One of the Few by Jason B. Ladd

Some years back, after some concerns about my health and general wellbeing, I started getting into the whole gym and fitness thing. I signed up for a gym, went 4 times a week, started running long distance. First it was 2 km, then 5 km and then 10 km (that was the max, honestly I don’t see myself going any further than that). Getting fitter and slimmer is always better than the alternative, but when it comes to being the peak of physical condition, it is being a Marine.

Or more specifically, a US Marine Corp. I think many of us hold to that ideal that to be a Marine, you are definitely the very best of an already elite crop of soldiers. It doesn’t just mean being physically elite, they are also trained to be mentally sharp, exhibit comradeship and integrity, etc. I think this ideal is somewhat perpetuated by years of watching movies and TV shows portraying Marines in the many battles throughout history, fictional or otherwise.

Which made me quite interested to read the book One of the Few by Jason B. Ladd, who tells his journey from childhood as an army kid, to a seasoned Marine and his struggles being both a Christian and an instrument of war. The book starts of peacefully enough, detailing his like moving across the United States, and even to Iwakuni in Japan. Then he meets his future wife as a kid, falls in love, gets married. Along the way he joins the army on the way to being a Marine. A pretty average story for an All-American soldier.

But what makes this book different for me is how he intersperse every chapter of his life in this book by asking the relevant questions about life, mortality and God. As his life gets more entwined in both his marriage and his training to be an elite soldier, the questions get tougher and more difficult to answer. Certainly, when faced with a life and death situation, you really start to wonder about the deeper questions of God and life. This is generalizing a lot, but the book goes into very detail on the struggles that he faced and how it relates to his walk with God.

I think because of how he handles this duality in his life, makes this book very different and rather special in the sense that there aren’t many books that I’ve read like this. Many people are interested in a memoir of a Marine, and by adding his Christian journey into the story takes the book on a whole different dimension. One complaint I would make, though is that the story doesn’t take a chronological path, it was quite confusing for me to keep track of the point in his life when reading through.