The Song That Started It All

           A Bullet and a Bible


James Hawkins, USMC — and the bullet that never reached his heart.
Long before Marty DeRoche ever sang a note of it, "A Bullet and a Bible" was already true.
Marty first heard the story from an evangelist speaking at his church in Kentucky — a soldier whose life had been spared when a Bible in his pocket stopped a bullet. The story stayed with him. So when his producer pitched him a batch of songs for a new project, one title stopped him cold: "A Bullet and a Bible." He was certain it was the same story he'd heard years before, and he knew immediately he had to sing it.
He almost didn't get the chance. The song had already been placed on hold by another artist. Marty waited, certain the song belonged to him, until word came back days later — the other artist had changed his mind. The song was his.
But Marty wanted more than the song. He wanted to know if the story was real, and if it was, he wanted to find the man it belonged to. He reached out to the songwriters — Amy Carlock, Kate Penwarn, and Denise Bain — and learned something unexpected: they hadn't written it from a true story at all. It had come from an idea, nothing more.
Undeterred, Marty held onto what the evangelist had told him and started digging. He pulled together every detail he could remember, enlisted his local newspaper for help, and eventually turned up an obituary in Sarasota, Florida for a man named James Hawkins — the closest match he could find to the story in his memory. He reached out to the family. One of Hawkins' daughters called him back.
Marty told her he wanted to dedicate the song, and a video, to her father. She played it for her siblings. Then her mother called.
Mrs. Hawkins spent an hour on the phone with Marty, sharing story after story about her late husband — a Bible that had stopped a bullet meant for his heart while he served overseas. It turned out the connection ran deeper than either of them expected: Marty came from a military family of his own, with a father who served in World War II and two brothers who served in Vietnam.
Mrs. Hawkins invited Marty and his wife, Delora, to Florida to meet the rest of the family — and to show him something. As a boy, she told him, James Hawkins had three dreams: to be a soldier, a police officer, or a preacher. He became a Marine first. After the war — after the Bible in his pocket kept a bullet from reaching his heart — he spent years serving as a chaplain to first responders. At seventy-eight, not long before he passed, he became a pastor, and the third dream was fulfilled too.
Mrs. Hawkins gave Marty a copy of a letter James had written during his time in the Marines — describing a night in a foxhole, snow all around him, asking God if he was going to die, and hearing an answer: not yet, there is more for you to do.
Then she brought out a red box, a Marine emblem engraved on the lid. Inside was the Bible itself — worn, with a bullet hole clean through the center. She invited Marty to open it to the page where the bullet had finally stopped. It was Psalm 5 — a psalm about crying out in the morning, laying requests before God, and waiting expectantly for an answer.
Marty had gone looking for a true story to honor. What he found was a family — and the quiet, unmistakable sense that the song had been placed in his path long before he ever sang the first note.