I once made an if-you-go-first pledge to my close friend, Beverly Schmidgall, that “someday” I would sing my song, Soldier, at her funeral. Of course, I didn’t expect someday to come early, but on February 25, 2001, at age 51, Bev died in England, due to complications from radiation exposure at Chernobyl, the toxic Ukrainian town where a nuclear meltdown had occurred fifteen years earlier.
We make such promises, hoping never to have to keep them, not only because we dread a last goodbye, but also because the death of a peer reminds us that our own “someday” might come sooner than we expect.
I met the fiery redhead with hair the size of a ten-gallon hat in February 1969, when thirteen Oral Roberts University students formed a weekend singing group that quickly became an international missions ministry called Living Sound. By the late 70s, we had toured in almost forty countries on five continents, along the way forging the kind of foxhole bond that war veterans try in vain to describe.
When Bev went solo in 1977, she headed straight to the world’s trouble spots was. Among other adventures, she lived in Croatia for a year and hitchhiked with soldiers into the battlefields of Bosnia to pray for war victims. She also traversed nearly all of the Trans-Siberian Railway’s 6,000 miles of track, often disembarking on impulse in some dowdy Russian town, and then whispering the word Xristianski to passersby until she either met a fellow believer or got hauled in for interrogation by the Soviet KGB.
In one city, the secret police took her into an unheated office and made her strip to her underwear while undergoing more than an hour of questioning. It was minus 50 Fahrenheit that day.
