There were men called "army chaplains."

[pynchonoid]

"There were men called 'army chaplains.' They preached
inside some of these buildings. There were actually
soldiers, dead now, who sat or stood, and listened.
Holding on to what they could. Then they went out, and
some died before they got back inside a
garrison-church again. Clergymen, working for the
army, stood up and talked to the men who were going to
die about God, death, nothingness, redemption,
salvation. It really happened. It was quite common."
(GR 693)

<http://www.charlotte.com/mld/observer/news/5425498.htm>
Speaking of God, preparing for war
JUAN O. TAMAYO
Knight Ridder

CAMP COMMANDO, Kuwait - On the brink of war, chaplain
Doug Dowling is thinking about the sermon he will
deliver today to American leathernecks in his
sandbagged chapel a few miles from the Iraqi border.

He will urge the Marines to treat enemy bodies with
respect, to look away from the grotesque mutilations
of war. He will tell them the war is not about getting
even for 9/11. And he will tell them that amid the
horror of war they may find the beauty of valor and
comradeship and, perhaps, the presence of God.

A stocky Navy lieutenant with a blond mustache and
bare-walls haircut, the 42-year-old Milwaukee native
looks like a Marine in his digital desert camouflage
uniform, floppy "boony" hat and military web gear.

But he wears a tiny black metal cross on his shirt and
speaks with the fervor of a former Navy warplane
navigator who was stationed in Kuwait during the
Iraq-Iran war in the 1980s, who fought in the 1991
Gulf War and then became a pastor for the Evangelical
Lutheran Church in America.

"There is a God who is a warrior, but God is the same
always," Dowling said. "The God you believe in as you
may go to war is that same God you believed in
yesterday and the day before, so nothing changes for
me on this day."

Dowling has baptized 32 people here, including a Navy
officer he met briefly in a military base parking lot
and christened with water from a plastic bottle.

He will hold one more service today in his tiny chapel
with a cross on top, really a bunker dug halfway into
the desert sand and then sandbagged for protection.

"I will pray for our men and for theirs, too," he
said. "And I will pray especially for peace."




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<http://www.pynchonoid.blogspot.com/>

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