I’VE NEVER BEEN TO HEAVEN

About the Book

The USS Repose and Vietnam are now fifty-five years in the rearview mirror, but it seems to be a previous lifetime. Before reading this book, I invite the reader to, just for the time being, displace the movies you have seen relative to the war. No movie can display the true emotions of the experience and lifetime of reliving any war. Only those who have experienced it can tell the real experiences they endured. Movies are stories of individual battles and experiences that may be ‘based on a real story’. You may have emotional experiences as you watch those movies, however, other than a scene or two, those scenes quickly and quietly fade into the past.

About the Author

Kurt Turner was born in 1947 and raised in a small town alongside the Ohio River. After high school graduation, he fulfilled his dream of becoming a Navy hospital corpsman. Knowing this would lead to his orders to Vietnam, he accepted whatever fate lay ahead. He arrived in Da Nang on Halloween of 1967, leaving the USS Repose on Halloween of 1968 with a psyche full of the things in which PTSD is made. Many horrific events were repressed (some suppressed) until revealed in future years.

When a string of negative events revealed memories of the past, a husband and father became lost in a downward spiral dealing with divorce, the loss of his mother, and the loss of two professional jobs due to earlier back injuries. His battle to keep both jobs was ultimately denied.

Eventually called into the ministry, he turned his negativity into several ministries. However, an incident in which he covered up a grenade with his body while running through triage and tossing it into the South China Sea as it exploded, saved the lives of staff and patients in triage. This incident came to life once the time of repression of thoughts and memories of the distant past were released in full force.

His story became a dichotomy between religion and the horrors of war as seen through Ecclesiastes 3:1-8.