Sailors who’d take a bullet for a chaplain

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Sailors who’d take a bullet for a chaplain



For RPs, one battlefield duty is paramount: Protect chaplains
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.
While they walked, a Marine instructor barked orders. Artillery fire boomed in the distance.
Half the sailors carried M16 rifles — some working on left-handed shooting stances — as well as web belts with ammo clips. But Gillen and several others walked with their hands at their sides, scanning ahead and following the instructor’s directions.
Then the instructor yelled, “Contact right!”
Each person dropped into the mud. Those with rifles pointed them toward opposite sides of the field. When the instructor gave a second command, half the sailors swung around online with the others and then rushed a mock enemy position while the other half pretended to lay down covering fire.
The unarmed sailors were Navy chaplains, prohibited by the Geneva Conventions from carrying so much as a pocket knife while on combat patrols in Iraq and Afghanistan. Most will be doing the real thing in just a few months.
But during this exercise — held at Camp Johnson, part of Camp Lejeune — all but two sailors pretended to be standard infantrymen, while two of their comrades assumed the roles of chaplain and religious program specialist.
An armed sailor, Religious Program Specialist 2nd Class Jonathan Oliveras, lingered behind the squad, next to Gillen, as the rest of the patrol rushed forward.
“Stay with your chaplain,” the instructor yelled to Oliveras, who until recently worked in an office as a chaplain’s assistant aboard the amphibious assault ship Nassau.
Religious program specialists don’t necessarily share the faith of the chaplains they are sworn to protect. Some are agnostic and others are atheists, said Cmdr. Gregory Todd, commanding officer of Chaplain and Religious Program Specialist Expeditionary Skills Training, or CREST.
But whatever their faith, they are indispensable to chaplains, he said.
When chaplains are not deployed, RPs serve as their personal assistants. They plan religious services, answer telephones, type religious programs and help prepare sermons. But during wartime, the RP takes on another role — serving as the chaplain’s personal gunman.
RPs come to Camp Johnson to learn how to do that.
For seven weeks, they learn infantry tactics, take martial-arts training, practice marksmanship, learn convoy driving and combat first aid, and go on hikes as long as eight miles. And they learn that a big part of being a chaplain is not about preaching but about meeting the service members’ basic emotional needs.
They learn how to set up a green altar with a camouflage covering that can also serve as a desk or a stand if need be — and they learn that there is a time for preaching and a time for more basic things.
“When you are in a good gunfight or one has just been completed, that’s not the time to go over there and start talking about Matthew, Mark, Luke and John and everybody else,” said Staff Sgt. Frank Lipscak, an infantryman and former squad leader who has deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan during his 16-year career and is now a CREST instructor. “That’s the time to go through and make sure everybody is OK.”
About 250 of the more than 900 Navy chaplains and RPs serve with the Marine Corps, Todd said, and each year about 40 of them come to CREST, which was founded in 1997 after it was discovered that many chaplains and RPs were unprepared for the rigors of combat during the 1991 Persian Gulf War.
Chaplains train for two weeks; RPs for seven. Camp Johnson is the only place where CREST training takes place.
Some, such as Oliveras, who entered the Navy as an undesignated seaman before striking as an RP, have never been to any formal military training outside of boot camp.
Most have never trained with Marines.
“I haven’t had to get this dirty in a couple of years,” Oliveras, whose fatigues were soaked from hours in the rain, said as he stood under a shelter during a break in training. “It gives you an appreciation of what Marines go through in the desert. It humbles you a bit.”
But every RP who deploys to Iraq or Afghanistan must come to Camp Johnson for training. Chaplains are not required to go, but are “strongly encouraged” to, Todd said.
“I wanted to be out there in the field with the troops,” Gillen said. “It’s wonderful. Get out of here and play in the rain a little bit. This is what our troops go through, and we need to be aware of that.”
Lipscak said he wanted to come to Camp Johnson to train hospital corpsmen and RPs because those two groups of sailors are essential to the well-being of Marines.
“They are great for morale,” he said. “You got to have a good chaplain. Chaplains and RPs are a force multiplier for an infantry unit. The things they bring to table, the spiritual advice, particularly when a unit takes a casualty, chaplains [have] got to get involved because the Marines get mad, they want to go out and start destroying things. The chaplain needs to get involved and get those Marines to cool off a little.”
The relationship is strange. Chaplains, who are officers, must obey the commands of enlisted RP when they are in the field. The RPs must obey the commands of the unit leader they are with, but their sole emphasis is on protecting the chaplain, Lipscak said.
Gillen had no problem with that.
“They are well-prepared to protect us,” Gillen said, noting that RPs patrol during worship services in combat zones and watch the chaplain’s back while he ministers to troops or civilians.
“If the RP says, ‘Get down,’ I am getting down.”
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.”



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