thedrifter
05-19-07, 09:05 AM
THE GOOD SHEPHERD
A Chicago priest tends his flock in war-torn Iraq
By James Janega
Tribune staff reporter
May 20, 2007
RAMADI, Iraq -- The Marines called it a chapel, but it really was a conference room in a war zone, with high sandbagged windows, dirty walls behind camouflage netting and sunburned Marines watching a war movie under a blast of air conditioning.
The movie stopped for church, a Catholic mass said by Army Capt. John Barkemeyer. The chaplain had arrived by Humvee, traveling through streets where members of his flock had died, past the place where he had narrowly escaped injury from a roadside bombing himself.
A lanky former pastor on Chicago's South Side who serves despite his moral misgivings about this war, Barkemeyer paused to trade the body armor and helmet of an Army officer for the white and yellow robe of a Roman Catholic priest. When he raised his arms, the hem of his robe hung incongruously over tan desert boots, and the kindness in his voice competed with grunts from a weight room across the hall.
For Barkemeyer, 43, it was the fifth and final mass he would lead on a day that had taken him through most of Ramadi, the war-torn capital of Anbar province. The trip was shadowed by oppressive heat, the possibility of mortal peril -- and an unusual calm.
"I'm supposed to be here," he said later. "This might not be the place on the face of the Earth that I would choose to be if I could be anywhere, but knowing what I can do, what I can offer soldiers, I believed it then and more strongly believe it now.
"That doesn't mean life is any easier."
Already on his second tour in Iraq, Barkemeyer is the Army's only Catholic chaplain in the province, a demanding role made harder by Anbar's brutality. He travels constantly, has cared for or administered last rites to dozens of victims of car and roadside bombs, and wakes up to knocks on his door in the middle of the night to find soldiers troubled by death, fears and religious uncertainty.
To adequately serve the number of Catholics in the service, the Army projects it needs as many as 400 Catholic priests worldwide. Instead it has 90. While Protestant chaplains can expect to lead about 70 religious services during a year in Iraq -- because there are more of them -- Barkemeyer will say more than 500 masses, most during visits to combat outposts.
Months ago, the pace brought Barkemeyer to a spiritual crossroads. He didn't doubt God or his reason for being in Iraq. He just knew he couldn't keep doing it, he said.
Surrounded by death and exhausted in spirit, Barkemeyer said, he told God he couldn't go on.
Looking back, he says, it was the only time God ever clearly responded to him. After that, the fighting dropped off.
Life plans take turn
Barkemeyer had intended to run a hardware store. He was born in Evanston and grew up in Wilmette, where the Barkemeyers have run the True Value at 4th and Linden for two generations. A third is in the wings.
They're a big family. Barkemeyer's brother Jim was the oldest. Germaine was the rebellious sister. Bob was garrulous. Heidi was the youngest and got away with almost anything. John was an instigator but a straight arrow, Jim Barkemeyer said. Even before he was a priest, they called him "St. John."
By the time he was in 8th grade, he had his life planned out. He would get a business degree from DePaul University and buy a certain house in Wilmette. Though he was the fourth of five siblings, he would be the one to take over the family business. "Absolutely nothing happened the way I planned," he said.
He went to Quigley North Preparatory Seminary and Niles Seminary. He studied in Rome and worked at the Church of the Holy Spirit in Schaumburg, St. Mary of the Lake Seminary in Mundelein and then in the Beverly neighborhood as pastor of St. Cajetan. He was an instigator there, too, funding a new roof and the school's electrical rewiring largely through raffles and donated services.
He was there seven years before joining the active duty Army in December 2006.
That wasn't what he meant to do either. He still has serious questions about how the U.S. came to Iraq.
In a homily to his parish, he once explained his stance: There was no evidence of weapons of mass destruction; there didn't seem to be need for a pre-emptive war; there was no connection between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda; and there was no urgency for a war to prevent future violence.
"This is all about taking care of sons and daughters," Barkemeyer said of his service to Iraq. "Not about the justness of the cause."
He was moved to join as teenagers left church pews at St. Cajetan for the Army and Marines after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. He knew about the chaplain shortage.
In 2003 he had entered the Army Reserves, thinking he would be a part-time touchstone for troops in the States. Two months after finishing chaplain school, though, the Army sent him to Kuwait and Iraq. His home during part of that tour was Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison, ministering to reservists there in the wake of the prisoner-abuse scandal.
It was so obvious he would be deployed again that he called Cardinal Francis George and asked for a leave of absence out of fairness to St. Cajetan. When Barkemeyer returned to his parish in 2005, he broke the news that he would not be staying long.
"On a personal level, I have a great deal of respect for him," said the parish business manager, Beth Dougherty. "But it was difficult for the parish when he left. He is an amazing human being, and I know he struggles with what he does out there."
A change of duties
Barkemeyer left the Archdiocese of Chicago for the 3rd Infantry Division in Georgia in December 2006.
By late January he was in Ramadi. Car bombs hit police checkpoints and roadside bombs blasted Army patrols. Soldiers fell to sniper fire and gunfights. Across the street from his room at the Camp Ramadi base, he spent hours at Charlie Medical, a military emergency room, moving mangled bodies and saying last rites.
At the end of his second week in Ramadi, a bomb went off next to Barkemeyer's Humvee. No one was injured. .
Amid all that, the memory of Cpl. Stephen Shannon stands out. The 21-year-old from Guttenberg, Iowa, called for Barkemeyer before surgery at Charlie Med. Barkemeyer remembers the tiny wound where a piece of shrapnel had wiggled under Shannon's flak vest.
It appeared to be minor, the size of a dime, but Barkemeyer agreed to anoint Shannon and said the rosary over the unconscious soldier while surgeons worked on him. The prognosis was good and Shannon was packed off for the logistics base in Balad, the last stop in Iraq for wounded soldiers shipping home or to Germany.
"And the kid died in the helicopter from here to there," Barkemeyer said. "I guess what really got to me—I mean, you name it, I've seen it -- but this kid in my mind was supposed to live.
"It struck me that if I wasn't there, there was no way the kid could receive the sacraments," he said. "It also struck me how fragile life is."
So Barkemeyer tries to improve lives in small ways. For troops at Spartan outposts, he brings video game consoles, candy, DVDs and material comforts gathered through an Internet donation program. In his room, he keeps kids' books and a video camera so parents can read bedtime stories to their children 6,000 miles away.
"Anything I can do that makes life a little better for a soldier, makes a day little bit better, that stuff is priceless," he said. "I live for that kind of stuff. I'll go to whatever meetings I need to go through and all that stuff -- but I live for this."
What troops want far and away is Barkemeyer, an authority figure who lets them relax. He strides around Camp Ramadi to visit soldiers, his big frame stooping in low-ceilinged Iraqi buildings and plywood huts. He's found a kindred spirit in a Louisiana supply sergeant with an opera-singing wife and a single-minded dedication to troops under fire. The chaplain often lights a cigar to share dramatic Anbar sunsets with another Army captain haunted by the deaths of soldiers under his command.
'Blessing to have him'
But most of Barkemeyer's flock lives off the base. To reach them, he travels by convoy from outpost to outpost, another soldier hidden under body armor and a helmet. He's accompanied by Pfc. Ashley Solorio, a 20-year-old Texan so small her rifle reaches from the ground to her elbow.
Instead of a gun, Barkemeyer carries a camouflage bag, from which he pulls a white and yellow robe, a round brass box holding the Eucharist and a brass cup for wine that the Army won't let him fill. When he says "This is the blood of Christ," he raises an empty cup.
"It's been about two months that we had him here, and it's a great blessing to have him," said Sgt. Rodolfo Fuentes, the charismatic Puerto Rican "mess papi," or "mess daddy," in an outpost where Barkemeyer comes to say mass. "I'm old school Catholic. I was raised on it. It's definitely important. Especially in times of combat right now, it's very important to have spiritual guidance over here."
In a single day this month, the chaplain said mass in the chapel at Camp Blue Diamond; at a palace across the Euphrates reputed to be a former brothel for Saddam Hussein's son Udai; in Fuentes' plywood mess hall; in a sandbagged classroom at a security station shared with Iraqi police; and at the Ramadi Government Center, where Marines had held off a near-constant siege since 2004.
With that volume of visits, "I doubted my ability to serve these soldiers," Barkemeyer said. It was the constant death, not the visits, he added. "I knew I could keep it up for a couple of weeks, and then I'd be in uncharted waters."
But just as Barkemeyer thought about giving up in February, violence dropped off. Local sheiks banded together and teamed with Americans to fight Al Qaeda insurgents.
"Talk about the presence of God," Barkemeyer said. It was the answer to many prayers, he says.
jjanega@tribune.com
Ellie
A Chicago priest tends his flock in war-torn Iraq
By James Janega
Tribune staff reporter
May 20, 2007
RAMADI, Iraq -- The Marines called it a chapel, but it really was a conference room in a war zone, with high sandbagged windows, dirty walls behind camouflage netting and sunburned Marines watching a war movie under a blast of air conditioning.
The movie stopped for church, a Catholic mass said by Army Capt. John Barkemeyer. The chaplain had arrived by Humvee, traveling through streets where members of his flock had died, past the place where he had narrowly escaped injury from a roadside bombing himself.
A lanky former pastor on Chicago's South Side who serves despite his moral misgivings about this war, Barkemeyer paused to trade the body armor and helmet of an Army officer for the white and yellow robe of a Roman Catholic priest. When he raised his arms, the hem of his robe hung incongruously over tan desert boots, and the kindness in his voice competed with grunts from a weight room across the hall.
For Barkemeyer, 43, it was the fifth and final mass he would lead on a day that had taken him through most of Ramadi, the war-torn capital of Anbar province. The trip was shadowed by oppressive heat, the possibility of mortal peril -- and an unusual calm.
"I'm supposed to be here," he said later. "This might not be the place on the face of the Earth that I would choose to be if I could be anywhere, but knowing what I can do, what I can offer soldiers, I believed it then and more strongly believe it now.
"That doesn't mean life is any easier."
Already on his second tour in Iraq, Barkemeyer is the Army's only Catholic chaplain in the province, a demanding role made harder by Anbar's brutality. He travels constantly, has cared for or administered last rites to dozens of victims of car and roadside bombs, and wakes up to knocks on his door in the middle of the night to find soldiers troubled by death, fears and religious uncertainty.
To adequately serve the number of Catholics in the service, the Army projects it needs as many as 400 Catholic priests worldwide. Instead it has 90. While Protestant chaplains can expect to lead about 70 religious services during a year in Iraq -- because there are more of them -- Barkemeyer will say more than 500 masses, most during visits to combat outposts.
Months ago, the pace brought Barkemeyer to a spiritual crossroads. He didn't doubt God or his reason for being in Iraq. He just knew he couldn't keep doing it, he said.
Surrounded by death and exhausted in spirit, Barkemeyer said, he told God he couldn't go on.
Looking back, he says, it was the only time God ever clearly responded to him. After that, the fighting dropped off.
Life plans take turn
Barkemeyer had intended to run a hardware store. He was born in Evanston and grew up in Wilmette, where the Barkemeyers have run the True Value at 4th and Linden for two generations. A third is in the wings.
They're a big family. Barkemeyer's brother Jim was the oldest. Germaine was the rebellious sister. Bob was garrulous. Heidi was the youngest and got away with almost anything. John was an instigator but a straight arrow, Jim Barkemeyer said. Even before he was a priest, they called him "St. John."
By the time he was in 8th grade, he had his life planned out. He would get a business degree from DePaul University and buy a certain house in Wilmette. Though he was the fourth of five siblings, he would be the one to take over the family business. "Absolutely nothing happened the way I planned," he said.
He went to Quigley North Preparatory Seminary and Niles Seminary. He studied in Rome and worked at the Church of the Holy Spirit in Schaumburg, St. Mary of the Lake Seminary in Mundelein and then in the Beverly neighborhood as pastor of St. Cajetan. He was an instigator there, too, funding a new roof and the school's electrical rewiring largely through raffles and donated services.
He was there seven years before joining the active duty Army in December 2006.
That wasn't what he meant to do either. He still has serious questions about how the U.S. came to Iraq.
In a homily to his parish, he once explained his stance: There was no evidence of weapons of mass destruction; there didn't seem to be need for a pre-emptive war; there was no connection between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda; and there was no urgency for a war to prevent future violence.
"This is all about taking care of sons and daughters," Barkemeyer said of his service to Iraq. "Not about the justness of the cause."
He was moved to join as teenagers left church pews at St. Cajetan for the Army and Marines after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. He knew about the chaplain shortage.
In 2003 he had entered the Army Reserves, thinking he would be a part-time touchstone for troops in the States. Two months after finishing chaplain school, though, the Army sent him to Kuwait and Iraq. His home during part of that tour was Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison, ministering to reservists there in the wake of the prisoner-abuse scandal.
It was so obvious he would be deployed again that he called Cardinal Francis George and asked for a leave of absence out of fairness to St. Cajetan. When Barkemeyer returned to his parish in 2005, he broke the news that he would not be staying long.
"On a personal level, I have a great deal of respect for him," said the parish business manager, Beth Dougherty. "But it was difficult for the parish when he left. He is an amazing human being, and I know he struggles with what he does out there."
A change of duties
Barkemeyer left the Archdiocese of Chicago for the 3rd Infantry Division in Georgia in December 2006.
By late January he was in Ramadi. Car bombs hit police checkpoints and roadside bombs blasted Army patrols. Soldiers fell to sniper fire and gunfights. Across the street from his room at the Camp Ramadi base, he spent hours at Charlie Medical, a military emergency room, moving mangled bodies and saying last rites.
At the end of his second week in Ramadi, a bomb went off next to Barkemeyer's Humvee. No one was injured. .
Amid all that, the memory of Cpl. Stephen Shannon stands out. The 21-year-old from Guttenberg, Iowa, called for Barkemeyer before surgery at Charlie Med. Barkemeyer remembers the tiny wound where a piece of shrapnel had wiggled under Shannon's flak vest.
It appeared to be minor, the size of a dime, but Barkemeyer agreed to anoint Shannon and said the rosary over the unconscious soldier while surgeons worked on him. The prognosis was good and Shannon was packed off for the logistics base in Balad, the last stop in Iraq for wounded soldiers shipping home or to Germany.
"And the kid died in the helicopter from here to there," Barkemeyer said. "I guess what really got to me—I mean, you name it, I've seen it -- but this kid in my mind was supposed to live.
"It struck me that if I wasn't there, there was no way the kid could receive the sacraments," he said. "It also struck me how fragile life is."
So Barkemeyer tries to improve lives in small ways. For troops at Spartan outposts, he brings video game consoles, candy, DVDs and material comforts gathered through an Internet donation program. In his room, he keeps kids' books and a video camera so parents can read bedtime stories to their children 6,000 miles away.
"Anything I can do that makes life a little better for a soldier, makes a day little bit better, that stuff is priceless," he said. "I live for that kind of stuff. I'll go to whatever meetings I need to go through and all that stuff -- but I live for this."
What troops want far and away is Barkemeyer, an authority figure who lets them relax. He strides around Camp Ramadi to visit soldiers, his big frame stooping in low-ceilinged Iraqi buildings and plywood huts. He's found a kindred spirit in a Louisiana supply sergeant with an opera-singing wife and a single-minded dedication to troops under fire. The chaplain often lights a cigar to share dramatic Anbar sunsets with another Army captain haunted by the deaths of soldiers under his command.
'Blessing to have him'
But most of Barkemeyer's flock lives off the base. To reach them, he travels by convoy from outpost to outpost, another soldier hidden under body armor and a helmet. He's accompanied by Pfc. Ashley Solorio, a 20-year-old Texan so small her rifle reaches from the ground to her elbow.
Instead of a gun, Barkemeyer carries a camouflage bag, from which he pulls a white and yellow robe, a round brass box holding the Eucharist and a brass cup for wine that the Army won't let him fill. When he says "This is the blood of Christ," he raises an empty cup.
"It's been about two months that we had him here, and it's a great blessing to have him," said Sgt. Rodolfo Fuentes, the charismatic Puerto Rican "mess papi," or "mess daddy," in an outpost where Barkemeyer comes to say mass. "I'm old school Catholic. I was raised on it. It's definitely important. Especially in times of combat right now, it's very important to have spiritual guidance over here."
In a single day this month, the chaplain said mass in the chapel at Camp Blue Diamond; at a palace across the Euphrates reputed to be a former brothel for Saddam Hussein's son Udai; in Fuentes' plywood mess hall; in a sandbagged classroom at a security station shared with Iraqi police; and at the Ramadi Government Center, where Marines had held off a near-constant siege since 2004.
With that volume of visits, "I doubted my ability to serve these soldiers," Barkemeyer said. It was the constant death, not the visits, he added. "I knew I could keep it up for a couple of weeks, and then I'd be in uncharted waters."
But just as Barkemeyer thought about giving up in February, violence dropped off. Local sheiks banded together and teamed with Americans to fight Al Qaeda insurgents.
"Talk about the presence of God," Barkemeyer said. It was the answer to many prayers, he says.
jjanega@tribune.com
Ellie