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            Dr. Tom Dooley gained world-wide fame a decade ago as a medical missionary.  Some of you may have read his best-selling book entitled Deliver Us From Evil.  Dr. Dooley was operating a hospital south of Haiphong harbor when the North Vietnam citizens were fleeing from the Communist forces to the north.  I want to read a few paragraphs from Dr. Dooley’s report.

            “What do you do for children who have had chopsticks driven into their inner ears?  Or for old women whose collar-bones have been shattered by rifle butts?  Or for kids whose ears have been torn off with pincers?  How do you treat a priest who has had nails driven into his skull to make a travesty of the Crown of Thorns?  As the weeks passed, I found myself increasingly puzzled, not only by the growing number but by the character of Communist atrocities.  They seemed to almost have a religious significance.  But more and more I was learning that these punishments were linked to the refugees’ belief in God.  Just before dawn one night there was a young man and some children.  We pieced together the story.  The young man was a school teacher.  The Communists had caught him leading the class in the Lord’s Prayer.  They made him repeat for them, line by line, and made a mockery of the words.  When the lesson was ended they led the class into the school-yard and taught the pupils a different kind of lesson.  Two guards held a child by the arms, and another grasped his head.  The leader rammed a chopstick deep into each ear, splitting the inner ear.  When all seven children had been ‘treated’ the guards turned to the teacher.  They drew forth his tongue with pincers and sawed it off with a bayonet.  Somehow five of the children managed to remove the chopsticks from their heads...They looked like zombies; and eight survived – one young man who never again would pray aloud, and seven children who would hear the Word of God only in their hearts.”

Person Evangelism, Volume 20, Number 4, page 7