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76 chapter three Conflict and Identity As he rode with the convoy back to the base after a civic action mission to providehumanitarianassistancetoaSouthVietnamesevillageinJune1967, chaplain Paul Mitchell, who was scheduled to return to the United States the following day, reflected on his time in Vietnam. He had conducted three general Protestant services that morning, which was typical of his routine during his year in Vietnam, where he “had traveled many miles by land and air, led men in many worship services, visited, prayed, and counseled with them.” Through this priestly ministry of presence, counseling, and conducting worship services, he helped soldiers deal “with their fears, hurts, and sorrows, trying to help them find answers to whatever questions and problems they had.” But “there was another side to my life in Vietnam,” he reported. Civic action projects had “consumed a goodly portion of [his] time and energy.” Mitchell’s unit worked with local orphanages, a leprosarium , and a local normal school. They collected and distributed monetary and material donations from the unit’s members and from congregations, organizations, and relatives in the United States. These activities crossed geographical, cultural, and religious divides and represented an important facet of the American effort in Vietnam.1 For Mitchell, his clerical identity was integral to both his ministry and civic action projects, but so too was his military identity as he participated fully in the unit’s broader military and political mission. Chaplains in Vietnam confronted a variety of situations that had the potential to induce conflict between their constituent communities or between the various roles they played and identities they assumed. This chapterexplorestheideaofroleconflictastheprimaryparadigmforunderstanding the chaplains’ experience. The literature on role conflict suggests chaplains were faced with irreconcilable conflict between their various identities and roles and thus dealt with the problem by compartmentalizing the roles, that is, separating them intellectually, or by privileging one role over the other, essentially minimizing one identity for another. This chapter, then, complicates the accepted narrative by examining chaplains’ Conflict and Identity | 77 responses to a variety of specific situations that likely would have produced such role conflict. Chaplains’ responses to the issues of conscientious objection, drug use, their noncombatant status, participation in civic action programs (CAPs), personal morality, and war crimes and atrocities all demonstrated specific sites where chaplains had to actively manage both their religious and military identities. Chaplains’ identity management in the face of potential conflict was far more complicated than the role conflict narrative allows. Moral, theological , and pastoral tensions tested chaplains’ beliefs and worldviews and demanded that chaplains work out ways to reconcile potential conflict. In response to these tensions, chaplains managed their dual identities as clergymen and officers by developing crisis-based theologies and practical solutions to moral questions that helped them find and define meaning in war. This process was a fundamentally creative one, requiring chaplains to rethink their own work and ministry in light of their wartime experiences. Chaplains did not forsake either their military or their religious identity as they worked out solutions to conflict in Vietnam. In published memoirs, autobiographical essays, letters, diaries, periodicals , and denominational publications, as well as in oral histories and in response to official history surveys, chaplains reported on their wartime experiences.2 Although these narratives were clearly written in specific contexts, with specific audiences in mind, and for particular purposes, which may have been political, religious, or therapeutic, among others, they offer a valuable record of chaplains’ activities and attitudes during the war. In this regard, chaplains’ writings serve many of the same functions as the ubiquitous combat memoir or narrative, even though chaplains were noncombatants and only some witnessed combat with line units.3 Most of the accounts discussed here are from chaplains who served with Army and Marine ground combat units, a not unexpected imbalance given the public appetite for combat-driven war stories over those told by rear-area personnel and the relative distance from the battlefield from which Air Force personnel operated. Although Army chaplains substantially outnumbered ship-based Navy or Air Force chaplains, hundreds from those branches served as well, but fewer have published memoirs, and the Navy and Air Force have not compiled statistically significant surveys of these personnel. Furthermore, readers will notice few places where analysis is tied directly to a chaplain’s race or denomination. The reason is pragmatic: The sources themselves only rarely reveal a chaplain ’s race, and not all even identify a chaplain’s denomination. None of [18.222.67.251] Project MUSE (2024...

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