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Military Chaplains and Soldiers Discuss Struggle to Keep Their Faith While Serving in War; 'Is The Pain & The Heartache Worth It?' Writes Chaplain Roger Benimoff After Attack in June
After Second Tour in Iraq, Benimoff Plagued By Questions; 'I Found Myself Getting Violently Mad At God' He Wrote in Journal
NEW YORK: When Army Chaplain (Capt.) Roger Benimoff began his second tour in Iraq in February 2005, he wrote, “My heart is filled with prayer and God is giving me a discerning spirit. The spiritual battle I am engaged in is a minute-by-minute war.” He is “on fire for God.” But the start of a full-blown crisis of faith-one he grapples with as a chaplain at Walter Reed Army Medical Center today-is seen in his journal entry from June 7, 2005, when soldiers brought back the bloodied corpse of one of their men to an aid station near Tall Afar: “Can [I] keep doing this? Is the pain & the heartache worth it? … God, please let me look to you and no other.”
Benimoff's experience, detailed in a daily journal and voluminous e-mails from Iraq shared with Newsweek, is a tale of a devout young man who begins his time in Iraq brimming with faith and a sense of devotion that carried him into a second tour. In the May 7 Newsweek cover “God & War” (on newsstands Monday, April 30), Washington Correspondent Eve Conant reports on how Benimoff, as well as other chaplains and soldiers, struggles to keep his faith in war. After joining Walter Reed last June, Benimoff was plagued by questions. “I am not sleeping well and I am still scared,” he wrote. “I was reading my Bible and I found myself getting violently mad at God.” For a brief period early this year, he came to “hate” God, and wanted nothing to do with religion.
National Guard Specialist George Schmidt, 30, who was raised as a Methodist in Titusville, Pa., and became a Wiccan before deploying to Iraq in June 2006, says he saw fellow soldiers driven in different directions. “Either you're running to God, grasping to hold on to the guy you were before you came to Iraq, or you're running right away from him because of what you're seeing,” he tells Newsweek. Schmidt is now being treated for posttraumatic stress disorder and anxiety at Walter Reed.
Army Specialist Joe Schaffel, 24, who is also being treated for PTSD, went to Roman Catholic school in Sleepy Hollow, Ill. “I had faith until I got to Iraq,” says Schaffel, who returned from his second deployment last September. “I haven't gotten it back since. Once you get there, you wonder how God could allow anyone to go through that.”
As Conant reports, chaplains are unarmed, but they go where the troops go. They help in any way they can. “When there were 17 or 18 bodies, it was more than mortuary services could handle,” says Army Chaplain (Lt. Col.) Dick Olmstead, now retired, speaking of his deployment to Kuwait and Iraq in 2004. “Maybe it's not the brightest move to have chaplains opening body bags to place 40-pound bags of ice on dead soldiers, but you have to go where your hands and heart are needed.” Still, after 20 or 30 ramp ceremonies, he says, “you can't help but wonder if God is really listening to you.”
When he was deployed a second time, in February, 2005, Benimoff asked to be placed with a combat maneuver squadron. “These are the guys that go in and kick down doors and drive tanks,” he says. “I wanted to be there for them.” He confided in his journal, however, that he was not sure he'd recovered yet from the deaths he endured during his first deployment. And he was terrified of getting killed. Benimoff often traveled in Bradley fighting vehicles or Abrams tanks to reach soldiers in small outposts.
On April 20, he writes of a memorial service he just finished for a private first class. A week later a Bradley crew is badly shaken up after a roadside blast. On April 29, two soldiers are killed by an IED. “Already, I am repeating my pattern from [the first tour]: I am doing more memorial ceremonies than preaching … I feel numb.” One day in May, snipers take aim at him and other soldiers on a hospital rooftop in Tall Afar. “The Army must be warping me,” he writes, “because it was not a big deal to get shot at. Last time I was petrified.” The adrenaline rush soon wears off; he writes that it is “hard for me to feel at all.”
Benimoff's journal ends Jan. 22 of this year. The last lines read: “I do not want anything to do with God. I am sick of religion. It is a crutch for the weak … We make God into what we need for the moment. I hate God. I hate all those who try to explain God when they really don't know.” By late March, during his first interview with Newsweek, he was recovering his faith but the pain had not subsided. “The symptoms are still there; this past year has been the most challenging of my life,” he says. “But I have a new relationship with God. I tend to be much more blunt with him.”
Also in the cover package, Editor-at-Large Evan Thomas and Editorial Assistant Andrew Romano report on the history of war leaders calling on God in the heat of battle. And in America, God and war have a particular kinship: presidents in time of conflict invoke the Lord's name as a way to rally the people, but also as a comfort and consolation for the loneliness of command. Evoking God in the midst of mass killing is inspirational to some and offensive to others. Divine sanction has been used to give meaning to the Constitution's promise of equality as well as to license genocide. Depending on the moment and the character of the particular president, asking the Lord's help in time of war can be a sign of hubris or humility.
(Read cover story at http://www.Newsweek.com)
