Loyalty test; the case of Chaplain Robertson - Air Force Lieutenant Colonel Garland Robertson - Column

Christian Century, March 2, 1994 by Ken Sehested

LIEUTENANT COLONEL Garland Robertson is an Air Force chaplain at Dyess Air Force Base in Abilene, Texas, whose military record includes a Distinguished Flying Cross, which he won by rescuing a reconnaissance team in Vietnam. He has also commanded a nuclear missile site. Despite these credentials, Robertson is on the brink of being discharged from the Air Force. Stripped of all duties, he has been removed from the chapel offices and sequestered in a windowless, closet-sized room adjacent to the base runway where he spends his days writing book reviews for a chaplain's resource bureau.

Robertson is accused of "flouting" the very authority of the president. In a January 5, 1991, letter printed in the Abilene Reporter-News, he responded to a speech by then Vice President Dan Quayle assuring U. S. troops mobilized in Saudi Arabia that "the American people are behind you." Robertson wrote that Quayle's assertion "must be clarified to indicate that the American people are not united in their decision to support a military offensive against the aggression of Saddam Hussein in Kuwait." The letter was, he thought, a modest attempt to raise the question of what is a justifiable use of deadly force.

Behind Robertson's desire for public debate on the topic lay his own experience as a pilot in Vietnam. "I assumed that our leaders were telling us the truth" about the need to support democracy and oppose tyranny in Vietnam, Robertson said in a recent interview.

Robertson resigned from active duty as a line officer in 1976 to pursue a theological degree. He earned both an M. Div. and a doctorate in theology from Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Fore Worth, Texas. In 1982 he was reactivated as an Air Force chaplain. After an initial posting in Florida, Robertson assumed chaplainey duties overseas. In Germany his patriotic innocence suffered a second setback. He began to see the connections between U.S. appeals to "vital national interests" and the existence of raw materials--like oil--in other parts of the world.

But the urgency of moral questions regarding war in the Persian Gulf was prompted most immediately by his pastoral duties. "Soldiers were asking me in private what I thought about the impending war," Robertson said. "They had troubled consciences. They wanted to know if [fighting this war] was right." Robertson was aware that leaders of many Christian bodies were publicly examining the morality of a war in the gulf, and a number were arguing that U.S. military intervention could not as yet be justified according to the criteria of just war theory. So he wrote his fateful four-paragraph letter. Although he identified himself as a Dyess AFB chaplain, he omitted his rank, judging that such an omission would satisfy Air Force regulations regarding public statements by military personnel.

He knew the letter would raise objections, but the resulting furor caught him by surprise. As revealed in documents and testimony at his September 1993 Board of Inquiry disciplinary hearing, Air Force superiors hoped to force him out of the service. The Air Force psychologist responsible for authoring two of the three evaluations of Robertson testified that the wing leadership "wanted his head." When an initial psychological exam produced no evidence of mental dysfunction, a second was ordered, and then a third. The same psychologist who provided him a clean bill of health the first time concluded, after the third exam, that Robertson exhibited a "personality disorder so severe as to interfere with the normal and customary completion of his duties." This evaluation was made without an examination, breaching the most elementary rules of conduct for the profession.

A civilian employee testified that her former boss, the senior chaplain at Dyess, had taken her aside after a Sunday morning service "to tell me he had to get Chaplain Robertson out of the service. Chaplain Elwell went on to tell me that this task must be accomplished by a certain date...so that [Robertson] would not be entitled to full retirement benefits." It seemed evident, she said, that he "had been told that part of his job was to remove Chaplain Robertson."

Robertson was removed from the chapel's preaching schedule rotation "until the completion of Desert Shield/Desert Storm" (and, later in the year, removed permanently). The Dyess wing commander indicated that he would manage Robertson "as an officer and not as a chaplain." His orders to relocate to Germany in preparation for the arrival of expected casualties from the Persian Gulf were canceled. One by one his other pastoral duties were withdrawn: leadership of the base chapel choir, special educational classes, even Bible study and prayer services with those detained at the base stockade. Later a full-scale inquiry by the Office of Special Investigations was instigated. Robertson was cleared of a mysterious charge of fraud.

At one point an officer from the Chief of Chaplains office in Washington, D.C., paid a visit. "He indicated that compromise was essential for becoming a successful military chaplain," Robertson said. "I suggested that 'cooperation' was the more suitable word, but he quickly confirmed his intentional use of "compromise.' 'If Jesus had been an Air Force chaplain,' he told me, 'he would have been courtmartialed.' But he said that compromise is necessary in order to maintain a presence." In a letter to the secretary of the Air Force, Robertson said, "If this senior command chaplain is correct--that compromise is necessary to survive in the Air Force as a chaplain--then reveal this restriction. The Air Force maintains that chaplains are free to proclaim and practice their witness without fear of reprisal .... It is important that we not deceive persons who look to chaplains for assistance in spiritual growth and faith development."