Keeping the Faith in Iraq

There are no atheists in foxholes, the saying goes, and that is what makes the job of military chaplain both, rewarding and challenging. Until last year, Captain Don Larson served as a chaplain with the Army National Guard at Balad Air Base in Northern Iraq. He made national headlines, when he converted to Wicca and lost his chaplaincy during the beaurocratic redtape that followed. However, Capt. Larson has kept his faith despite this setback; his faith in his religious path, his faith in the US mission in Iraq, and most importantly: his faith in the men and women who are deployed there.

As he told me of his experiences in Iraq, his voice was calm, almost serene. I had the sense I was speaking with a deeply spiritual man.

He could not hide his admiration for the soldiers under his care, even over the phone.

"I just look at these nineteen and twenty year-olds with profound respect," he said. "Because when I was their age, I was just beginning to understand who I was."

To illustrate his point, he related the story of a young man who conducted himself with bravery and compassion.

The event occurred when he was filling in for another chaplain. Capt. Larson was briefly attached to a QRF, a quick reaction force, tasked with security and reconnaissance; they are expected to respond to any given event on very short notice, usually less then fifteen minutes.

"When they come back (from a response call), and they have lost one of their team members or they have engaged the enemy, they have a debriefing," he explained. "You sit down, and you ask them what happened and let the soldiers share and touch base."

Capt. Larson's role during these debriefings was to help assess the soldiers' psychological and spiritual state of being.

"I try to see if everybody is okay," Capt. Larson said. "Or if someone is going through a grief cycle or is closing down, cutting off from everbody else, because they've experienced something extremely traumatic."

In this particular event, the unit was ambushed. An IED, an improvised explosive device, went off, disabling the first vehicle in a convoy, and an insurgent sprayed the soldiers with small arms fire.

Capt. Larson's description of the incident was very matter-of-fact; he didn't go into much detail, and I was grateful for it. I have never been to Iraq, never have been inside a combat zone. However, I've seen more than my share of video footage on the internet: the Jihadist video where a tank explodes and the assailants praise God as rescuers carry away the injured on stretchers; the footage shot by a civilian whose truck has been disabled by insurgents and who helplessly watches as the enemy murders the driver of another disabled vehicle; the footage of injured soldiers pinned down by insurgent fire, unable to leave their position inside some drab concrete structure. I am grateful to live in the comfort and safety nortwestern Iowa provides, and I don't share Hemingway's and Crane's desire to place my readers into the thick of combat.

"The status of the soldiers was unknown to the guys in the second vehicle," Larson continued. "One of the soldiers chased him down, the trigger man that had just injured his friends and shot him. He went to this Iraqi and saw that he was still alive. And so what he did was to dress his wound and get on the radio and call in a helicopter to save his life."

At the debriefing, as the soldiers sat on metal folding chairs in the plain looking, temporary structure, the soldier asked, "Chap, did I do good? I mean, part of me wishes I just would have killed that guy. He tried to kill my friends. And yet another part of me understands that you don't do that. So after I injured him and he dropped his AK-47, there I am: the guy tried to kill us, I'm holding in his entrails and stopping the bleeding and calling in the medivac to save his life."

Captain Larson replied, "You did very well. You proved your quality by staying true to your training and doing the right thing."

At age 45, Captain Larson has been through a lot of things in Iraq, and he has bounced through fairly well, he said.

"But I have a very mature and deep belief system," he added. "I don't know, if I would have done as nobly at nineteen as this young man, who was compassionate and true to his mission."

All wars are ugly, and while the mainstream media are right to bring their horror to our notice, while they are right to impugn those who dishonor the military - those who torture detainees at Abu Graib, who rape young girls and murder their families - it is important to keep in mind that many of our fighting men and women behave nobly and honorably, even in psychologically and spiritually complex situations. Capt. Larson, in his capacity as a chaplain, provided me with a unique perspective on the inner lives of soldiers and the better qualities that surface in these individual in extreme situations: compassion, courage, insight, and esprit de corps.

Chaplains spend a great amount of time in military hospitals. LSA Anaconda's hospital exemplifies this. When looking for images of the interior of such a place, one doesn't have to search the internet very long to find a photo of a chaplain tending to an injured soldier on a guerney.

Capt. Larson related an event involving an injured marine. Several vehicles had been destroyed during an attack. Among the soldiers flown in by medivac helicopters was a Hispanic woman, perhaps twenty years old.

"Her leg was torn to shreds," Capt. Larson said. "The doctors and nurses were literally having her bite down on something (while they were tending her injuries). I leaned over and held her hand and said, 'You are my hero.'"

As the medical team labored to set her leg, the marine took hold of his hand, looked him in the eye and found the strength to smile at him.

"When I was twenty, the idea that I could actually perish was remote in my thinking," he marveled. "What happens (to soldiers in Iraq) is a lot of rapid maturing. ... A young woman gets off a plane, and she is in a combat zone. Suddenly she realizes: yes, I can die."

Facing one's own mortality, he said, demands of people that they grow up quickly and develop mature attitudes about many things, even spiritual matters.

"After our unit's first very close call, there was a quantum shift in the consciousness," he said. "The spiritual things I represented took on a whole new significance."

In his long career as a minister, Capt. Larson has had many conversations about God. But he feels the most interesting theological discussions have been with other members of the military, even before he was stationed in Iraq.

One reason is that abandoning otherwise irrenconcilable cultural barriers, such as religious differences, become a matter of survival. Capt. Larson conducted "open door services" that were very Universalist in character. They were attended by Catholics, Jews, Buddhists, and Wiccans - people who in the Sates may never have shared a religious service.

"In the States, people get really picky about their brand of theology ... I'm tired of people caring about the window dressing of religion, and not its soul," he said. "Most soldiers leave these bags behind."

Another reason lies in the nature of the military lifestyle. Capt. Larson said that the military facilitates openness.

"We train together, we eat together, we shower together," he said. "You can't be a real uptight, private person and be in the United States Army."