All Okay, Jumpmaster

As sentinel you guard the gate
'Twixt life and death, and unto death
Speed the brave soul whose failing breath
Shudders not at the grip of Fate,
But answers, gallant to the end,
"Christ is the Word -- and I his friend."
-Letts

I “rented” three movies from the MWR bunker. Not at the same time, but Cradle 2 The Grave makes three. It also makes the third one that is scratched just enough so that the movie freezes exactly at the start of the climax, and the only thing you can do is skip to the next chapter and try to rewind. I love watching what happens in the end in rewind. All movies should be viewed this way. It would save lots of people the hassle of having to hold it in near the end of the movie, when the extra-large diet coke you invited in wants to leave.

I enjoy talking with chaplains. They always have interesting stories to tell. Some hilarious, some inspiring, and a few that make you tear up. Ours is a huge Simpsons fan. He is a Texas boy, like me. I have met better chaplains, I think, but he is pretty good. I have not heard his preaching, but he does a good memorial service. We have a Catholic chaplain who comes to give mass once or twice a month. There is a huge shortage of chaplains in the military right now—age and health regulations are basically ignored for them. If you are eighty and have one lung, but are an ordained minister, then dammit, you can become a chaplain. And I think that’s great. This is a very spiritual undertaking, this strapping on your armor and rolling off to war. Sometimes you are amazed to discover a good idea that the army hasn’t managed to screw up; the chaplain corps is one of these.

Of course, our chaplain sometimes doesn’t like his job. He hates—HATES—the fact that he’s not allowed to carry a weapon. He carries several razor-sharp knives to make up for it. We joke with him, and tell him that he should be able to use his Bible like a weapon, and kill Hajis with it. Like the priest units in Warcraft or Age of Empires. Ha. Privately I think that if there were a touch-and-go situation outside the wire and he was there, he would pick up the first weapon dropped by one of our guys and use it himself. I can see him doing that. But the chief of the Chaplain Corps said they wouldn’t carry weapons, so for now he’s stuck.

My second-favorite scene in Band of Brothers (the first being when Speirs runs right through the company of German soldiers) is when the guys are trying to take a town and are getting pretty chewed up. Several of them take cover behind a building, away from the deadly crossfire out in the street. They are amazed to look over and see a chaplain striding around purposefully, completely oblivious to the hail of bullets around him, giving dying soldiers their last rights. And possibly the only (seriously, the one and only) good scene in the otherwise horrible movie Pearl Harbor is the shot of the chaplain wading out into the water to bless the dead men floating in the harbor.

The say it is not politically correct to call this war a Crusade. I would argue that rather than insult the Arab world, it insults our war—we are nothing like most of the corrupt, greedy Crusaders. But look at the hilarious-if-it-weren’t-so-scary reaction of the Arab world to some CARTOONS and tell me there isn’t a Crusade-esque clash of civilizations coming. I am glad chaplains are here to keep us focused spiritually. We need all the help from God we can get; and we need to constantly be reminded that this conflict is just the earthly manifestation of a greater one taking place in realms we can’t see.