Defying the odds
When Captain Chris George started his speech, the South Shelby Chamber members didn’t know what story he had to tell.
“I probably shouldn’t be here, but I am,” he began.
He first turned to the American Flag, which he had moved from its usual spot in the church to the stage beside him. George wanted to talk about what the flag meant. Soon after, he gestured his Bible, and said that he would not be speaking about the Shelby County Sheriff’s Office although he works for it.
Instead, he would share how the flag and the Bible are objects that have shaped him.
A lesson on the field
The stars and stripes took on new significance when George was 19. The Marines course he was required to take, called Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape, or SERE, would prove true to its name.
He signed a waiver agreeing to “get beat” and started the course, knowing only that he was to do as he was told. The men taking the course were all taken out on a truck like cattle and dropped off in the middle of nowhere.
Their goal was to get from point A to point B without getting caught by the enemy who were dressed as communists.
“I said, ‘I got this. You don’t have to tell me twice. I’m just going to hide for three days,’” George laughed as he explained that an air horn would signal when the men were safe to be picked up off the closest dirt road. “I hear the loud air horn. I go ‘Whoo hoo, I made it. Roll Tide!’”
But the Jeep making its way over the hill was not carrying United States uniforms. Before he knew what happened, he was wrapped in a burlap sack, hog-tied, beaten and thrown in the back of the Jeep. His only piece of luck was the cushioned landing supplied by the other guys who had also been captured.
They were taken to a camp, stripped down to their underwear and their hands were bound behind their backs. When they were transferred from the small concrete boxes they were kept in to the back of the camp, they were forced to walk on their bare knees through sharp gravel.
The communist flag waved the entire time George was in the camp, until the last day. All the men were brought together — all of them only about 18 or 19 years old — and the leaders of the “communists” started cutting stars out of the American Flag with his knife.
“When everyone was on their feet, they took that communist flag down and put that one up,” George said with tears in his eyes as he held up the American Flag standing next to him on stage. “This flag right here means more than the cloth that it’s on. That red is all the blood that was shed from the beginning... That union in the top left color represents united as one nation, and that white is the purity that we are founded upon under God.”
Letting go of anger
Early in his career, George was angry. He said he held a lot of hatred towards his mother for her choices and his father, for not being there for him. It wasn’t until later that he realized that drug addicts, while victims of their own decisions no longer have control over those decisions.
George was in second grade when his mother walked into his classroom, interrupting his spelling test. Then it was just him, his mother and his Superman backpack hitchhiking from Birmingham to Pensacola, Fla.
“You have a whole different world out there from truckers to dopers to hippies to everybody else picking you up, and there’s a whole lot of people who have to pick you up,” George said.
They were making their way, sleeping in cars, when his mother ran out of money and had to call George’s grandmother. Immediately, his nanny drove to pick George up, but left his mother.
Those experiences are the same ones that George said he wants to block from other people. He said now it’s his job to worry about those things so other people don’t have to, and his experience taught him the best way to help.
“If you have someone within your family that is struggling, and you think ‘Oh gosh, what are we going to do?’ you pray,” George said. “That’s all you can do. You’ve got to give it to God. You can’t do it yourself.”
He called the members of the chamber to action asking them to do something. He said people shouldn’t just want to help the widowers, the widows and the orphans, they should know it’s a command from God.
Immediately, George turned to a guest he invited to the luncheon, and called him onto the stage. He introduced the 90-year-old Marine, who did four landings in the Pacific and was shot on Hiroshima Island, and explained that there was no “too old” excuse for helping people.
After the two embraced, George finished his speech with a statement about anger. He held up a clenched fist and said it represented the anger you can harbor, perhaps toward someone else or even toward yourself.
“As long as you are angry and you have your fist up like this, you are never going to receive anything,” he said. “You open that hand, and you help somebody. I can guarantee that hand is going to overflow with more than you can help. So unclench that fist, open that hand up and be ready to receive.”