Points Summer Book Club

The more I think about it, the more I'm grieved by the absence of God during the bombardment (by which I mean, the absence of Baumer reaching out to God). But you know, that's war too. Here's a link to a piece I wrote four years ago in National Review, on the role of military chaplains. Here's the lede:

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."

This passage from "All Quiet" also got me to thinking about the ambiguous scene from "Saving Private Ryan," in which the U.S. sniper recites Psalm 23 as he's picking off Nazis. Is that blasphemy? Or is the soldier steeling himself to do his moral duty by trying to remind himself that this is what fighting evil requires of him under God?