Marines in Iraq look to pastor for answers to tough questions

"They don't think their dead comrade should be awarded the honor of a marine killed in action. But asked if the unit should refuse any memorial at all, their heads snap up. "He deserves something," the tall one says adamantly. His mate nods in agreement."

PART 1: US Navy Chaplain Michael Baker ( Read the full series )
Military chaplain: Marines in Iraq look to pastor for answers to tough questions
From a buddy's suicide to a religious ritual, young troops count on Lt. Michael Baker.
By Lee Lawrence Correspondent of The Christian Science Monitor
from the October 30, 2007 edition

Habbaniyah, Iraq - Under a sun-blanched desert sky, Navy Chaplain Michael Baker and Marine Sgt. Bill Hudson Gross bounce in the back of a truck as it rumbles across Camp Habbaniyah. Clad in helmets and body armor in the 110-degree F. June heat, they're on a mission: to baptize Sergeant Gross.

"I am going to try to talk him out of it," confesses Chaplain Baker, a tall, lanky Methodist minister whose formal Mississippi-tinged speech and posture mask an often goofy sense of humor.

It's not the baptism itself; it's just the part where Gross wants Baker to immerse him in the Euphrates, one of four rivers that the Bible describes as flowing from the Garden of Eden. For Gross, an infantry platoon leader who just weeks before saw two of his men wounded by shrapnel, the river has a personal connection. Two years ago he deployed to a small base on the river, where he turned his back on religion after learning of his father's death back home. Now that he has rediscovered his faith, he feels it fitting to be baptized in a river where, he says, "a lot of people gave up hope."

Baker enumerates the problems with Gross's plan: "There is the issue of water pollution and the issue of security," he says. By stepping into the Euphrates, they would technically be leaving the confines of the camp, home to the 3rd Battalion, 6th Marine Regiment. Safer to wear their 25-pound body armor and risk drowning, he wonders? Or better to stand in the river without it and risk being shot? His laugh at the predicament is loud and staccato.

For military chaplains in war zones, even very routine requests can prove challenging – as Baker has discovered, it is not always easy to satisfy basic emotional and spiritual needs of individual troops within the hard-edged, mission-oriented goals and guidelines of the command.

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http://www.csmonitor.com/2007/1030/p20s01-usmi.html?page=1

What's it going to take for Marines and the rest of the units with people in combat zones to understand this came from a combat wound? What makes them think it is any less worthy, noble or heroic than being cut down by a bullet from the enemy or a bomb? They all need to understand that although there were other options, this is in fact a war wound that claimed a life. The bullet may have come from the Marine's own finger pulling the trigger, but the wound was caused from combat.


PTSD is an insidious killer.

Main Entry: in·sid·i·ousFunction: adjectivePronunciation: in-'si-de-&sEtymology: Latin insidiosus, from insidiae ambush, from insidere to sit in, sit on, from in- + sedere to sit -- more at SIT 1 a : awaiting a chance to entrap : TREACHEROUS b : harmful but enticing : SEDUCTIVE 2 a : having a gradual and cumulative effect : SUBTLE b of a disease : developing so gradually as to be well established before becoming apparent

It is far more dangerous than a bullet fired at random or a bomb just waiting to claim another life. This one kills slowly with more far reaching victims. It takes buddies. It takes families. It takes friends. With normal combat deaths, the grief is answered with the knowledge of what happened and when. With PTSD and suicides, there are no clear answers. Everyone is left to wonder what they could have done to save the life. Everyone is left to wonder when it got so bad that there was no hope left to want to live. Everyone is left to wonder when it all started.

When they have PTSD, which is a wound from trauma, there is a golden window of opportunity to treat the wound before it infects the casualty. Left alone it eats away more of the character until there is nothing left. This is not something that should ever be treated as less worthy of honoring the life. It should always be more worthy of saving a life than it is. Until we all get it into our brain that this is a wound as surely as a bullet cuts into the skin, we will lose more by their own finger on the trigger, their own hand on a noose, their own hand on a bottle of pills.

These Marines in this article spoke of the code. The code also says never leave anyone behind. If they do not take action helping those wounded by trauma, they are in fact leaving them behind to be taken by the enemy. The enemy they can no longer see, but the one suffering from the ghosts does. kc