Wounds of war.

YOU'RE GOING to Germany? Sweet!" That was how news of my deployment was greeted by more than one member of my Air National Guard unit--the 181st Fighter Wing of the Indiana Air National Guard.

In the military, the initial criteria for evaluating whether an assignment is a good one include its opportunities for travel and sightseeing. Deployments to training bases like Volk Field, Wisconsin, or Gulfport, Mississippi, are met with yawns or pity. Trips to war zones--the "sand box"--earn you a measure of admiration. Trips to Nellis Mr Force Base (next to Las Vegas) or Tripler Army Medical Center (in Hawaii) are greeted with a knowing grin and a slap on the back. A trip to Germany seemed to fall into this latter category. That is, until I described what I would be doing.

I was one of a small number of National Guard chaplains selected for duty at Landstuhl Regional Medical Center. This is the major U.S. Army hospital in Germany where the badly injured troops from Iraq and Afghanistan are taken.

Landstuhl serves as the central hospital for the U.S. military in Europe, and real-life challenges to any worldview show up everyday, some battlefield-related and some not. The first night I was on call, the neonatal intensive care unit beeped me and said it had a "demise." A baby born earlier in the day had died and I was to go and be with the family.

When I got there the father was ever so gently swabbing the baby, meticulously cleaning his child's body. The father was a veteran of war zone deployments and had taken care of many of his buddies when they were injured. Now he was cleaning the child's little body, working around the tubes, getting the baby ready for the graves registration people. During the next four hours with this young family I prayed with them, stood outside their door as they had time alone with their child, made phone calls to inform the grandparents (at the request of the parents) and kept vigil with the father, who was reluctant to give up his child.

In the eyes of the world this man was a soldier, and our soldiers are often treated like a Rorschach inkblot onto which we project all of our support for, or anger about, U.S. foreign policy. But that night all I saw was a flesh-and-blood man who had just had his heart split open with grief. Here was a son, husband, brother. Not an instrument for some politician's ego, not an unwitting dupe in some global scheme he cannot comprehend, not an impervious Rambo. Here was a broken man looking for a healing word from his Christian tradition. Here was a man whose heart was just as broken as that of any other father in his shoes--or boots. I was honored to represent the church to him, wearing the same work clothes that he wore.

I spent a lot of my time in the psychiatric ward. It was not a popular spot for the distinguished visitors who would regularly tour the hospital. Senators and generals were happy to visit those who had physical wounds; they looked on with pride when the wounded were awarded Purple Hearts. In the psych ward, however, the wounds were of the mind and spirit. The wounds did not have the same kind of clarity as those on the other wards, and opportunities for compassion were less straightforward.

Three times a week I led a "Spiritual Wellness" group on 9 Charlie. When I talked with previous chaplains, it became obvious that my predecessors had followed a variety of approaches. Some would start by reading a story--rabbinical or biblical or secular--and simply ask the patients to respond. Others would lead a more traditional devotion. I found myself simply asking a few leading questions, such as "What do you want to be free from?" and "What do you want to be free for?"

The point was to get the patients--typically between six and 20 at a time--to talk with one another. When one person talked, that often invited the response of others, and soon they were interacting with each other's life stories. As one of the civilian therapists, the kindly Father Marc, a retired military chaplain and a Roman Catholic priest, told me, the patients mainly heal each other. Facilitating that interaction is the best we can hope for, especially given the fact that most of them will be on the ward for a week or two at most before they are sent either back to the States or back to duty.

It is hard to generalize about the patients. Many had conditions that would be found in any psychiatric ward anywhere in the world, such as depression or bipolar disorder. Many of them had attempted suicide. Several had been devastated by "Dear John" letters or by marital infidelity. As they talked about their realities, many past issues surfaced, such as physical and sexual abuse, or parental neglect and its accompanying low self-esteem.

In our chaplain training for dealing with tragedy, we are told that the greatest predictor of people having a hard time dealing with a trauma is a past history of trauma. If you have problems before going to war, going to war will often make them worse. And many of these men and women had come from "downrange"--the universal military term to describe the war zone, whether it be Iraq or Afghanistan. "Downrange" is a term that comes from the firing range--it is the direction of the targets, the place where the bullets hit.