Military chaplains: Prayer and humor hold a combat trauma unit together in Afghanistan

National Guard First Lt. Kurt Bishop listens to medics letting off steam, nurses coming to terms with death, and doctors showing stress.

from the December 4, 2007 edition

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Sgt. Catie Cejka – an emergency medical technician – had been monitoring the boy, and her face still saddens recalling the event: "That was the only time I really talked about it, and I think that helped more than anything."

Had Cejka approached him at Sunday services or a Bible study, Bishop wouldn't have thought twice about addressing the issue in terms of his Christian faith. But their conversation took place at the hospital and, as a chaplain in a secular institution, he's not allowed to impose his religious views on others. Indeed, proselytizing would hinder efforts to establish the kind of open, trusting relationship that enables Bishop to reach out to soldiers in a time of need, whether to help them through troubles or to provide moral guidance. Like many chaplains, Bishop walks this church-state tightrope by preaching his faith at services and, at other times, letting the cross on his uniform suffice unless a soldier broaches the subject. "I did," Cejka says, "so we went into how this is the way things happen, you can't control them, it's God's plan."

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During the "Mustang blue," Bishop's radar is up. He sidles up to a doctor and, in a low voice, asks about the first patient. The doctor shakes his head. The head wounds are severe, he says;there is no recovery in sight.

"I thought so," Bishop says, then melts back into the bustle. When the patient is declared dead, Bishop helps curtain off an area where nurses will prepare the body for transfer to an Afghani morgue. Inside the curtained cubicle, Bishop then helps clean the Afghan soldier's face and body and wrap it in white sheets. Pulling a card from his pocket, he reads a Muslim prayer that asks God to look over the young man's family.

"They don't share my faith," he later says of the Afghan patients treated in the trauma unit, "but that doesn't mean that I don't need to be praying for them. If the least I can do is to read the emergency Muslim prayer off this card that I have, then I am going to do that."

Once the two survivors and the deceased have been moved to a local hospital, medics clean the floor, tidy shelves, align tables. Off in a corner, a man in jeans and polo shirt sits alone. Bishop has never seen the Afghan translator fall so quiet. Within minutes the chaplain is by his side, hand on his shoulder, speaking softly.

Later, on a slow afternoon, the translator approaches Bishop, smiling shyly. The chaplain recognizes the overture and engages him in a conversation that quickly veers to the tragedy and losses of war. The translator had known the Afghan soldier, and his death had hit hard.

After the translator leaves, Bishop stays on, watching the comings and goings of the medical team. "It is amazing to see them come together and lean on each other," he says. "It strengthens my faith because I know it's not a human thing, I know it's God working in people."

Southern Baptist tradition stresses witnessing, and Bishop has come to believe that "everybody witnesses whether they know it or not, and, here, once it gets into a room it's going to circulate. It can be 'hey can I bring you anything,' or it can be that shoulder to lean on, or that person to talk to when people are having tough times."

And every morning before he heads to the hospital, Bishop says, "I pray, 'God, help me get out of the way so you can use me.' "

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