What is a military chaplain job’s description?
I have always wondered about that. It all used to look oxymoronic to me. Until I read that PTSD is on the rise among soldiers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan, that is.
It is tough to be a soldier. Soldiers, like the rest of us, have conscience and moral codes. Unlike the rest of us though, they’re trained, and often ordered, to sniff the life out of others. The problem is, with the frequency of our needless wars increasing, those “Others” begin to look like “Us” and soldiers may have hard time doing what they had been trained to do.
Enter military chaplains.
Is it part of a chaplain’s job to comfort helpless soldiers when they’re ordered to wake up families at night and interrogate the terrorized population? Does a chaplain tell soldiers, contra the Ten commandments, it is ok to shoot to kill people when they don’t even know why and who it is they’re killing? Does the chaplain absolve soldiers’ of their sins when innocent kids are killed as a result of their actions? Does a chaplain also adopt the military term “collateral damage” to justify killing innocent folks?
It is like chaplains mostly heal the devil in a soldier’s injured soul so he/she can go on and fight for another day.
Is this the Christian thing to do then?
ekwaysan
