Yemen: the one that got away

Southern Baptist missionary Don Caswell saw the armed terrorist walking towards him and knew - just knew - the gunman was coming to kill him.

'I was looking at him and I saw him look at me. And that instant I realised he was coming right towards the pharmacy', Caswell said in his soft Texan's accent.

Caswell, a pharmacist, was shot twice during the December 30 attack at Jiblah Baptist Hospital, but after emergency surgery and treatment is recovering. When he was able to talk about the shootings a week later, he attributed his survival to God.

Three other missionaries, physician Martha Myers, hospital administrator William Koehn and purchasing agent Kathleen Gariety, were shot dead by the gunman (see February EN).

For 35 years Southern Baptists have treated some 40,000 patients a year at the now 45-bed hospital in Jiblah, a small town in southern Yemen located about 125 miles south of San'a, the nation's capital.

Ironically, the hospital was amid shut-down operations on December 30 when the attacks happened. Administrators of Southern Baptists' International Mission Board (IMB) had struggled for years to keep the hospital going despite mounting costs and a lack of missionaries willing to come to staff the facility. Plans were underway to turn the hospital over to the Yemeni government.

Don and Teri Caswell had worked at the hospital for about 18 months of a two-year term as International Service Corps missionaries appointed by Southern Baptists' IMB. Their term was to end in June this year.

Teri had dropped her husband off around 7.30 am that last Monday in December. She had left their boys, Ben, 11, and Caleb, 5, in bed while she took Don to the hospital and made a quick stop for groceries before arriving back home to have breakfast with the boys.

Five or six shots

At the hospital, Caswell and Mrs. Ocsana Magaly of Russia, another pharmacist, handled a flurry of prescription refills and then around 8.00 am they heard gunshots.

'It sounded like five or six gunshots. It is not unusual in Yemen for people to shoot guns off, but normally not that early in the morning. And it sounded like it was real close', Caswell recalled.

'I wonder what that is', Caswell said to Mrs. Magaly.

He walked out the door of the one-room pharmacy and looked down the open corridor. He saw a man come out of Bill Koehn's office.

'I noticed he wasn't running fast but he was moving quickly and I noticed a gun in his hand. It was a pistol of some kind', Caswell said.

As he made eye contact with the gunman, Caswell moved back into the pharmacy room, thinking he would move behind a work counter. But the gunman entered immediately behind Caswell and stood no more than five feet away. 'At that time I knew he was going to shoot me', Caswell recalled.

Peace

'I think an incredible thing about that was that I wasn't filled with a lot of fear', he said.

'I had a certain peace about all this and then a shot came and I think probably in the back of my mind was, well, where is he going to shoot and is it going to hurt very much. He got me right here in the side. It wasn't an unbearable pain but it did hurt pretty bad. I remember that shot and I thought I heard two more quick shots but I didn't feel anything else.'

Caswell was hit twice, once in each side, though the second shot apparently entered from the back as he spun around and fell from the impact of the first shot. Caswell thinks he remembers hearing three shots and speculates one shot just missed him completely. Miraculously the bullets missed major organs, arteries or other body parts that could have killed him. One bullet is still inside; doctors say they will leave it as long as it causes no problems.

God's hand

Today Caswell marvels that the gunman killed three missionaries with deadly precision, then failed to kill him with two shots. 'I know for sure God's hand was in on it and I didn't die for a reason. The ultimate reason I know is that God will be glorified', Caswell said.

'At that time maybe I hit the floor real fast - it seemed like slow motion. I just hit the floor on my face. I had my hand like this', he said, showing how he covered his face with a hand. 'And the next thing, you know, I remember talking to God all this time. "Well, Lord, am I going to die? Are you taking me now or what's going to happen?" Then I was thinking, I thought he (the gunman) was right in front of me and he would shoot me in the head or something, but I laid there and nothing happened and I never heard anything else', Caswell said.

He saw blood on his hand, and wondered if he had been shot in the face, but later decided either he scratched his head as he fell or perhaps had picked up blood on his hand from one of his wounds.

In that warped perception of time that occurs in crisis events, Caswell said later the entire episode took a few seconds, yet he recalls clearly talking to God in that quick-but-long few seconds between the time he was shot and when help arrived in the form of doctors and nurses seconds later.

'This whole time I was just talking to God and it did hurt a little but, Lord, I didn't feel like I'm dying, whatever that feels like, you know. But still at this time I never was unconscious. I just had this peaceful feeling. Seems to me maybe I was talking to God out loud. Maybe it was just in my mind, but I was asking the Lord if this was the time He was going to take me, if I was going to die there. I remember telling Him that, "Lord, if you want to take me it's fine, but I would really like to stay here and not leave Teri and the boys alone here like this". Of course He did leave me here but that was just the sort of thing going through my mind. I was just continually talking to God and asking Him what was going to happen, if He was going to leave me here or take me. I remember telling Him in between that it hurt some. I was just going back and forth with things like that. I remember then somebody trying to turn me over...'

Emergency surgery

Doctors rushed Caswell to an operating room, where most supplies had already been packed away. But missionary physician Judy Williams of Mechanicsville, Virginia, had insisted on leaving out enough instruments and other items needed for emergency surgery. She asked Australian physician Ken Clezy to do the exploratory surgery on Caswell because she was about the only one who could locate supplies quickly.

After getting a phone call telling her Don had been 'hurt', Teri tried to call the hospital. When she got no answer she drove the four or five miles or so to the hospital at breakneck speed, honking the horn to clear people out of the way. Seeing soldiers around the hospital, she knew something major had happened and only when she got inside did she understand that her husband had actually been shot. She was able to speak to Don and kiss him just before they wheeled him in for surgery.

Exploratory surgery ascertained that the bullets had missed vital organs and that there was no internal bleeding. Soon, as he recovered sufficiently, the Caswells went with their boys to another country in the Middle East to recuperate.

With their current Yemen assignment virtually complete, the Caswells do not know right now what they will do next. They will wait to hear what God has for them. Would they return to Yemen? 'Yes, if that's where God calls us', Caswell said.

The story of Don Caswell

Five or six shots

Peace

God's hand

Emergency surgery

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