From Their Souls – Service | Sacrifice

Brigadier General Robinson Risner, a senior ranking officer, was held and tortured for 7 1/2 years in the infamous Hanoi Hilton, a North Vietnamese POW prison.  Senior officers, as they were moved in and out of solitary confinement or singled out for torture, report that The Lord’s Prayer was spoken from the depths of the soul, to bring courage to the 47 men whose days in captivity totaled 108,116.  In those dark and terrifying times, rotting away thousands of miles from home, Colonel Robinson Risner recounted in his book about their decision to conduct unit worship and prayer services in defiance of the communist North Vietnamese.  He wrote,

“I could not have existed if I had not been able to pray.  To be able to mention in prayer the names of my wife, children, friends or relatives, or one of my fellow POWs who I knew was being tortured or mistreated, brought us together.  The thousands of miles, the walls of my cell, the guards, were all transcended by this dimension of communication.”

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