Dive into an incredible chapter of Our American Stories with Dave Eubank, a man whose life has been a testament to courage and unwavering faith in action. From a young age, Dave felt a deep calling to confront evil, leading him to an impactful career in the U.S. Army, where he served as an officer in the infantry, the Second Ranger Battalion, and as a Green Beret in Special Forces. After nearly a decade of intense military service, a profound spiritual experience led him to redirect his warrior spirit. He answered a desperate call from the Wa tribe in war-torn Burma (Myanmar), embarking on a new mission that combined his military skills with a profound commitment to humanitarian aid.
With his organization, the Free Burma Rangers, Dave Eubank now leads humanitarian missions in the world’s longest-running civil war, delivering critical aid where bullets are literally flying and the risk of death is exceptionally high. What sets Dave and his team apart is their unwavering philosophy: to ‘stay with them’ – to remain alongside innocent civilians facing violence, providing crucial medical care, food, and comfort. This includes often bringing his own family into these perilous zones, demonstrating a profound commitment to selfless service. It’s an inspiring tale of how courage, conviction, and a deep-seated faith can drive one man to stand with the most vulnerable, transforming war-torn landscapes with acts of hope and relentless action.
📖 Read the Episode Transcript
Speaker 1: And we returned to our American Stories. Up next, a story from a man who truly puts his faith in action—combat zones, to be exact. Dave U Bank’s main mission with the Free Burma Rangers is to deliver aid in areas of the world where bullets are literally flying overhead, and the risk of death is high. He also brings his family and children along for the ride. Here he is to tell his faith story. Let’s get into it.
00:00:40
Speaker 2: So this is how I felt called to be a missionary. I don’t know if I was born a soldier, or I just decided to become one so young that I can’t remember the difference. But I was naturally attracted to action and combat and testing myself and going forward, trying to face evil and win from.
00:01:03
Speaker 3: A very early age.
00:01:04
Speaker 2: Went to university at Texas A&M. Was commissioned there as an officer in the U.S. Army. Was in the infantry down in Panama and doing different missions all over Central South America. Then I went to the Second Ranger Battalion, and I was an attuned leader there as a first lieutenant. And then I tried out for Special Forces, and I became a team leader for the Special Forces of Green Berets. Altogether, I spent just under ten years—nine point something years—in the army and felt the call to get out. Military has all its challenges, but I liked it.
00:01:40
Speaker 3: I liked the action. I don’t like all the rules and time use, but I love the action. I love the people in it.
00:01:47
Speaker 2: But I remember when I rededicated my life to the Lord in my thirties, when I had a crisis of really following Jesus and decided to follow full on. After a lot of failures, “Well, my way down work, Jesus, I’m going to go back to your away.” And I felt God say, “Stay in the army.”
00:02:04
Speaker 3: “I’ll bless you.”
00:02:06
Speaker 2: “Put God first, your men second, and you last,” which is not the order it was. “Put God first, your men second, you last. You be affected for me in the army, I’ll bless you. Or get out and see what happens.” I had a choice that kind of makes it hard, but I thought, “I wonder what it’s like to get out and just totally depend on God and go for it.” And I got out, and I went to seminary.
00:02:36
Speaker 3: But while I was.
00:02:37
Speaker 2: Doing that, that’s when the Wa tribe of Burma came and said to my dad, “Please, to someone, to help us.” They saw a picture of me with the Green Beret on. They said, “Send that guy. We’re a warrior people, we need warriors. We’ll understand them. He’s a warrior,” we know that—talking about me—”and we need Jesus. And your son’s a seminary, so he’s trying to follow Jesus.”
00:02:55
Speaker 3: “Send him.”
00:02:56
Speaker 2: And when I got that call, it just felt right. You know, like when you fall in love with someone, how do you describe the feeling of falling in love?
00:03:03
Speaker 3: Why did you choose that person?
00:03:05
Speaker 2: That’s invisible, but it’s powerful more than anything else.
00:03:09
Speaker 3: And I just felt that in my heart. “This is from God. This is from God,” and it’s a feeling, you know.
00:03:14
Speaker 2: I saw a movie once based on a true story of a young girl who had a horse and loved it, but they had to sell it is Oklahoma during the drought, I guess in the thirties or whenever. They had to sell it because they couldn’t afford it, the farm anymore, they couldn’t feed the horse and all this, and the wife is talking to the husband after the sales, saying, “You know, our daughter feels so bad.”
00:03:33
Speaker 3: “I feel so bad.” And the husband says, “Well,”
00:03:36
Speaker 2: “I’m going to give you some facts. We don’t have food, we can’t feed the horse, we can’t do this. We’re going to lose the farm.” And then his wife says, “Feelings are facts, too.” That really struck me. “Feelings are facts, too.”
00:03:50
Speaker 3: They are.
00:03:51
Speaker 2: You don’t get married just on hard facts. You get married on feelings. You don’t go to war just on hard facts.
00:03:59
Speaker 3: You have to feel it.
00:04:01
Speaker 2: And I think that feeling is from God. How we use it can be for the devil, it could be for anything, but it’s from God.
00:04:07
Speaker 3: And for me, there was just that feeling like, “Okay, you’re going to go.”
00:04:11
Speaker 2: There was a lot of fighting because Burma’s the longest running civil war in the world. Over three million displaced in the last two years alone, millions more in the last seventy-three years of fighting, more fighting now than there’s been since World War Two. The Burma dictatorship right now is supported by China, Russia, North Korea.
00:04:27
Speaker 3: It’s wicked and killing its own people.
00:04:30
Speaker 2: I’ve lost sixty of our rangers, of our humanitarian men and women, killed in serving others. There’s thousands more others have been killed.
00:04:38
Speaker 3: That’s just our group. So we’re in the middle of this whole thing.
00:04:50
Speaker 2: And I remember when we first started, there was fighting that were shooting, and I was helped trying to help wounded. And this ethnic Karen medic stepped out of the jungle next to where I was, said: “My name is Helia. I am a medic. Can I help you?” And I had a bunch of medicine. I’m not medic, and I go, “Yeah, man!” And we started working together.
00:05:08
Speaker 2: Ethnic men and women started to join us, and we just started to go where the fighting was and help people, and slowly became the Free Burma Rangers, and we follow Jesus.
00:05:18
Speaker 3: Although to be in the Free Burma Rangers, you don’t have to follow Jesus. You have to do this for love. We only have three rules: the ability to read and write in any language. You can’t run. People can’t run. You’ve got to stay with them, whether you’re armed or not. It’s up to you.
00:05:29
Speaker 2: But if you have no guns, and they’re coming with guns, the enemy is, and the people can’t flee, you’ve got to stay with them. You’ve got to help them flee or live or die with them. And the last one is: do this for love. We don’t pay the team to do this for love and trust God. So I’m a soldier submitted to Jesus serving as a missionary. You know, actions speak louder than words. So the fact that you’re there, even if they don’t like your skin color or race or country you came from. You’re there, and they’re in trouble, that’s automatically, you’re like, “Whoa, that guy didn’t have to be here, not paying them, and it’s not comfortable right now and maybe super dangerous, and he’s here. Huh. Why?” When you’re there with these people, your presence starts off the whole thing.
00:06:15
Speaker 3: You’re here.
00:06:16
Speaker 2: I remember, you know, having our kids with us. The Kurdish general said, “You brought your son, your most precious thing. I give you my most precious thing in my country.” When we Sudan getting bald of us every day in the Nuba Mountains, the leader of the Nuba Mountains said, “You brought your family.”
00:06:31
Speaker 3: “That means you don’t want anything from us. You’re just here to give. Wow. I haven’t seen that. Wow.” And then with others like Iraqi General, “You brought your family.”
00:06:45
Speaker 2: “You must think that in God’s eyes, American children and Iraqi children have the same value because you’re living with our children.”
00:06:52
Speaker 3: So that’s first thing is presence, and the next thing is action.
00:06:55
Speaker 2: What are you doing handing out food, medicine, running through gunfire to say somebody, “Oh wow, you rich your life for me.” “You don’t even know me, man!” “Yeah, but God knows you and God knows me, so that makes us related that way. And he told me to come and help you.” “Oh, wow, okay.” And then those are actions, and then words. “Please forgive us. I’m an American for the good it’s done and rolled them against you,” because we’re just human, which is people just like you. America is not God. It’s not the devil.
00:07:25
Speaker 2: The good things that America has done because God has blessed us when we obey him, and sometimes he blesses us when we don’t obey him.
00:07:31
Speaker 3: He’s just good that way.
00:07:32
Speaker 2: But we have a lot of good things and a lot of things work so well in our country because we follow God.
00:07:37
Speaker 3: But we’re not God, which is people. We make mistakes, too, and some of our mistakes have hurt you.
00:07:42
Speaker 2: “Please forgive us.” I love my country. I’m so grateful to be an American and for the good it’s done more than any other country in the whole world.
00:07:51
Speaker 3: That’s sure. But we’re still people.
00:07:53
Speaker 2: We still make mistakes, we still kill people that don’t, shouldn’t have been killed.
00:07:57
Speaker 3: And I apologize, and they go, “Huh, okay, forgive you. We forgive you.”
00:08:02
Speaker 2: And that’s from people whose kids have been killed and in their strike. The American military in general tries very hard and has the best record in the world of not killing people they don’t want to kill, but still it happens.
00:08:14
Speaker 3: We’re human.
00:08:15
Speaker 2: So to say we’re sorry, and then to say we come in Jesus’ name and ask Jesus yourself, whether you’re Muslim, Atheist, Agnostic, spirit worship, or Buddhist. This is not about religion. This is bigger than religion. This is about the living God who sent his son and loves you. And we come in his name because he changes our heart. He didn’t just change it once, he keeps changing it every day. And we offer that, too. You don’t have to take it. But that’s why we come in Jesus’s name.
00:08:40
Speaker 3: And what can I pray with you?
00:08:42
Speaker 2: And about every time they go, “Yes, please.” Only one time in my entire life have I said to someone in a foreign country, “Can I pray?” And they said, “Yes,” and a “But don’t pray in Jesus’ name, not only won’t.” And I prayed in Jesus’ name anyway there. When I was done, they go, “I told you not to.” I said, “Well, man, that’s my prayer.”
00:09:05
Speaker 2: “I got to do it. But don’t worry. I won’t pray anymore with you.” There was only one guy. Everybody else is like, “Yeah, please, I’m in trouble.”
00:09:12
Speaker 2: And I remember in the Battle of Mosul when it was over, Iraqi General came to me and said, “You know, we almost lost our country. And I prayed to God for help, and he gave me the worst two things in one: an American Christian, you. But thank you for showing us what it means to follow Jesus.” “Wow.”
00:09:36
Speaker 3: And I love this guy.
00:09:37
Speaker 2: It’s General Mustafa Muslim. So love is what breaks down barriers than all of us. And Jesus offers that supernatural transformation of the heart. And when we are willing to follow him, even in the midst of our weaknesses and sins and questions, when we say, “I’ll obey.”
00:09:55
Speaker 2: “You, Jesus, please give me your love.” He does, and he goes with you, and people feel that.
00:10:00
Speaker 2: So that’s my only hope in ministry because I’m also just a person with sinful thoughts, sinful actions, limitations, but offered up to Jesus.
00:10:10
Speaker 3: He uses us anyway because he loves us, too, and he wants us to love each other.
00:10:15
Speaker 2: My mom says, “God has friends all over the world, and he likes them to meet each other.”
00:10:22
Speaker 1: And a terrific job on the production, editing, and storytelling by our own Monty Montgomery, and a special thanks to Dave U Bank, Free Burma Rangers. That’s his mission, and that’s his mission field: a soldier missionary. Dave U Bank’s story here on Our American Stories.
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