Bringing God to Men: American Military Chaplains and the Vietnam War

Introduction

1 introduction God and country. Peace and war. Civilian and military. Sacred and secular. American and foreign national. Officer and enlisted. At every turn, American military chaplains inhabit these liminal spaces at the intersections of religion and war. First, they occupy a space somewhere between military and civilian life: they are full-fledged members of the military, but they are also responsible to their various religious communities. Second, they often mediate between the more clearly defined categories of officers and enlisted personnel, an intermediary position symbolized by their title of “Chaplain” rather than their rank. Third, they fall somewhere between their own religious denominations and a broader religious community— for example, a Methodist chaplain must not only uphold and practice his individual faith and provide spiritual support to his coreligionists but also provide access to the same support for Muslim or Mormon soldiers. Chaplains cross cultural boundaries, working both with American service members and with foreign nationals, and they also cross service boundaries —Army chaplains provide for the spiritual needs of Navy, Marine, and Air Force personnel, and Navy and Air Force chaplains are similarly flexible . Finally, the chaplain lives between the sacred and the secular. The chaplain is concerned with the spiritual, the other-worldly, the moral, the tenets and practice of faith; at the same time, the chaplain must operate in a secular environment, in an organization governed by hierarchy and orders, which exists as the violent arm of a secular state. By institutional design and personal choice, military chaplains are fundamentally people in the middle.1 Chaplains’ fundamental ambiguity and disorientation of identity and position are, ultimately, their most important qualities because they allow chaplains flexibility in responding to the various moral, theological, and political questions raised by war and their participation in it. During the Vietnam War, their liminal position is precisely what produced chaplains’ diverse range of experiences in the war, provided complex strategies for resolving conflict, enabled the institutional chaplaincy to fulfill its mission , and prompted chaplains to interpret the Vietnam War in ways fundamentally different from nonchaplain military members and their civilian clergy counterparts. During and after the war, the chaplains’ position in 2 | Introduction the middle of various communities shaped public discourse about religion and war and guided postwar institutional changes. The crucible of the Vietnam War intensified these potentially conflicting spaces and highlighted the chaplain’s ambiguous and problematic position. As the nation waged literal war in Vietnam, it also came apart over a war of words and actions about the war in Vietnam. While conservative and liberal voices clashed over the morality of the Vietnam War and argued about a chaplain’s prophetic responsibility to support or criticize the war effort from the inside, chaplains themselves remained focused on providing pastoral care for their military constituency.2 These competing views came to a head after the war ended and resulted in a fundamentally changed organizational culture within the military chaplaincy. The experience of Vietnam often compounded or complicated moral, political, religious, and social divisions for chaplains and soldiers. Vietnam raised a host of doubts and created a range of conflicts not only for individuals and religious communities but also for the nation as a whole as “Vietnam” came to represent both a failure of American foreign policy and of a certain vision of American identity and destiny. Yet chaplains’ institutional affiliations and personal attributes prompted them to bridge divides that separated various communities. They served as mediators between religious and military cultures in situations that demanded explanation and reconciliation, though their resolutions of these tensions and conflicts were often morally complex. Those who served in Vietnam faced fierce moral and religious dilemmas during the war, and personal faith did not always provide satisfactory answers—nor did it alleviate the stress of combat. Yet the evidence suggests that most chaplains did not buckle under the pressure of their ambiguous positions, nor did they abandon their religious values and beliefs in favor of military ones. Instead, chaplains’ actions and interpretations of the war in Vietnam complicate and add nuance to the dominant narrative about the nature and practice of religion in a time of war. In sociological studies of chaplains, “role conflict” is the dominant paradigm for explaining military chaplains’ experiences and behaviors. Role conflict suggests that situations with competing demands, values, and systems create conflict that must somehow be resolved, either by compartmentalization , by privileging one role over another, or through cognitive dissonance, that is, bringing conflicting actions and beliefs into...