Free God's Problem by Bart D. Ehrman Page A

plans for the crossing had been laid, and the time was set, only to be frustrated by a counteraction by the Germans: knowing what was to come, they burst the earthen dam at the head of the river, sending down avalanches of water, making an immediate crossing impossible. The Americans had to wait. Finally on February 22 the orders were given: they would head out at 1:00 A.M . the next morning.
    My dad’s recollections of the next twenty-four hours need to be pieced together from sundry sources: letters that he wrote after the fact and stories that he (reluctantly) told later. He crossed the river in a boat, paddling with a dozen or so others, with German infantry on the other side firing at them, bullets flying everywhere. The fellow in front of my dad was blown away. Those who made it to the other side needed to hunker down in foxholes while more troops crossed. The foxhole my dad found himself in was filled with water from the flooding of the river. And there they had to stay, my dad and two others, unable to move out with crossfire all around. They had to stay, in fact, for nearly an entire day, legs and feet in freezing water, in the dead of winter.
    Eventually they decided they couldn’t stay: feet frozen and no prospect of help. They made a run for it, with my dad in the lead. Unfortunately, the only way out was through a minefield. His two buddies were blown to bits behind him. He managed to get back to his line but was unable to go any farther. A medic was called in, gave him a quick examination, and determined that his feet were in serious shape. They took him out on a stretcher to the rear of the line; eventually he was evacuated and flown to Salisbury, England.
    Doctors there told him it was a miracle he had been able to stand, let alone run, given the state of his feet. They thought they would need to amputate. Luckily, circulation was sufficiently restored and he survived with two feet intact, but damaged for life. Until his dying day he had problems with circulation and could not keep his feet warm.
    The end of the story is that an uncle of his learned that he was at Salisbury and managed to visit him in the army hospital there. At first his uncle didn’t recognize him. The sheer terror of my dad’s experience had made his hair turn completely white. He was twenty years old at the time.
    I tell this story not because it’s unusual but because it is altogether typical. Fifty million other people were not nearly so lucky: they were flat-out killed. Many millions more were horribly disfigured or dismembered, with wounds to show for the rest of their lives. Millions of others had experiences comparable to those of my dad. Every one of them suffered horribly. My dad’s experience was uniquely his, but in other ways it was typical. At the same time, it was not universal.
    Back home in Kansas, where he grew up, there were other twenty-year-olds who on the day of the battle had little more to fret about than getting a D on a chemistry exam or being unable to land a date for the fraternity dance or being jilted by their latest girlfriend. I don’t want to underestimate the excruciating pain of unrequited love: most of us have experienced it and it can tear a person apart from the inside out. But it is hard to compare with the physical torment and sheer terror of being under enemy fire with colleagues being blown to bits on your right and left.
    At the same time, in contrast to the boys back home, there were other twenty-year-olds not far from the front lines who were being slowly and inexorably tortured and murdered in the experiments of crazed Nazi doctors—subjected to freezing experiments, incendiary bomb experiments, amputations and attempted transplants of arms and legs, and so on. Suffering is not only senseless, it is also random, capricious, and unevenly distributed.
    How do we explain the suffering of war—or suffering of any kind?
     
    The Prophetic View Revisited
     
    As we have seen, the prophets of