thedrifter
05-26-07, 07:35 AM
Army officer has divine duty
Military chaplain sets aside moral misgivings about war in Iraq to serve soldiers who need him
By James Janega
CHICAGO TRIBUNE
Contra Costa Times
Article Launched:05/26/2007 03:00:44 AM PDT
By James Janega
CHICAGO TRIBUNE
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 himself had narrowly escaped injury from a roadside bombing.
A 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."
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 serve the number of Catholics in the service, the Army estimates it needs as many as 400 Catholic priests worldwide. 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.
By the time he was in eighth grade, he had his life planned out. He would get a business degree from DePaul University and buy a certain house in Wilmette. Although 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, Ill.; St. Mary of the Lake Seminary in Mundelein, Ill.,; and then as pastor of Chicago's 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 United States 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-Qaida; and there was no urgency for a war to prevent future violence.
His service Iraq "is all about taking care of sons and daughters," Barkemeyer said. "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, 2001, 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 United States. Two months after finishing chaplain school, however, 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 after 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.
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. It also struck me how fragile life is."
So Barkemeyer tries to improve lives in small ways. For troops at 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."
Ellie
Military chaplain sets aside moral misgivings about war in Iraq to serve soldiers who need him
By James Janega
CHICAGO TRIBUNE
Contra Costa Times
Article Launched:05/26/2007 03:00:44 AM PDT
By James Janega
CHICAGO TRIBUNE
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 himself had narrowly escaped injury from a roadside bombing.
A 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."
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 serve the number of Catholics in the service, the Army estimates it needs as many as 400 Catholic priests worldwide. 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.
By the time he was in eighth grade, he had his life planned out. He would get a business degree from DePaul University and buy a certain house in Wilmette. Although 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, Ill.; St. Mary of the Lake Seminary in Mundelein, Ill.,; and then as pastor of Chicago's 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 United States 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-Qaida; and there was no urgency for a war to prevent future violence.
His service Iraq "is all about taking care of sons and daughters," Barkemeyer said. "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, 2001, 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 United States. Two months after finishing chaplain school, however, 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 after 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.
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. It also struck me how fragile life is."
So Barkemeyer tries to improve lives in small ways. For troops at 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."
Ellie