Beyond the Battlefield: A Life of Service, Spirit and Sacrifice

by David Stevens, academic administrative coordinaor and ROTC liason

While serving on active duty in the U.S. Army, my father died on Nov. 25, 1973, after having served in WWII and the Vietnam War. He was 45; I was 8. This is his story.

Alvin Otis Stevens was born in Texas in 1928. While the U.S. was engulfed in WWII in 1944, he joined the U.S. Merchant Marine at 16 with his grandfather’s signed approval. My father’s first voyage was on a transport ship secretly carrying munitions to Saipan in the Pacific. 

Six weeks after V-J Day, he enlisted in the U.S. Navy and was sent to Jacksonville, Florida, for training as an aviation electrician’s mate. From there, he went to Argentia, Newfoundland. One week after his 21st birthday, he was discharged after five years of honorable service.

Called to ministry, he came to Searcy in 1951 and enrolled at Harding. He was part of the student body that helped tear down Godden Hall to make space for better facilities. Those recycled bricks still stand on campus in the bell tower and the Claud Rogers Lee Building. As a Bible major, he preached in rural Arkansas churches and spent most Sundays at the Hickory Ridge congregation. My parents married in February 1953 and graduated with their bachelor’s degrees in May. 

The newlyweds went to Newfoundland as missionaries in the summer of 1953, and then served churches in Texas and New Mexico before moving to Memphis where Dad preached and resumed his graduate studies in ministry. He and Jimmy Allen, a fellow veteran, friend and preaching buddy, were members of the first graduating class in Memphis of Harding Graduate School of Religion, now known as Harding School of Theology.

In 1960, my parents moved to Paris where my dad taught in a preacher training school and worked with members of the U.S. armed forces and their families at an airbase near Evreux, France. During this time, he began praying for opportunities to become a military chaplain. He consulted Conard Hays and others who had served in the chaplaincy during WWII. However, he needed a third year of seminary, so after another stay in Memphis, he finished a Master of Theology 1962 and was later commissioned as a chaplain in the U.S. Army. 

In 1964, the Stevenses had a permanent change of station to Germany where my sister and I were born. My mother would joke that when you went to Germany, you returned with a cuckoo clock, a promotion and a child. My parents had a bonus baby! When he was 40, my dad earned his jump wings and became an airborne paratrooper in order to better serve as chaplain. 

In the military, we say, “No good deed goes unpunished.” My father was sent to Vietnam for one year, and the rest of us moved to Albuquerque to be near my mother’s family. Dad served with the 9th Infantry Division, the “River Rats,” on the Mekong River delta in 1968-69, and he earned a bronze star medal and an aerial achievement medal. I was only three when he left, and I don’t remember speaking to him about his time in Vietnam. He loved to take pictures, though, and I remember him hosting slide show presentations in our home with pictures from Vietnam, including the orphanages he supported.

In 1972, the Army sent him to Korea for one year where he also worked with orphanages. He was home on leave when we celebrated Thanksgiving together as a family in 1973, and he died in his sleep that night.

I had my dad for six of the first eight years of my life. He was the spiritual leader of our family. Christianity was not something we did; it was our identity. My parents taught me that God defined my worth. 

Every Memorial Day, I remember my father’s burial at the national cemetery in Fort Bliss, Texas. No matter where you look, all the grave markers are in perfect military alignment as if, even in death, all the troops are lined up in perfect formation. I could not be more proud to be the son of a WWII and Vietnam War veteran who gave his life to serve God, others and our country.