Ministers of War: The amazing chaplaincy of the U.S. military

National Review, March 10, 2003 by Rod Dreher

The shooting had long since stopped by the time Richard Kent arrived for his tour of peacekeeping duty in Bosnia. But what the American soldier saw in an abandoned warehouse in a village called Kravica still haunts his dreams.

Eight years before Kent's arrival, Serbian forces crammed a thousand Bosnian Muslim men into the warehouse, where, according to the United Nations' official report, they were "killed by small arms fire and grenades. Visiting the Kravica warehouse several months later, United Nations personnel were able to see hair, blood and human tissue caked to the inside walls of this building." By the time Kent and his fellow soldiers saw the building, it was being used to store tractors and manure. The only sign of the barn's past was a black mold covering the walls, feeding off the rotting human flesh and blood embedded in its crevices.

Kent went to Bosnia a devout Catholic, but nothing they taught him in catechism class back in Michigan prepared him for that moldy barn in Kravica. "When evil of this magnitude is encountered, simple piety is not enough," Kent says today, from his home in northern Virginia. "Why does a God who has protected me, a soldier, through dangers large and small -- where was He when the men murdered in this warehouse screamed for His mercy? Why has He allowed genocide?"

It is at this point, when the cruelty that a soldier has witnessed threatens to overwhelm his understanding and devour his soul, that he may go in search of a chaplain. Dave Peterson, a Presbyterian minister and retired Army colonel who served as a top chaplain in Operation Desert Storm, says the gruesome slaughter of fleeing Iraqi troops on the so-called "highway of death" back to Baghdad devastated many Americans who fought in that battle. "We had chaplains talking to some of those troops for a significant amount of time after the fact," Peterson says. "A significant number of troops just broke down after that. It left a mark, it really did."

If most people think of military chaplains at all, the image that comes to mind is kindly but slightly befuddled Father Mulcahy, from M*A*S*H. In fact, the more dangerous the mission, the more vital chaplains are to its success. The nearly 1,400 chaplains in the U.S. armed forces -- nearly all Christian, except for about 30 Jewish and 15 Muslim clergy - - must be on-the-spot counselors to men and women living through a kind of trauma that few civilians will ever experience. They prepare soldiers to kill and to die without losing their souls. They help soldiers re-integrate into the lives of their families. Chaplains ministering stateside help military families left behind get through months of emotional and sometimes financial hardship.

And, most important, on the battlefield they serve as a sign of the presence of the just and good God in the midst of hell on earth. Chaplains work on or very close to the front, and do so unarmed. To soldiers under fire, the chaplain's presence is a sign that God has not abandoned them. A chaplain's importance to the morale of combat soldiers is so central that if his courage falters during fighting, commanders must immediately replace him, or risk the collapse of the entire unit. The things soldiers in combat are asked to do and to suffer are so extreme that, in many cases, only a belief that God is with them enables them to endure.

"Courage is really fear that's said its prayers," says Father Vincent J. Inghilterra, a top Army colonel and Catholic priest who has been a military chaplain for 34 years. "The truth is, there's no way we can do anything without a deep spiritual life and dependence on God. When you're a soldier, you are there alone, you're very mortal, you have a mission and you don't know if you're going to survive. We chaplains bring the presence of God into every situation, so that wherever our soldiers find themselves, they are not devoid of God."

Talking to these men, one is struck by their moral realism, and how starkly it contrasts with the effete sentimentality you find among so many clergymen today. Theirs is a sterner faith, a manlier piety than mainstream America is accustomed to. It has to be, because the world beyond our shores is filled with hot, cruel places, lands where a faith that has had its moral backbone turned to aspic by our decadent, Oprah- cized culture cannot hope to survive. U.S. troops aren't the only Americans who could stand to hear the testimony of military chaplains in these dire days.

The presence of religious leaders among armies is an ancient custom. The Bible records that the Israelites brought their priests with them into battle. The Romans did as well, and had their pagan priests perform ritual sacrifices and read auguries from animal entrails on the eve of battle. The word "chaplain" derives from the early Christian era. In the 4th century, a Roman soldier, Martin of Tours, is said to have divided his military cloak and given half to a beggar he found shivering in the cold. That night, he had a mystical vision in which he saw that the beggar was actually Jesus Christ. After converting to Christianity, Martin became a devout churchman, and when he died, he was canonized, becoming a patron saint of France. The Frankish kings would carry St. Martin's cloak -- called in Latin cappa -- into battle as a holy relic. The priest who cared for the cloak was called a cappellanus, and ultimately all priests who served the military were called cappellani. The French translation was chapelains, which is where the English word comes from.