For a moment, the chaplain wondered if this improvised ceremony might violate some obscure canon of Christian liturgy. But using the baptismal font for this purpose felt appropriate. After all, the symbolic cleansing of warriors after battle was an ancient ritual familiar to the Greeks, the Crusaders, Native Americans, and many others. And the liturgical rite of baptism, older than Christianity itself, was a ceremonial washing away of sin and the receiving of God’s forgiveness. The chaplain’s soldiers, he knew, needed both.
It was 2006, a soft May evening in Iraq, and the fierce heat had eased a bit. An orange moon rode the dusty horizon, and there was just enough wind to rustle the palm-tree fronds outside the blast walls of the American compound at Habbaniyah. Inside the small chapel, soldiers sat hunched on white plastic chairs, scrawling on the three-by-five index cards the chaplain had passed around. He had asked them to jot down a few words about their twelve months in combat, now coming to an end. When they were done, the chaplain had told them to bring the cards forward and place them in the baptismal font, the dry stone bowl recovered from the weeds where the Iraqis had thrown it years ago when this former British army chapel was converted into a mosque. Now, at least for a time, this was an American base. The stone bowl rested on a plywood stand, and one by one the soldiers approached, dropping in one, two, even three cards.
It had been a hard time for them all. The fighting there, just outside Falluja, had been brutal. Sniper shots and bomb explosions ripped through their ranks. Suicide bombers blasted their convoys, and rockets and mortars rained down on their camp, once spraying the stone-block chapel itself with shrapnel. Fifteen of their own soldiers, their closest friends, had gone home in flag-draped coffins. Many more were wounded, in body and spirit. They had fought back, killing or capturing when they could. Local civilians, women and children, had died in front of them by errant or careless gunshots or blast fragments. The soldiers had witnessed inexplicable hatreds among Iraqis: prisoners and innocents of the wrong sect tortured by insurgents and shot or beheaded, their gruesome remains left for the dogs.
None of it fit with the prior life experiences of this Pennsylvania National Guard battalion, men and women from pleasant, uneventful small-town and suburban American life. They were still reeling from the recent deaths of five friends, killed when a convoy took a wrong turn and a Humvee rolled over a makeshift bomb, bursting into flames. The turret gunner was killed instantly, and the other soldiers tumbled out on fire, their dying screams seared into the souls of the living.
At the chaplain’s request, the soldiers committed what they could of this to paper. Write down what you want to leave behind, he had told them in his soothing, sonorous voice. Things you have done or left undone… things you have seen. They wrote fast, words of sorrow and anger, regret, shame, guilt, grief. Words inadequate, perhaps, but still too poisonous to carry home. Write down, the chaplain said, what is troubling you.
The chaplain himself, a man whose smooth, boyish face belied the pain and suffering in his eyes, put his own card in last. Every inch of it was filled. He had held dying soldiers in his bloody arms, had said memorial services too many times. He had struggled to protect, strengthen, and comfort his soldiers. Yet, he had once written home in a despairing note, “I can read it in their eyes. They think my answers are shallow and hollow.” The chaplain’s wounds were deep, and now he was nearly spent.
He had read somewhere of the formal cleansing rituals some African villages held for returning child warriors guilty of astonishing cruelties. The young killers were accepted home, but only after ceremonies of healing and forgiveness. He knew, of course, the Old Testament instructions for the purification of warriors returning from battle before they could enter camp. Something like that was needed here, he believed. He was afraid that he and his soldiers were contaminated by war trauma; that, unless they began the cleansing now, once they got home their moral wounds would suppurate, perhaps for decades, until the pain finally would erupt.
It was the best he could do. As the soldiers stood, he struck a match. The pile of cards caught and flared. Wisps of smoke and red embers rose, and they watched in silence until it was all gone, and then they walked out into the night.