As Hugh Nibley was riding the troop transport ships that were crossing the English Channel on the morning of June 6, 1944, he was one of the first to hit Utah Beach as one of the Intelligence officers. He was to get behind German lines so he could let everybody know what was happening. He had smuggled a small copy of the Book of Mormon into his intelligence pockets. They were told that they could not put anything into these pockets except for classified materials. As he was riding across the choppy waters, he was reading Ether 13–15. Brother Nibley said, “I had read these before, but to me it had always been so fancifully absurd, so far out of the realm of anything that I had ever experienced, I could not see how this could even happen. It was so outlandishly awful.” He said, “It was at that moment as I looked out at what I was experiencing, that was when I got my testimony of the truthfulness of the Book of Mormon. It was in the darkness, realizing how real it can be, and so in such a way that you could not make it up that way.”
Moroni himself, in fact, had experienced something like this. He had lived through the destruction of his own people. I have wondered why Moroni detailed over three chapters, the day-by-day, blow-by-blow, count of how many men were left among the Jaredites.
During his own people’s final struggle, Moroni was one of the commanders of a full complement of soldiers, which may have been a maximum of 10,000 people. After the battle every day, he would have counted up who was left. Ether had apparently done the same. When Moroni gave us these diminishing numbers, he had lived through that situation. Like Brother Nibley, that darkness of war allowed Moroni to feel the contrast with the wonderful things that he had learned from the Nephite records and the 24 gold plates of Ether.
Book of Mormon Central, “How Could So Many People Have Died at the Battle of Cumorah? (Mormon 6:114),” KnoWhy (November 15, 2016).
Alex Nibley and Hugh Nibley, Sergeant Nibley: Memories of an Unlikely Screaming Eagle (Salt Lake City, UT: Shadow Mountain, 2006).