Chaplains struggle to pay fitting tributes

CHAPLAIN Kevin Wainwright was preparing his Easter Sunday sermon in Iraq when there was a knock on his door.

The news was grim: 1st Lt Phillip Neel was dead. The young officer and fellow West Point grad had been a regular at the chaplain’s Sunday church services. Wainwright knew and admired him. Now he had to find the right words to honour him.

Wainwright chose the legend of Sir Galahad, King Arthur’s noble knight, and the poetry of Alfred, Lord Tennyson to salute Neel in a memorial.

He spoke of his compassion, his devotion to his soldiers. But in trying to understand Neel’s death, the chaplain also posed an agonising question: “Why does it seem that the good guys are the first ones to fall?”

On Easter night, the sad milestone of 4,000 American deaths in the Iraq war was reached. As the toll approached 4,000, Wainwright and hundreds of other military chaplains in Iraq and across America wrestled with hard questions constantly. These are the men and women who pray with the mortally wounded, who administer last rites on bomb-scarred roads, who sit at kitchen tables with grieving families back home.

Army chaplains such as Wainwright have been especially busy: Almost three-quarters of those who have died in Iraq were in the army. Of the total lost in all services, more than 30 were just 18 years old; about 80 were older than 45, according to the military. Nearly 100 were women.

But for every number, there is a name, and for every name, a husband or son, wife or daughter whose life is remembered, often by a chaplain.

“I’m the guy who knows all their stories,” Wainwright says. “Of all the people in the battalion, the chaplain is the one who should know a little about everybody.”

In 14 months in Iraq, Wainwright comforted countless grieving soldiers, composed handwritten notes to families and conducted memorials, including one for Neel held last year at a concrete-barricaded chapel.

“I remember them all,” he says.