Marvin McFeaters always puts his Faith first. It’s a lesson he learned on the field in Vietnam, and one he carries with him to this day as the post commander of Catholic War Veterans Post 1652 in Falls Church.

A convert to Catholicism, the now parishioner of St. James Parish in Falls Church, McFeaters grew up attending a Congregational church in Arlington. After graduating high school, he spent a year studying in Beirut, Lebanon, before joining the Navy in 1966.

In 1967, McFeaters was sent to Vietnam for what would become an 18-month tour of duty. During his time at war, McFeaters had several experiences with faith that stuck with him for years. The first happened while he was stationed for nine months in My Tho, a little town south of Saigon.

He remembers one day when his unit was patrolling the river and got a radio call telling them about a dead Vietnamese man floating in the water about a mile away. The body had been in the water for days and was already bloated, but McFeaters’ unit tied him to the boat and spent hours looking for somebody who could give him a proper burial.

They weren’t able to find anyone to take the man and eventually were ordered to cut him loose, but the day led to a discussion among the soldiers, a few of whom were Catholic, about the corporal works of mercy and how important it was to try to give the man a proper burial.

Around the same time, McFeaters became friends with a chief petty officer who was a devout Buddhist. The man told him a story about a time when he had almost drowned and had put a Buddha on a little card inside a metal frame, in his mouth. The man believed that, because of that action, he had been saved. He offered to get a Buddha for McFeaters, saying even though he was a Christian, he believed the Buddha would protect him as well.

The man went to his priest and got a Buddha for McFeaters. Then, he took McFeaters and knelt down at an altar he had in his home and prayed in Vietnamese.

“As I understand it, he was praying for me and to Buddha,” McFeaters said. “This Vietnamese man’s faith and also his absolute certainty that that is what protected him and saved him during that somewhat traumatic experience, affected me profoundly,” McFeaters said.

It was that thought McFeaters took with him to Cua Viet, a much more isolated and dangerous place for his unit. During his eight months there, his unit took a lot of shell fire from the North Vietnamese.

“We were pretty heavily bombed and I don’t want to be dramatic, but it was wearing,” McFeaters said. “Apart from the physical casualties, there was a lot of psychological wear and tear up there.”

With nowhere else to go, McFeaters turned to prayer to help him get through.

“I said a very good prayer for a 23-year-old guy, I said, ‘God help me endure this shell fire,’” McFeaters said. “My God was the Christian God and I was remembering this Vietnamese sailor’s experience with his own faith. It was an epiphany of sorts for me and then I survived the experience.”

McFeaters was discharged from active duty with the Navy in 1968. In 1969, he enrolled in Columbia University, where he lived in Skylar Hall, the on-campus Opus Dei house.

“I found it by accident,” McFeaters said. “I went to the student housing office and they said, it’ll be a room of your own, a common dining room, a common room and good fellowship. It sounded like something I could do, so I checked in for the summer and stayed for four years.”

Even though he was not Catholic, McFeaters enjoyed living in Skylar Hall and found refuge there from the radical New York atmosphere.

“As one friend described it, it was somewhere between a fraternity house and a seminary,” McFeaters said. “I was living there and I knew nothing about Catholicism and they did not try to convert me while I was there, but I was strongly exposed to Catholicism.”

While at Columbia, McFeaters met Evelyne, the woman who would become his wife. She was from the Philippines and, when she went back to the country for her brother’s wedding, martial law was declared and she couldn’t get out. The two corresponded for three and a half years before McFeaters went to the Philippines and married her in 1975. Since she was Catholic and he was still Protestant, the couple had to get a dispensation from the archbishop before the wedding.

After McFeaters finished Columbia, the couple moved to Falls Church and McFeaters got a job selling insurance. He has been in the insurance business ever since, and today has his own firm.

He started attending St. James Parish with his wife every Sunday. As he watched her grow deeper in the Faith, he began thinking about, and finally joined the Church himself.

He attended RCIA classes in 1983 and got as far as the confirmation stage before he backed out because he felt like he wasn’t ready. A few years later, McFeaters decided it was finally time.

He was confirmed on All Saints’ Day in 1986 at St. James.

“It’s like everything fell into place,” McFeaters said. “I felt like it was the perfect time to do this, it felt right and I felt like I had finally come to the point in my journey that I was looking for.”

After being confirmed, McFeaters started attending Mass at the Cathedral of St. Thomas More in Arlington a couple of times a week. In 1990, he joined the Ambassadors of Mary, a men’s prayer apostolate that brings the statue of Our Lady of Fatima from house to house. His work with the group helped him develop a love for the rosary.

In 2000, after attending a Mass on Memorial Day, the then-post commander invited McFeaters to a Catholic War Veterans reception. McFeaters has been involved with the group ever since. Since 2003, he has served as post commander for the Paul and Jacques Martin Post in Falls Church, which is loosely associated with St. James Parish.

“In a way, the Catholic War Veterans for me is a gateway into my own spiritual journey,” McFeaters said. “At this time in my life, it’s an opportunity for me to express my faith in the community. It takes veterans to help veterans and our primary mission is to help veterans and families.”

For McFeaters, everything that has brought him to this point was a result of God’s plan.

“I found that there are turning points in our lives over the years where we have to turn to God because there is nowhere else to go,” McFeaters said. “The life lesson I had at Cua Viet, where I prayed to God, ‘Lord, help me to endure the shellfire,’ was not unique, but it was profound to me and taught me a lesson.”

McFeaters attends daily Mass as a way of keeping himself spiritually grounded. Every day he prays for help in submitting to God.

“By submitting myself to God and asking for His will, I not only find the solution to the problem, but I develop a stronger faith as well,” he said. “I learned the hard way over the years that it’s got to be God’s way. I’ve exhausted myself testing the process, but at the same time, He has given me a life that’s bigger and better than anything I could have devised on my own.”

On the Web

For more information on the Catholic War Veterans, visit cwv.org.