Sailors who’d take a bullet for a chaplain

[unhappycamper]

RP2 Aaron Neely checks around a corner in Falllujah, Iraq to make sure it's safe for Lt. Matthew Weems, a chaplain for 3rd Battalion, 4th Marines, to continue. Chaplains must rely on their RPs for protection in a war zone.


Sailors who’d take a bullet for a chaplain
By Chris Amos - Staff writer
Posted : Wednesday Nov 7, 2007 19:10:30 EST

Camp LEJEUNE, N.C. — Lt. Cmdr. Yolanda Gillen did not expect to get this dirty at work when she became a Navy chaplain seven years ago.

But one September afternoon, Gillen, who most recently served as a Methodist chaplain at the Coast Guard Training Center at Cape May, N.J., and a group of about 20 sailors trudged across a soccer field during a driving rainstorm, simulating a Marine combat patrol in Iraq.

~snip~

Like Gillen, Todd did not plan to go into combat when he became a Navy chaplain 21 years ago. But he said he found life at the front was more meaningful.

“It’s the most honest,” he said. “You’re living with people day to day. Your only place to go to the bath is a trench. You don’t hide a whole lot in that setting. You just say, ‘This is the way it is.’ I like that.”

“Chaplains are probably the most protected human beings in a combat zone,” Lipscak said. “Marines on patrol inherently understand that if you protect nothing else in this world, you protect the chaplain.”


Rest of article at: http://www.navytimes.com/news/2007/11/navy_rptraining_071107w/



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