July 26. Dave Roever. Dave fought in the Vietnam War as a gunner on a US Navy riverboat. Then life changed.
Dave went on to found the Roever Foundation, which has provided thousands of scholarships to students in Vietnam and other places. The Foundation has built a cardiac-care unit and a Digital Imaging Lab, which saves hundreds of Vietnamese lives—at no cost to them.
The Foundation built a thirty-six-bed heart-monitoring system in Saigon and provides cataract surgery for hundreds of Vietnamese children. They’ve also provided clothing for about two million children in Vietnam, plus medicine, wheelchairs, bicycles, boats, and motors to the Red Cross in Vietnam.
Their service extends to countries such as El Salvador and Mexico, with medical and dental support for the underprivileged. On this date in 1969, while he was manning the gun in the riverboat, a grenade exploded in Dave’s face.
Hope. It can turn a tragedy into triumph.
Hidden in the steamy Vietnamese jungle, a sniper centered the crosshairs on the head of a twenty-six-year-old American gunner.
The gunner—a Brown Water Black Beret—stood on the bow of a Swift Boat near the Cambodian border. He raised his arm to throw a grenade.
The sniper was waiting. Aiming carefully. Waiting. The sniper squeezed the trigger.
Six inches from the gunner’s head, the bullet hit the grenade. An instant explosion showered the gunner with 5000-degree hot-white phosphorus.
Gunner Dave Roever was forever changed. Phosphorus burned his body inside and out. He looked down and saw his face lying on his boots, his heart pumping in his chest, and the blood pouring out his wrist where his fingers had been. The right side of his head—his ear, his eye, his lips—they were all gone. “I wanted to die. I was so afraid that if I lived, I would be rejected, and couldn’t live with that.”
The medics marked him “Killed in Action.”
But they were wrong. For Dave, God had a different plan.
Waking up in the hospital with third-degree burns over 55 percent of his body, Dave struggled with hopelessness, wanted to protect his wife Brenda, and tried to end his life. He pulled out “the [life-sustaining] tube.”
But the suicide attempt failed.
Looking back, he laughs at the irony. “I pulled out my feeding tube by mistake, and in a short time, I got hungry! You can die that way, but it’s going to take a long time.”
In dread, Dave waited for his wife Brenda to enter the room to see him for the first time. He was prepared for the worst, for her to turn around and leave. He’d seen other wives abandon their disfigured husbands.
But Brenda walked over, leaned down, smiled, and kissed him. “Welcome home, Davey. I love you. You really weren’t all that good looking.”
From that moment on, his tragedy became his triumph. His message became one of hope. And now Dave delivers his hope-message with a good dose of humor. He brags about his brand-new nose—“it’s a boy”—and laughs at the time the wind blew his hair off and a dog returned it—“How did it know it was mine?”
But in the midst of all the laughing is the clear message: “The thing that takes low self-esteem and transforms it into positive self-esteem is when you take what you see as a negative … use it for something good. Lighten up on it! Use it. Make laughter of it! I don’t mean ridicule. People laugh with me and not at me.”
“I want you to know, brothers, that what has happened to me has really served to advance the gospel” (Philippians 1:12 ESV).
Are there scars in your life that God wants to use to help heal others? Hope. It can turn a tragedy into triumph.
Daystar interview. https://www.daystar.tv/marcus-joni/season:2/videos/dave-roever-11-20-2019.
American Snippets interview. “E029—Dave Roever And His Mission to Restore the Wounded.” Accessed June 5, 2020. https://www.americansnippets.com/dave-roever/.
Mendoza, Jim. “A Grenade Blast Left Him Disfigured. Today His Scars Are a Message of Hope to Others.” Hawaii News Now. February 27, 2018. https://www.hawaiinewsnow.com/story/37606497/a-grenades-blast-left-him-disfigured-today-his-scars-are-a-message-of-hope-to-others/#:~:text=%22When%20that%20grenade%20exploded%20it,and%20he%20endured%20painful%20operations.
Wangrin, Mark. “Never Let a Good Scar Go to Waste.” Texas Co-Op Power. August, 2014. https://www.texascooppower.com/texas-stories/history/never-let-a-good-scar-go-to-waste#:~:text=%E2%80%9CGod%20took%20the%20experience%20of,good%20scar%20go%20to%20waste.%E2%80%9D.
Dahmen, Jerry. “I Love Life: An Evangelist’s Triumph Over Adversity.” KXRB. September 20, 2013. https://kxrb.com/i-love-life-an-evangelists-triumph-over-adversity/.
Story read by: Chuck Stecker
Introduction read by: Daniel Carpenter
Audio production: Joel Carpenter
Story written by: Thomas Mitchell, http://www.walkwithgod.org/
Editor: Teresa Crumpton, https://authorspark.org/
Project manager: Blake Mattocks
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