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Damascus Churchgoers Sing In Atomic Warhead's ShadowBy FRANCIS X. CLINES c. 1980 N.Y. Times News ServiceDAMASCUS, Ark. — The thermonuclear warhead rested nearby in a field, covered and trussed like a very special crop, as the Sunday service at Southside Baptist Church drowned out the military helicopter with a hymn, “When I See The Blood.”“Judgment is coming,” the people sang, their hymn sounding out toward the disabled machine of war. “All will be there.”This was a special morning at the church, at least as impressive to the congregation as the fallen warhead that lay a short walk away, beyond the roadblock, bv the frial wooden buildings standing tall in the farm land. Sunday meant the opening of revival week by a visiting evangelist invited, in timely coincidence, to preach a return to life’s basics: “Sin is bad, and hell is hot.”“My phone's been ringing since this little explosion over here, telling me what-all I should do if that warhead goes off,” the Rev. Robert Blann said as the people smiled at him in the pulpit. “Well if that warhead goes off, nobody needs toSOUTH PORTLAND. Maine (AP-Air Force Sgt. Jeffrey Kennedy, the Maine native injured in a Titan II missile silo explosion Friday in Arkansas, remained in critical condition Sunday at a Little Rock hospital but his “vital signs are good,” a relative said.The 25-year-old Kennedy was one of two men who had entered the missile silo to monitor a vapor leak moments before the explosion, according to an Air Force spokesman.His parents, Daniel and Norma Kennedy, flew from Maine Saturday to be with him at Baptist Medical Center in Little Rock. His parents and his wife, Margaret, were visiting him for “a few minutes” every four hours, according to hospital spokesman John Pounders.Pounders said Kennedy’s major problem was his lungs because he apparently inhaled a toxic gas. His breathing was being aided by a resoirator and he was com-do anything.”The people laughed gently in their pews, well familiar for several days now with the abrupt comfort of such intimations of Armageddon. In their obviously heartfelt service Sunday morning, the congregants from this land of grazing dairy cows and buried missile silos managed to speak and pray of more than the apocalyptic warhead, waiting so very near on the earth. They followed the Sunday routine of their lives and witnesses in the church oneDAMASCUS, Ark. (AP) - John and Beverly Stacks, who live less than a half mile from the Titan II missile silo where an explosion occurred, are terrified and angry. It’s the second time a missile has*municating by writing notes, Pounders said.Kennedy’s “vital signs are good. But it’ll be a long process back,” his mother-in-law, Lillian M. Bruni of South Portland, said in a telephone interview from Little Rock Sunday. She was babysitting for Kennedy’s two young children at the couple’s * home.Kennedy, who was cited by the Air Force in 1979 for his exemplary service at Little Rock since 1975, was team chief in charge of eight men who maintained the silo missile site.The citation said Kennedy’s “outstanding professional skill, knowledge and leadership aided immeasurably in the accomplishment of the mission” of the 308th Missile Maintenance Squadron of the 308th Strategic Missile Wing. “His continuous record of safe-and-professional propellant transfer operations is outstanding,” the citation said.another’s personal spiritual troubles; they prayed for those stricken naturally in time’s illnesses; they prayed for the end of the long drought that has browned their fields.Blann, the visiting evangelist, turned to Isaiah for a fuller sense of context in this alarming week of the rocket explosion, for a sense of the presumptions of nations. “Behold the nations are like a drop of a bucket and are counted as small dust in the balance,” he read. “Allaffected their lives.“I have about had it, emotionally and physically,” said Mrs. Stacks. “If he (her husband) was to get any more of it, I couldn’t take it.”Stacks, 25, has lived with chronic disabling headaches, medication and shots since a leak occurred at the silo in 1978. He was outside several hours before he learned about that leak, and he was exposed to escaping fuel.His times in the hospital have been “too many to count,” says Mrs. Stacks.When her babysitter called Thursday with the first word of the leak, her frustration and fear returned. She couldn’t reach her husband at the dairy barn by telephone. She was afraid for him to leave the barn because of the risk of exposure.When the Stacks evacuated, they wrapped their sons Courtney, 3, and Ryan, 4 months, in blankets to protect them from exposure.“The kids are so little, it just wouldn’t take much,” Mrs. Stacks said. “I try to look after their futures.”The Stacks filed a $2.6 million lawsuit against the federal government last year. They say they have received no help with Stacks’ medical expenses or compensation for his cattle that died of lung problems or spontaneously aborted.When Stacks became ill in 1978, the family thought it was the flu.nations are to Him nothing.”As an armada of military people fretted in the field nearby, and miles away at the Air Force base in Little Rock, and far off in the Pentagon in Washington, the 200 members of the Southside Baptist congregation kept their peace. They took revival bumper stickers for their cars and pickups. They made a note of the pulpit announcement on the upcoming church breakfast. “Brother Elmer — he’s got to fix his cat-head biscuits, and they’re good,” said Dave Smith, a friendly man with a crushing handshake.The resident preacher, Rev. Terry Simpson, welcomed his people and any visitors to “the community around the warhead.” “There is no telling what God can do by a demonstration of his power after what we’ve seen in a little explosion in a si!o over here,” he preached. “Well, maybe not so little, but little compared to what God can do. God has exploded his power in this earth more than once and the shock waves were felt around the world.”The congregants seemed to find great comfort in the message that there is a power even beyond the thermonuclear bomb resting just west along the road to Damascus. “This doesn’t worry me a bit,” said Ken Finch, a merry-eyed man who was among the hundreds who had to flee their homes after the silo explosion. “If God wants that thing to blow, it’ll explode. In all this modern technology — oil spills and Three Mile Island and St. Helena — if God wants me, he’ll call my number.” This is not to say the people here are not worried. “I thought the rocket was off, the button was pushed, and the Russians would be shooting back,” said Milburn Thomas, a local letter carrier who, like many residents, seemed mystified that the Air Force had not yet removed the warhead from the ground. “We’ve got to have some sort of defense. The way this happened has brought us a fear.”In church, though, there was more to life than the warhead.‘‘Now listen to me,” Blann pleaded from the pulpit. “Can you think of someone who needs spiritual restoring?” He told the people to go to one another and offer personal comfort and pray to God about all life’s troubles, big and small.“Are you listening?” he said. “Only the spiritual can be gentle.”Downnpr Hntpl
Newspaper Details
Blytheville Courier News
Blytheville, Arkansas, US
Mon, Sep 22, 1980
Page 2
Full Page
Clipped by
Arkansas S.
AR, USA 14 Feb 2020
Other Publications Near Blytheville, Arkansas
Blytheville Army Air Corps News
Blytheville Courier News
