Safest Place in Iraq: Experiencing God During War

CHAPTER 1

Heat, Danger, Dust, and Death

When they told me where I was going, they said it was the Safest Place in Iraq, but by the time I got there, things had changed. On a Tuesday night, the dining facility was crowded, bustling, with hardly an empty chair, when mortars landed on the building. Of the more than two hundred people in the dining facility (DFAC), eighteen were killed. Forty-seven were wounded, some seriously, but they’d survive—with or without that arm or leg or eye.

People were stunned, walking around like zombies. Most avoided eating in the DFAC, even after it was repaired and they started serving meals again. From that moment, incoming mortars and rockets became part of the routine that was soon to be my daily life.

Located on the main rail line between Baghdad and Basra, Diwaniyah is known for its manufacturing, and famous for its automobile tires. Dust-colored high-rise apartment buildings line the streets, each building home to more than a thousand people. Water from the Euphrates River irrigates the farms and groves outside the city, making the region one of the nation’s most fertile.

Men from Diwaniyah would drive to a vacant field on the edge of town, bringing their rockets and mortars to fire at us. They did this in the morning on their way to work. Sometimes it was mid-day during a lunch break, and other times in the evening on their way home from work. Occasionally it was in the middle of the night. Some of the people shooting at us were teens or even younger. Often, they would launch their missiles-of-death just before, or right after their prayers.

Camp Echo was a small, roundish Forward Operating Base (FOB), about a mile in diameter, in the middle of the desert, with temperatures ranging from 110–120 degrees. The dirt, sand, and heat were inescapable. Every day began with a new film of dust on each desk, table, chair, bed, and floor. The layer of dirt thickened as the day wore on.

Surrounding the entire FOB was a 12-foot high concrete wall. The other side of the barrier consisted of dry fields inhabited by rabbits, snakes, and camel spiders. There were also scorpions, an occasional wild dog, and, of course, the men and boys trying to kill us.

I volunteered to go. My philosophy as an Army chaplain was that I wanted to be wherever soldiers had to go, and if they were at war, I wanted to be there with them. Not because I enjoy fighting. We all know that a chaplain is a non-combatant. I wasn’t there to fight.

I was there to encourage, counsel, and pray; provide worship opportunities, friendship, and guidance; nurture the living, care for the wounded, and honor the dead; and guarantee the constitutional freedom of worship to men and women of all faiths, and the same freedom to men and women of no faith. Camp Echo was my home, my parish, my fiery furnace.

The day I arrived in March 2007, I met the commander: a pleasant, graying fifty-nine-year-old from Illinois who wanted to survive, go home to his wife, and retire to a life of fishing with his grandchildren. He told me our troops’ morale was horrible, and that part of my job as the chaplain was to encourage them to stop grumbling and complaining. Several weeks later, when I walked into his office to check on a few things, he started spewing out his own frustration and anger.

We’re sitting ducks inside this FOB, he shouted, and the General refuses to let us shoot. If I had my way, we’d put snipers in each tower along the wall, and whenever someone shows up with mortars and rockets, shoot ‘im dead. I’m tired of sitting here doing nothing.

Sir, my job is to help put an end to the grumbling.

He looked at me, paused, and laughed, remembering his own words, then continued griping. Even the Colonel needed someone safe to vent to, someone who would listen, someone who cared. It was a miserable place to be, and a terrible time to be there.

One morning, a mortar made a direct hit on the housing unit of one of the female civilians who worked at the FOB. A vibrant thirty-five-year-old from Houston, she was smart, pretty, popular, and dead. Seventy-five of our civilian workers packed up and went home the next day. They liked the job and the money, some of them earning more than $100,000 each year they worked in Iraq. In a few years they could make enough to fulfill several dreams and goals, but they didn’t want to die. The fact that they could pick up and leave was wonderful for them, but awful for the soldiers. We didn’t have that option.

I knew from the start that I could be wounded or killed. It was a weird feeling, and I came to accept it. How or when, I had no idea. But every time there was another explosion, I wondered if this was the day.

My wife also knew I might not make it home alive. Or if I did return, I might be a broken man–crippled, blind, psychologically damaged, or all of the above. With that possibility in mind, she told me before I left home, I don’t want to find out after you get back or after you’re dead that you were in danger. I want to know right away.

The phrase I want to know describes much more than how she felt about what happened to her husband during the war. It’s true about everything she does. She loves learning, is an avid reader, is addicted to research, and always wants to know more about everything. She might not have invented the internet, but it was certainly invented for her. She probably hasn’t read every book in the world, but I would bet there’s not an important book in the world she hasn’t read or skimmed or at least knows something about. When I was heading to Iraq, she was writing her doctoral dissertation and preparing for a new teaching position. So, to hear her say I want to know, elicited my response, Oh yeah? What else is new?

Many of our military personnel won’t tell their spouse and family what they’re going through during war, thinking they’re protecting them. Plus, we’re limited in what we’re allowed to say or write to our families. But I have a hunch there are many, like my wife, who are better off knowing what’s going on, and who want to know.

The first time I mentioned during a phone call some of the dangerous things that were happening, she said, I already know. I saw it on TV and in the newspaper. They’re mentioning Diwaniyah and Camp Echo by name. She scanned and sent me an LA Times article. I took it to our staff meeting the next morning, and discovered that many on our leadership team didn’t know what was going on outside the wire.

Rockets and mortars exploding all over the FOB weren’t the only danger, though. My busiest times were in the afternoons and evenings, so I got in the habit of exercising in the morning, sometimes on a treadmill in the gym, and sometimes outdoors. I went to the track one morning and discovered a group of people huddled toward one end of the oval. A nineteen-year-old soldier from a small town in Pennsylvania died of heatstroke while running. The temperature was about a hundred twenty degrees. He had returned from the States the night before.

While at home for his two-week mid-deployment R&R, he took his girlfriend out to dinner and proposed to her. She screamed Yes, put on her shiny new engagement ring, and was eager for him to finish the deployment, come home, get married, and live happily ever after. Nineteen-year-old men aren’t supposed to die like that.

Heat, danger, dust, and death formed the context for the job I was sent to do. Operating from the philosophy that ministry follows friendship, I built relationships among the men and women at Camp Echo: military, civilian, American, and Coalition. This allowed me to be there when they were at their best and when they were at their worst, in their strongest moments and in their weakest.

In the heat of the battle and the heat of the desert, hours turn into days, which transition to nights, and add up to weeks and then months. The conditions wear you down, leaving an imprint on your mind and your soul: images that will be seen in dreams for months or years, sounds that reverberate long after you’re home, people you befriended and cared about and stared at death with, but will probably never hear from again. For many of us, it’s only memory now. But for others, the war continues … on the inside.

CHAPTER 2

Unexpected Partners

There hadn’t been a chaplain at Camp Echo during the three years the FOB had been in operation, but now that people were being wounded and some were dying, our leaders decided to send a chaplain. My job was to build a religious program from scratch, take care of the spiritual needs of the people, and provide a ministry of presence. To do that, I needed a ministry team. I already had four congregations of prayer partners back in the States. Now I needed boots on the ground partners.

My first day at the FOB, somebody told me there was a civilian worker on post who was a pastor before the war. A Baptist preacher from North Carolina, James had been leading a Bible study every Sunday morning for the past year. In essence, he had been the only pastoral presence for the people at Camp Echo.

James worked the night shift, so on Friday night, the day after I arrived, I went looking for him and found him in his office around eleven p.m. A forty-two-year-old African American, he was a trim five-foot-nine with a ready smile, slight mustache, and graying goatee. He had a gold front tooth, which sometimes gleamed and sometimes was dark, depending on the