As night spread a dark blanket over northern Luzon in the Philippines, Bill dug a hole three feet wide and six feet long. Opening a stretcher, he placed it across the bottom to form a mattress. Then he climbed in to catch some sleep.
Bill was a medic with the United States Army. World War II raged across the Pacific islands, and blood and screams had filled his day. But night brought some relief. Occasionally sniper fire or the deep-throated boom of an American cannon would rouse him, but he’d become accustomed to the sounds of war.
«Get out of this foxhole and go back to the surgical tent!»
The voice seemed so real that Bill lifted himself on one elbow and looked around to see who’d spoken. Seeing no one, he lay back down and was about to drift away when the command came again. Bill was a Seventh-day Adventist Christian as well as a soldier and knew that God might e trying to impress on his mind something Important. So he rolled up his bedding, left the foxhole, and spent the remainder of the night in the nearby surgical tent.
In the morning he returned to the foxhole to retrieve the stretcher and gasped in amazement. A sniper bullet had pierced the stretcher in the exact location where his head would have been had he remained in the foxhole. Bill survived the war, returned to America, and began writing articles for Guide magazine. His last name was Anderson, and his friends called him Andy. For many years he was the author of Andy’s Gadget Magic