Ministering to Soldiers, and Facing Their Struggles

ON RELIGION
Ministering to Soldiers, and Facing Their Struggles
By SAMUEL G. FREEDMAN
Published: July 1, 2011

Maj. David Bowlus, a chaplain, in Iraq. He now instructs chaplains at the military's school for them at Fort Jackson, S.C.

"During the Vietnam War, a chaplain typically deployed once, for six months. Of the approximately 1,650 active-duty chaplains now, more than one-third have had multiple deployments, according to statistics from the Army’s Office of the Chief of Chaplains. And the average deployment has lasted 13 months."

FORT JACKSON, S.C. — Growing up on a farm in Ohio, the son of an Army medic in World War II, David Bowlus often sneaked into the attic to try on his father’s uniform as if it were a destiny. At 16, on a family trip to West Point, he watched the cadets drill and knew what he wanted for the future.

After graduating from the academy, an armor officer trained for war, he entered a military doing the peacetime duties of the 1990s. The closest Mr. Bowlus got to combat before retiring from the Army in 1998 was a round of war games, fought with weapons that fired only laser beams.

But as this Independence Day nears, Mr. Bowlus, 40, has served more than his share of time under fire, having returned to active duty in 2002. He has made eight tours of duty, rising to the rank of major. He has done it, however, in his second Army incarnation, as a chaplain.

In those years, he has held syringes and gauze for a medic while praying the 23rd Psalm with a soldier shot during a raid in Mosul, Iraq. He has administered first aid and God’s word to the fighting men raked by rocket-propelled grenades when the Taliban ambushed their convoy. He has soothed grieving parents and overseen the loading of coffins for the long flight home.

All of it has imbued him with purpose, and all of it has tested his endurance, both psychologically and theologically. Major Bowlus is part of a cohort of military chaplains who have gone through the same kind of multiple deployments as American soldiers in nearly a decade of war in Afghanistan and Iraq, and suffered similar emotional aftershocks.
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Ministering to Soldiers, and Facing Their Struggles