News From the Cause
Ministering To Soldiers, And Facing Their Struggles (NY TIMES)
July 05, 2011
FORT JACKSON, S.C. — Growing up on a farm in Ohio, the son of an Army medic in World War II, David Bowlus often sneaked into the attic to try on his father’s uniform as if it were a destiny. At 16, on a family trip to West Point, he watched the cadets drill and knew what he wanted for the future.
After graduating from the academy, an armor officer trained for war, he entered a military doing the peacetime duties of the 1990s. The closest Mr. Bowlus got to combat before retiring from the Army in 1998 was a round of war games, fought with weapons that fired only laser beams.
But as this Independence Day nears, Mr. Bowlus, 40, has served more than his share of time under fire, having returned to active duty in 2002. He has made eight tours of duty, rising to the rank of major. He has done it, however, in his second Army incarnation, as a chaplain.
In those years, he has held syringes and gauze for a medic while praying the 23rd Psalm with a soldier shot during a raid in Mosul, Iraq. He has administered first aid and God’s word to the fighting men raked by rocket-propelled grenades when the Taliban ambushed their convoy. He has soothed grieving parents and overseen the loading of coffins for the long flight home.
All of it has imbued him with purpose, and all of it has tested his endurance, both psychologically and theologically. Major Bowlus is part of a cohort of military chaplains who have gone through the same kind of multiple deployments as American soldiers in nearly a decade of war in Afghanistan and Iraq, and suffered similar emotional aftershocks.
“I found myself at a crossroads of giving and pouring out and having to find a way to refill my reservoir,” Major Bowlus said in an interview last month, recalling his lowest ebb. He continued a few moments later: “I realized my passion for God and my love for people was waning. I cared, but I didn’t care as much as when I first went in. I was lovingly going through the motions.”
Major Bowlus’s challenges, his struggle and his ultimate recovery — to the point that he now instructs chaplains at the military’s school for them at Fort Jackson — exemplify the experiences of his peers. And it sets this group of military chaplains apart from their predecessors in the Vietnam War era, the last period of sustained American combat overseas.
A recent doctoral dissertation by Vance P. Theodore at Kansas State University, based on a survey of 408 chaplains, calculated that about 20 percent showed signs of depression, anxiety or post-traumatic stress disorder. One evocative umbrella term for chaplains is “compassion fatigue.”
During the Vietnam War, a chaplain typically deployed once, for six months. Of the approximately 1,650 active-duty chaplains now, more than one-third have had multiple deployments, according to statistics from the Army’s Office of the Chief of Chaplains. And the average deployment has lasted 13 months.
“Coming back from a year, 15 months, even 20 months, you have reintegration issues,” said Col. Michael Dugal, the director of the Center for Spiritual Leadership at Fort Jackson, which helps chaplains deal with the strains. “And there’s the whole issue of ‘How do I prevent burnout as I constantly provide for the spiritual needs of so many soldiers?’ Click here to view
