From Combat to Nonresistance — Michael Peck — Ep. 020

Hello everybody, welcome back to another episode of Anabaptist Perspectives. I'm here with my friend Mike Peck. We would have actually met in Bible school, what is it, three years now or something like that, a couple years ago. So, you know, Mike is, yeah, a good friend of mine. We've had some unusual experiences in your life, especially for us as Anabaptists. It's not your typical story. I want to hear a little bit about that today. The one thing that makes your story a little unique is you were in the U.S. military for some time before you became saved.

What motivated you to even join the U.S. Army? Like, were you Christian? Like, why did you even do that? Yeah, I would have professed Christianity. I would have grown up in the Protestant Church. There's still that patriotism there. And so I sort of grew up with that. My dad was in the military. My mom was actually in the military for a short while.

And pretty much my grandfathers, you know, had served. And so it was just, it was sort of something that you do. But I had a sort of a lot of influences, such as like video games and movies that I watched, sort of influenced that, the glory of it all, I guess you could say. And how old were you when you joined? Well, I would have been 20 when I joined. So, yeah, just give us some details on that. Like, where were you stationed? What was your position? What kind of, how long were you in the Army? Yeah, that's, yeah, tell us. Well, it's actually funny. Like, my dad was medical in the Navy, and so my mom would have been medical.

They were both corpsmen. I had just assumed I would never be in the military. And so I just, I don't know, I just didn't think it would ever happen. And it came to a point where just sort of my work wasn't really going anywhere. My dad was about to retire. We were stuck in Hawaii. And so I just started to look into it. And I took what they call the ASVAB, which is a test that sort of places you, or they sort of evaluate where you would be best in the military. And I had sort of scored high enough to do many different jobs. But because of just sort of the glory that I saw in being the foot soldier and all the movies and, like I said, the games that I had played of just where you're on the front lines and you're just, you know, facing the action, I decided to go in the infantry, which is like one of the lowest scores.

Really? Like as a prior? Yes. No kidding. Okay. I'm really curious though, like, because you're an infantryman, what were you taught about killing, about facing the enemy? And how did that affect you? I remember struggling with that a little bit because of this love your neighbor. And that was one thing. And thou shalt not kill and certain things like that. So you would still, at this point, like, I'm still a Christian, but yet, but yet I'm a, you know, an infantryman. Yeah. Like, yeah. Didn't you feel any kind of contradiction? Yeah, that's the thing. It's like, I would go and I would go and shoot in training. And I went along with it. But then at night, it was sort of like this wrestling.

I always remember sitting in my bunk, just sort of thinking about, like, okay, what they're saying this is right, but for some reason, like, is it? Like, why isn't it fully matching up with what I'm reading in scripture? Okay, so you were deployed then, correct? And so tell us about where you were deployed to, how many times, and also like what year would have this been at this point? I first would have been deployed in Iraq.

Okay. And that would have been a year-long deployment. And that would have been in 2000, I want to say 2010 to 2011. Our mission was more to what they called wind in the hearts and minds. You know, we had come through there and destroyed so much. So now we were trying to rebuild and sort of help them get back on their own feet. And that was one of the big things. So I didn't necessarily see much of the firefights, but I had done that for a year and saw a few things. But it's interesting, like once you're trained, you're sort of trained so much for that that it becomes every day.

It's sort of hard to explain it, but there was a sense where you would wake up in the morning and you would look up and you say, "Today is a great day to die." Wow. And do you actually believe that? Well, yeah, like there's a sense where you do start sort of, I mean, part of it is you have to let go of the fear, otherwise the mission's not going to get complete.

But you start to become, you have all these brothers with you who sort of are saying the same things and believing the same things that it just sort of becomes ingrained in you. Okay, so after that year in Iraq, what then? After that year, we came back and you're, you know, you pretty much just come back for however long until you get orders again. They usually have a time frame, I think, for about six months to a year where they just sort of let you, you know, recuperate and before the training starts right back up again. And it did for us. And I think within a year, we were ready to go to Afghanistan. That was a whole different, a whole different war zone.

Iraq was a lot of mortars, whereas Afghanistan was more sort of firefights. And so you saw clashes and, yeah, we had seen, yeah, a few of you fighting. I don't really know, like the groups, like it was sort of, Iraq was sort of like Afghanistan, where it was sort of like winding down to the point, like our main mission there was to sort of help the Afghanistan police to be able to work on their own, so that way we could ship out and that they could still, you know, function and enforce the law in their own country. So how long were you in Afghanistan? I would have been in Afghanistan nine months. So a shorter, a shorter deployment.

Yeah. And then back, and then after that, where were you at that point? After I had come back, it was sort of towards the tail end of my contract. So I think I had about four to six months left. And that was enough time for me to come back and relax and then pretty much get out. Did you see action?

Yes. I had seen not a lot of direct action in Iraq, but in Afghanistan, we would have seen a little bit more, just sort of casualties. A lot of, a lot of more innocent casualties. Were you ever shot at?

There was a few times we were shot at, yes. Indirectly and directly, yeah. There's no thrill like getting shot at. Once the adrenaline kicks in and you've been trained to do all these different maneuvers and everything, and it works, your muscle memory kicks in and you just act without even thinking. Yeah, that's just, that's not a story you typically hear from a, especially a conservative Anabaptist. So now the question is, how did you go from firefights in Afghanistan to, first of all, becoming a Christian, and then from that, becoming non-resistant and now a conservative Anabaptist? What's the story there? When I was in the military, you had this belief, like I said before, that like tomorrow you were going to die.

So you lived up today. And so there was a lot of just drugs. There was a lot of partying. There was a lot of alcohol. You just sort of lived for that day. And yet, at the same time, I would have professed still that I was a Christian. I would have believed that the Lord was watching over me in the battlefield. Very, very thankful that the Lord, one, didn't ever put me in the position to take another man's life, but two, that I was able to live through all that and be where I am now. But it was Afghanistan that I would have sort of had my change of heart and sort of started to reevaluate everything that I had believed.

So we were close to coming home. My position at that point was I was just pretty much pulling security.

Officers and other leaders, civilians who were contracted out to do certain jobs there, would come to this little hut, I guess, and they would sign off and sort of take one of us to provide security for them. Since we were the combatants, you know, it was our job to sort of go with them and make sure they weren't doing anything that would put them in harm's way or be there in case something did happen. We were going to get ready to leave. And I remember talking to this photographer, this combat photographer, who was just always around. If we were there pulling security, then she was probably there taking pictures of whatever was happening.

And we had said hi to her, and she said, "Oh, you know, I'm going out to take photos of this training." And, you know, we just went, "Okay, you know, an average day." We had went and pulled security for some aircraft contractor. And next thing you know, we hear this explosion. And that was sort of, I mean, you always hear explosions. And so I get up and I go out to just sort of make sure, just see what's happening. And, you know, there's a big plume of smoke, but again, it was sort of, it happens all the time. So within the next hour, we pack up and we start heading back from that job. And as soon as I get back, people are running around frantic and yelling.

Nothing had happened there. And no one was giving me information. And we just knew after a few minutes that something had happened to one of our soldiers. And we didn't know who it was. And a few minutes later, we see this truck pulling in, and it is going at full speed and just hits the brakes right next to us. He opens the door, and this body just falls out, just limp. And I knew the moment I saw, just I saw that, that the person had passed.

And sure enough, it was the woman we had talked to, the photographer that we had talked to. And so we get her out of the truck, we get her ready, and they start performing CPR. And we're calling in the helicopter, waiting for it to show up. Finally, it showed up, and we put her up into the helicopter. We knew she was gone.

But that changed me in the sense that we were a few months from going home. She had just talked to her husband and her daughter, her only daughter, and just about how happy she was and how happy they were. They just couldn't wait. We were a few months from leaving. And it was just all those things just sort of hit me. And I started to just sort of think back and say, "How could this be something that Christ would want?" And I had struggled with that for a long time. And I couldn't tell any of my brothers because if you start showing any signs of weakness or if you even give a hint that you're not going to back them up in a firefight, that's trouble.

So finally, I broke and I had talked to my dad, who had retired from the Navy, and I didn't, I assumed he was still patriotic. And so even talking to him was a little scary. Well, at that time, he had been going through his own journey and discovered non-resistance and sort of ran into Anabaptists. And that's where he would have learned listening to Dean Taylor. I had sort of just told him everything, everything I was feeling. This just doesn't seem right. And to my surprise, he said, "Oh, hey, well, guess what?

Here's the journey that I'm on." And he started giving me all this stuff. And I'll tell you, the biggest thing for me was this idea and concept. And it's so mind-blowing, but it's just reading the Bible for what it says. For me, the churches that I had gone to, it was sort of you would bring your Bible with you, and sometimes you wouldn't even open it, and you'd just look up at the projector. And the pastor would put, you know, some scripture on, but he would tell you what it means. And so I guess I sort of got used to that, always trying to find a translation for what I was reading, as opposed to just reading it for what it said.

And just that concept opened my eyes. To think that thou shalt not kill means thou shalt not kill was just sort of mind-blowing for me. But another thing was, was it was so freeing. Right there, while I was in Afghanistan, I had, I remember, got down on my knees and sort of rededicated my life to Christ. And the most interesting thing was shortly after that, we had to give up all of our weapons.

Oh my. Okay. Because we have to get back to the States at the same time all of our weapons do. Well, they go by ship. So it takes a lot longer for them to get back. So it was so great that I was so terrified of how am I going to do this. Here I am in a war zone. My job is to kill people. And now I've had a change of heart. It was taken out of my hands. I didn't have to worry about it. There's a couple of questions, obviously. What did your fellow soldiers find out about these beliefs? Did your commanding officers?

And just with all of that, what were the challenges you faced? I mean, you're in Afghanistan. And you're reading scripture and it says, "Love your enemies." Like that's very, yeah, US military is probably not going to be too happy about that.

What happened? Well, like I said, I pretty much kept it in a sense to myself, as opposed to my parents. But when we did get back and I was out of the war zone and I had nothing to, you know, worry about in that sense, my contract was coming to an end. I had six months left. That's when I started to tell people, because I had assumed they're, okay, well, I'm going to get out of this, go home, and just sort of go into the Anabaptist church. Telling my friends that, they just, they thought I'd lost it, I think. Like, wow. Yeah. I mean, did they ridicule you at all, or was it just kind of like, okay, that's a little strange?

It was sort of like, that's just a little strange. Obviously, they poked fun. And like you said, that band of brothers, we always want what's best for them, you know, for each other. With my friends, no, it wasn't too bad. And of course, my family had already made this switch, I guess, or become, joined the Anabaptist church. And so maybe the extended family, I'm guessing, even today is not on board with some of this. Like you're in this whole yeah. Yeah.

When did you leave Afghanistan? Do you remember when that was? Yeah, I would have left Afghanistan in the fall of 2012 and gotten out of the military. Less than five years. Yeah. So let's bring it home to something a little more practical. What would you say to someone who's in the military or thinking of joining the military or maybe even knows someone in the military? What would you say to them who's maybe struggling with some of this?

What's your advice? So I guess for someone who's in already, I'd have to say just sort of look at what you're doing. And are you really able to do what you're doing to the glory of God? For those who are thinking about it, you see so much glory. Like there is, like you watch movies and you see all this stuff of, you know, these war heroes. But there's a lot of people who you could really sit down and talk to, especially if you're thinking about going combat, that could tell you some stories. And even now, there's times where a noise will sort of bring back sort of that PTSD. It's pretty crippling sometimes.

And so it's just sort of like, is it all worth that? If you are a Christian, you should be fighting for God's kingdom, you know? And are you actually doing that? And well, obviously, you came to the conclusion you weren't, you know? And like, I can't. And sometimes people, I wonder if they're always honest with themselves. Wow, well, thank you for sharing your story and your journey, some of the things you learned along the way.

Obviously, it wasn't easy. And yeah, it's, and I'm sure there's still a lot of things ahead too, you know? But appreciate that. Appreciate you taking the time. And thank you, everyone, for watching. And if you have any questions for Mike, put them in the comments below. Maybe I'll email them to him and he can give a response. We can even maybe do a follow-up video. I'm really curious what the response will be to what you shared. So if you like what you saw, we have new episodes each week. And yeah, come back for more content like this. And we will see you in the next video.