. Those three years were an interesting and enjoyable time.

It began in late September of 2003 when I travelled over to England about two months ahead of Avril. This gave me time to shadow my boss for a while, and to begin getting some of our personal affairs in order over there. Two memorable things occurred during those first two months. The first was during a visit with John to the Manchester United training grounds. While waiting in line for lunch in the cafeteria, one of the players came up and followed me down the lunch line. A quick glance over and I discovered that he was none other than Ronaldo.

As a longtime soccer fan, it was all I could do to simply go through the line without gushing all over him and asking for his autograph. The second event occurred in Greece where John and I attended a world-wide sports ministry conference with over 750 people in attendance. During one seminar we were told to turn around and pray with whoever was behind us. Imagine my surprise when it turned out to be Ben Peterson, a wrestling gold medalist at the 1972 Munich Olympics.

I had worked out with the wrestling team at UNC, and done intramural wrestling at West Point, so I knew immediately who he was.

In addition to my regular SCORE duties, I also had the opportunity to attend the 24 Hours of Le Mans road race in France. I have been an avid sports car fan for many years, so this was truly a dream come true. I’ve subsequently had the opportunity to attend two more times with the some of my guy friends from England.

As far as regular duties are concerned I had a blast. I probably attended over 75 professional soccer games during our time in England, and I think I only had to pay for one of them. In addition, in my travels around the country I was able to visit dozens of stadiums from the fantastic Anfield of Liverpool Football Club to some smaller venues like Rushdon & Diamonds made famous because the owner was the founder of the once-famous Doc Martens boot
company. I even got to visit Honda’s Formula 1 factory, which was quite fascinating.

One last humorous part of my regular duties was all the soccer that I got to watch on tv at home. Avril is not an avid sports fan, but whenever there was an important game on television all I had to do was tell her there was a game on and she would defer to me and let me watch it. That has only ever been true in all our married life during those three years in England!

Perhaps the most surreal thing that ever occurred was when Avril and I were invited to attend the British National Prayer Breakfast in Westminster Hall at the Houses of Parliament.

It was in the Fall of 2004 and the theme that year was ministry in business and sports. As SCORE’s representative in the South of England, I was asked to help organize the order of service for the event. One perk of that effort was that I was also invited to a formal reception in the residence of the Speaker of the House of Commons the night before the prayer breakfast. All of that was something I never saw coming.

The most poignant event that I was tangentially associated with though, was the London bombings in July of 2005. During my time in the Maine National Guard, I had become a trainer of trainers, and I had recently been doing some seminars around the country on trauma and crisis response ministry. So, it was sort of known that I had some knowledge of the subject. The afternoon of the bombings I received a phone call asking if I could meet with one of the men who attended our church. I was told that he had been on one of the subway trains that had been bombed. In helping him to talk through what had happened I discovered that he was a true hero. Because of his previous work for the railroad industry, he had helped people from the wreckage out to safety, and then gone back and aided rescue workers when they arrived by doing some triage prior to their arrival. He eventually received some formal recognition from the government for his heroism. In addition, one of the people who was killed was a young man who was an avid motor sports fan with some interesting connections. As it happened, I ended up attending his funeral the day we were supposed to have lunch to discuss some future ministry plans.

One of my favorite Bible verses for many years comes from Ephesians 3:20-21 which says, “To him who is able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine, according to his power that is at work within us, to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus throughout all generations, for ever and ever!” God has truly done that for me. He has given me a life far more interesting than I could ever have imagined when I left North Carolina to head up to West Point back in July of 1965.

I was rummaging through a box of stuff recently and came across a photograph of myself dating back to my high school days. Looking at my young self-50+ years later got me to thinking … how did I go from that 17-year-old kid to a 71-year-old retired pastor with 30+ years of ministry experience? Or, how did I go from “Cross Rifles” on my lapels to “The Cross”?

That probably seems like a relatively easy question to answer since like my other stories it simply calls for a recitation of the historical events that led from one thing to another. But truth be told it is not nearly as simple as that. For how does one explain in any meaningful way how one gets changed from the inside out … and where do you begin telling the story?

I think that from a very young age God and I had always been playing a game of hide and seek. When I was hiding from Him He would be seeking me … and when I was seeking Him He was nowhere to be found. Not because He wasn’t there, but because I was looking in all the wrong places. But as I said in one of my other stories, God has been truly good to me right from the start.

I point to two people as being the most influential in pointing me to a lasting faith in Christ. The first was my roommate during our Firstie year, and the second was my wife. From my roommate I got to watch someone live out his faith in real everyday human terms for nine full months. He gave me reason to believe that there might be something real to this idea of being “born again”. And from my girlfriend and eventual wife I had a reason to continue playing hide and seek until I finally ended up looking in the right place. Once I met Avril I knew I did not want to lose her and I knew I wanted what she had so that we two could truly become one.

The most poignant thing that I remember about things relating to God growing up was the gnawing question, “What’s going to happen to me when I die?” That and the fact that I did not think I was going to fare very well when the time came to find out. I grew up attending church very routinely, but even that did not do anything lasting to help alleviate my uncertainty. So, as I grew up, I measured everything I learned about God and religion to how close it came to giving me a final answer to the big question. My roommate was one of the first people I ever remember meeting who could sincerely answer that question for himself … and Avril was another. I watched him closely…and I became more and more convinced that Avril was a keeper.

So, just as my interest in all things Russia were systematically imprinted on my life as time went by, so too were things about God and the big chill imprinted on me as well. After West Point and marriage to Avril, the next place that imprinting happened was in Berlin. Soon after Avril arrived she met another Army wife who asked her if we would like to attend a home Bible study at their apartment. It was taught by an older American missionary couple and after dipping our toes in the water Avril and I made it a regular habit during our time in Berlin. Nothing permanent happened with regards to an answer to the question, but it was certainly something that the Lord used to keep nudging me forward.

My time in Vietnam was another period of significant imprinting. I would imagine that the question, “What’s going to happen to me when I die?” is one that a lot of people ask in such circumstances. It certainly was in mine. That and the fact that I simply ran into an unending stream of people who all seemed to have the same kind of sincere answer to the question for themselves that I had originally found with my roommate and Avril. It’s the one that Jesus so succinctly makes in the Gospel of John, chapter 3, verse 7, “You must be born again.” Even so, as with Berlin, nothing permanent happened with regards to an answer to the question during my time in Vietnam.

Finding the answer for myself didn’t happen until after I got back to the United States and into my assignment with the 5th Special Forces Group at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. Soon after arriving there I was sent as a liaison officer to work in the Tactical Operations Center of a Joint Army, Navy, Air Force and Marines Task Force. I will never forget what happened. I was in the middle of a late-night shift in the TOC, and a big, impressive African-American Army chaplain came walking through with a pile of books in his arms up to his chin. He asked me if I would like something to read and I said sure. With that he handed me a book from his pile and kept on walking.

The book he gave me was “The Cross and the Switchblade” by Rev. David Wilkerson. I read the book off and on as I had time until my shift was over and then I went back to my tent to finish it. As soon as I closed the book I realized that I could no longer avoid the obvious … I must be born again. So, I began to pray. For the first time in my life I prayed as if God were real and I really wanted to talk to Him and I really wanted to hear from Him. I prayed all kinds of stuff. I remember saying something like knowing I had messed up my life and I was a sinner and wanted to know I was forgiven. At one point I even prayed through the Apostle’s Creed confessing that I believed all those things it says. All I know is that somehow, somewhere in the middle of my prayer, I sensed the great burden of my burning question that had been weighing me down for years was lifted. I felt clean and new and different … and I knew what was going to happen to me when I died. I was going to be with God forever. The day was Thursday, May 18, 1972.

All of this was part of the necessary process if God was eventually going to take me from “Crossed Rifles” to “The Cross”. 2 Corinthians, chapter 5, verse 17, which has been a favorite of mine for a long time now, says, “If anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation, the old things have passed away and all things have become new.” That’s the way I felt going forward. From the time I was 10 years old I had thought I was supposed to go to West Point and become a career officer in the Army. But now I thought differently. I didn’t know what I was supposed to do, but I felt deep inside it was something else. In due course I resigned my commission and Avril and I moved to White River Junction, Vermont, where we found teaching positions in the schools there. Avril taught high school choir and I taught 5th grade math. And, while we were searching for a home to buy, we also found a little Bible church which we started to attend.

In that Bible church we started to grow in our faith and in due course I found out what I was supposed to do with the rest of my life. God pointed me in the direction of seminary with the goal of eventually becoming a pastor. The brand-new pastor of Valley Bible Church (his first Sunday at the church was the first Sunday we walked in the door) had gone to Dallas Theological Seminary, so that’s where I ended up going. We arrived in Dallas in August of 1975, and four years later I left with a Master’s in Theology with a major in Bible Exposition.

I didn’t end up going straight into the ministry as I had originally imagined. We moved back to White River, Vermont, and I worked in business for six years. In due course, the Lord did lead us into ministry, though, when in 1985 I became pastor of Church of the Open Door in Hampden, Maine. A year later, when I heard that a Maine Army National Guard Engineer Battalion a couple of miles down the road needed a Chaplain, I interviewed for the position and was accepted.

A couple of years earlier while living in Vermont I had had my commission reinstated and had served there as an Infantry officer, so it was a relatively simple process to get a branch transfer from the “Crossed Rifles” of the Infantry to “The Cross” of the Chaplains Corps.

I know I’m not the only USMA ’69 classmate to meet the love of his life at a West Point mixer, but you will never be able to convince me that my West Point love story is not a special one.  So, as an introduction to my tale, let me begin with a little bit of poetry I once wrote which sums up our first few moments in a nutshell.  (To be sung to the tune of “Hallelujah” – by Cohen not Handel).

I saw a girl with a radiant mane,

So I walked up to her and asked her name,

And she looked at me and said, “What’s it to ya?”

Hallelujah, hallelujah, hallelujah, hallelujah.

It was Saturday, February 15, 1969, and there was a Valentine’s Mixer scheduled that evening at Cullum Hall that I had no intention of attending.

Instead, I had every intention of spending the evening shooting pool in the pool room above the office of the Cadet Hostess.  I had not really gone out with any girls for a long while after having had my heart broken many months earlier.  But I was playing pool with a friend of mine who was in the band that was playing the mixer that night, and he convinced me to come help him set up.  So I did.

 

Most of the early part of the evening is a fog, but one thing I do remember very clearly is seeing a pretty redhead sitting at the opposite end of my table with no one paying any attention to her, and with her paying no attention to anyone else.

So in due course I got up and walked around to the other end and said, “Hi, what’s your name?”  Without skipping a beat she looked up and rather curtly said, “Guess!”  I took that to mean that she wasn’t interested, so I said something like “Alright, I can take a hint.”  But as I started to turn away she told me she was just kidding and that I could sit down.  I eventually found out her name was Avril, and that she had reluctantly come up from New Jersey with her sister and a friend.  The three of them were basically “Renegade Drags!” This is a term that has probably gone out of style; but back then it was term used to refer to girls who came to mixers without invitations from the Cadet Hostess’ Office.  Basically they were party crashers.  It happened all the time.

Besides Avril, I also met her sister and her best friend and I learned that Avril was a music major at Montclair State College.  And she learned that I would soon be taking possession of my sort of blue-green 1968 Triumph TR-250 convertible.

Because I had not been around girls for a while, and because of our sort of shaky start, I was not real sure where things stood with us. So, at one point when she started to go to the ladies room, I suggested she leave her purse.

She asked why and I said that if she left her purse I knew she would be coming back.  In the end she didn’t leave her purse, but she did come back!  I don’t remember much else about the evening except that we spent the whole rest of the dance together and that we had a good time.  However, when the time came to walk her back to her car and say good-bye, we completely forgot to exchange contact details.  But by God’s grace that wasn’t the end of the story.

Having broken the ice and gotten back into the world of women, I decided to look for a date for the following weekend, but I didn’t have Avril’s contact info.  So I pulled out my notebook and started calling girls that I had once-upon-a-time gone out with.  However, they were all girls that I had not had any contact with for over a year, and for some reason not one of them was interested in picking up where we had left off.  So I decided to try to figure out how I could get in touch with Avril, which meant that I had to call the good, old-fashioned telephone information operator.

Everything got off to a good start as I began to explain to the operator that I was a West Point Cadet and that I had met a girl at a dance and I didn’t have her phone number and could she please help me try to locate her?  She very pleasantly agreed to give it a try.  I told her that I knew that the girl lived in Rutherford, New Jersey, and that her father’s name began with an “A”.  But then she asked me what Avril’s last name was … and when I said, “Smith”, the operator rather loudly said, “Do you know how many Smiths there are in the Bergen County phone book?”  So I gently reminded her that she lived in Rutherford and that her father had an odd name that began with an “A”, so could she please just read down through the “A’s” and maybe I would recognize it.  When she got to “Alden” I said that was an odd name, so if she would give me that number I would hope for the best and not bother her again.  And the rest is as they say … history.

I called the number and Avril answered the phone and she came up the following weekend.  We continued to date from then on all the way through graduation and on into the summer when we had the chance.  Later that year we were even able to watch Army beat Navy 27-0 on Thanksgiving weekend at JFK Stadium in Philadelphia.  I distinctly remember some rather happy soul behind us yelling in his glorious New York City area accent, “First it was the Jets, then it was the Mets, and now it’s the Cadets!”  The Jets had won the Super Bowl in January, and the Mets had won the World Series in October, so it was a great year for NY City sports fans.

In a previous “Days Forward” story, I mentioned that I was originally scheduled to go to Vietnam, and that a friend I met in Infantry Officer Basic had orders for Germany.  We each decided we wanted to swap our orders, so we asked our CO for permission and he agreed to put in the request.  Looking back on it all now God must have been pulling some strings for us even back then.  To get my orders changed from Vietnam to Germany all I had to do was ask.  It was as simple as that, and more importantly, it meant that I could ask Avril to marry me without having to wait until I got back from Vietnam.

One funny memory involving our engagement happened right before I left for Germany in December of 1969. When I was growing up my mom would often show me her diamond ring and tell me the story of how my grandfather had won it in a poker game.  She said that the original men’s ring had been given to my father as the first-born son, and that someday it would be mine as their first-born son.  She had never had an engagement ring, so my dad had the ring downsized and made into a woman’s ring for her with the understanding that it would someday be mine.  We would occasionally talk about how maybe I could someday use the rather large stone for my eventual bride’s engagement ring … whoever that might be.  That bride turned out to be Avril, so in late 1969 I asked my mom for the stone which she reluctantly gave me, and I had it put into a miniature class ring to give to her on our engagement night a week before Christmas.  Instead, the next day, right after she arrived back from dropping me off at McGuire Air Force Base in New Jersey for my flight to Germany, her engagement ring arrived directly from the jeweler by US mail. Not all stories work out as perfectly as we might imagine they should.

I arrived in Berlin to begin my service with the Berlin Brigade right before Christmas of 1969.  Then in June of 1970 I flew back to the US for our wedding at West Point.  Because we were having a small wedding, Avril decided to use the Post Chapel rather than the Cadet Chapel.

We had a beautiful wedding on a beautiful sunny day with our lovely wedding pictures being taken out at Trophy Point with lots of tourists watching in the background.  A couple of days later I returned to Germany with my new bride to begin our life together in Berlin.

We’ve now been together forty-seven years, and we are looking forward to two big anniversaries in the not too distant future.  The 50^th anniversary of the day we met will be Friday, February 15, 2019, and our 50^th wedding anniversary will be Saturday, June 13, 2020.  God has been truly good to us right from the start!