by Jeff Sharlet
The most zealous among the new generation of fundamentalist chaplains didn’t join to serve the military; they came to save its soul. To that end, they cultivated an ethos now echoed by personnel up and down the chain of command: faith first, family second, country third. Captain Morton began to see that hierarchy realized after 2001, as a new generation of midcareer officers who’d come up under the evangelicalized chaplaincy returned to the Air Force Academy to become air operations commanders (AOCs), in charge of cadet squadrons. They, in turn, began promoting God’s will in the academy not as chaplains but as ostensibly secular officers. Captain Morton realized what was happening when female cadets began telling her they were giving up their coveted pilot slots to pursue “God’s purpose.” “These women were being counseled by their AOCs that what God really wanted them to do was to bear children and be someone’s wife.”
Morton was alarmed not just as a chaplain and as a woman but as an officer—fundamentalist AOCs were deliberately sabotaging a competitive system designed to produce the best pilots. The results will ripple outward for years, as women who passed up their wings are passed over for promotion, creating an officer corps shaped by religious orthodoxy at the expense of ability. Morton contributed her concerns to the 2004 Yale Report and submitted it to the head of chaplains at the academy, Colonel Michael Whittington, for whom she served as executive officer. He shelved it until Mikey made it public in 2005. In response to media reports, Morton’s superior asked her to declare the report a mistake. “I refused,” she says. “That pretty much sealed my fate.” Maj. Gen. Charles Baldwin, air force chief of chaplains, announced an inquiry into the report’s conclusions, but that didn’t give Morton confidence. An adviser to the Joint Chiefs of Staff on ethical issues, Baldwin had instructed chaplains at the academy not to screen a clip from Schindler’s List in a religious diversity program because he thought “it made Christians look like Nazis.” He was even less pleased with the Yale Report. Morton realized her military career was over when Baldwin told a meeting of the academy’s chaplains that they “were one big family that could tolerate no disloyalty in our ranks.” The next day, “I was fired as Chaplain Whittington’s executive officer… [and] he refused to give me a new assignment.” She went public. The air force tried to transfer her to Okinawa, but Mikey demanded an investigation, and eventually a deal was struck: the only chaplain to speak up for religious freedom was made a civilian.
In 2008, a filmmaker named Brian Hughes traveled to Bagram Air Base to make a documentary about chaplains, a tribute, of sorts, to the chaplain who had counseled him without regard for religion when Hughes was a frightened young airman during the Gulf War. Military personnel sacrifice their rights to legal and medical privacy; chaplains are the only people they can turn to with problems too sensitive to take up the chain of command, anything from corruption to a crisis of courage. When Hughes went to Bagram, he was looking for chaplains like the one who’d helped him get through his war. Instead, he found Lt. Col. Gary Hensley, division chaplain for the 101st Airborne and the chief army chaplain for Afghanistan.
In the raw footage Hughes shot, Hensley strips down to a white T-shirt under his uniform to preach an afternoon service in Bagram’s main chapel. The shirt’s logo is for an evangelical military ministry called Chapel Next; the “t” in “Next” is an oversized cross slashing down over a map of Afghanistan. “Got your seat belts on?” Hensley hollers. He’s a lean man with thinning, slicked-back gray hair, and he carries a small paunch like a package. He seems to wrap himself around his belly as he paces the stage, his neck lunging forward and his right hand tapping the arm of his glasses to emphasize sight: he wants his soldiers to know he sees. He seems to want the filmmaker, Hughes, to know this, too; he pauses to stare directly into the camera. That’s no accident. When he learned there would be media in the room, Hensley bumped another chaplain who was scheduled to preach. He wants to be seen. “The Word will not fail!” he shouts. “Now is the time! In the fullness of time”—Hensley leans forward, two fingers on his glasses, his voice dipping to a growl—“God. Sent. His. Son. Whoo!” Then, as if addressing thirty-three million Afghans and their belief that Muhammad was a prophet in the tradition of Jesus, he shouts, “There is no one else to come! There is no new revelation! There is no new religion! Jesus is it!” Amen, says the crowd of soldiers, many of them also now stripped down to their Chapel Next T-shirts. “If he ain’t it, let’s all go home!”
Hensley brings it down. “I’m from the Jesus movement,” he says, presenting himself as a prophet born of American history: “Haight-Ashbury. Watergate. Woodstock. And out of that mess? Came Hensley, glory to God!”
Hensley has come, it seems, to plagiarize: “By virtue of the resurrection, Jesus was exalted to the right hand of the Father and is the messianic head of the New Israel.” It’s a direct quote, unattributed, from the British theologian C. H. Dodd. Dodd contributed to a complicated notion, developed in the 1930s, called “realized eschatology”—in essence, the idea that history and end-times revelations can be reconciled. His ideas are used by some liberal Christians to combat the apocalyptic fervor of fundamentalism, but Hensley takes the stolen text as a battle cry. “That’s us!” he cries. “We are Israel. We are the new Israel!”
At this point, says Hughes, the army media liaison sitting next to him in the pews, responsible for making the army look like “democracy consultants,” not an occupying force of crusaders, puts his head in his hands.
“There will come a day when there will be no more Holy Spirit!” Hensley shouts, hopping up and down on the stage, his speech no longer directed toward the pews but as if to some greater audience. “When the church shall be raptured up in the sky!” He draws the word out: “skyyyyy!” “And we shall be with hiiim! And all of us shall be with him!” He slows to an emphatic whisper, like a warning: “Glory to God, that’s our message!” A little bit louder now. “The messianic Jesus is comin’ back!” Louder. “And I expect him to come back before we go to the mess hall, you know that?” Which means, he says, that they have to get busy fast if they’re going to save Afghanistan. “Special Forces guys,” he muses, “they hunt men, basically. We do the same thing as Christians, we hunt people for Jesus. Hunt ’em down.”
And the soldiers, many more of them now stripped down to their cross-over-Afghanistan T-shirts, say Amen.
For Lt. Col. Bob Young, the front lines were in the combat hospital that was part of his command at Kandahar Air Base. “It averaged we’d get two and a half Americans a day,” he told me, the awful accuracy of that number lost on him. He cared about his troops, but they were not the ones he thought about most now. It was the Afghans, shot, blown up, and simply diseased, who haunted him. His recollections of their maimed bodies boiled in his head, forcing him to talk for hours at a time about what he’d seen. As he did, he dipped close to what a secular soul might call despair and then shot up into determined, ecstatic, desperate declarations of faith in the God he believed had sent him to Afghanistan, the God who would shortly send him to Kuwait for a second time.
I’d found him after the Military Religious Freedom Foundation reported on Travel the Road, an evangelical reality show featuring a pair of self-described “extreme missionaries” who embedded themselves within Young’s command, intent on saving not just American but Afghan souls. Young liked that! He told them about his plan to pray for rain for Afghanistan. One of Young’s captains saw the MRFF report and wrote to the foundation with a list of complaints about his commanding officer, complaints he and his fellow junior officers had registered with Young’s superiors. I spoke to the captain. He told me, “Call Young. He’ll tell you everything.” I reached the colonel at home in Georgia late one evening. He said he was going to sit on his porch and look at the moon. In the background, I heard dogs barking. He talked for three hours.
“Another twenty, twenty-five of them, more than that,” he said of the wounded in Kandahar, above and beyond his two and a half men, “would be Afghans.”
His southern voice snapped, as though he were bouncing on his toes. “Kids getting burned. Bad guys floating in on helicopters. You wouldn’t know who they were.” The base hospital treated seven thousand Afghans that year. Young, commander of the army’s 325th Forward Support Battalion, lingered there, watching the bodies. “I want to tell you this. Triage area, guy strapped into gurney, Afghan guy. No shirt, skinny as a rail, sinewy muscle. Restraints on his ankles, his feet, dude is strapped into a wheelchair. I said, ‘What’s wrong with this dude?’ ‘Oh, man, he’s crazy.’ He’s got a plastic shield in front of his face because he’s spitting. ‘Sir, he’s crazy, we got the psychiatrist coming.’ Psychiatrist walks in. He has this big syringe. I say, ‘What’s wrong with him, Doc?’ He says, ‘I don’t know.’ I say, ‘I’ll tell you what’s wrong with him. The guy’s possessed.’ ”
Young stared at the syringe. “ ‘That ain’t going to solve the problem,’ I tell him. But the doc hits him with the syringe. Couple minutes later the general’s son-in-law—the Afghan general’s son-in-law, our translator—comes in. I said, ‘What’s wrong with this guy?’ He says, ‘How do you say in English? He has spirits.’ I say, ‘Doc, there’s your second opinion!’ ”
On the phone, Young laughed, a harsh sound: “Ha!” Then his voice collapsed. “I’m telling you, it’s real. Evil is real.”
Young prayed over the possessed Afghan. “I always pray over them.” But the doctors took him away and Young never did find out what happened. “Can’t say I saw the demons shriek out of his body.” He believed his prayers mattered, and he tried not to be bothered when God didn’t show him the results. Mostly, he prayed over children. Burned, crushed, limbs amputated; their bearded fathers brought them in and stood like stones on one side of the bed, and Col. Young would take up a position across from them—he has five children of his own—and stand watch, praying in his mind, his hands rising above. “People were so appreciative,” he assured me.
In the reality show, one of the missionaries, a skinny Christian hippie with a strawberry blond beard, interviews Young after a service at the base chapel. (“Wooden chapel, built by the 82nd Airborne,” Young told me. “Amazing! A Christian church in Kandahar, right at the heart of where the Taliban started.”) “Interestingly,” Young says to the camera, “the drought has been in effect here since the Taliban took over.” Young has a high mouth and a low brow overhanging dark brown eyes set between ears shaped like musical clefs; the effect is that of a satellite dish, beaming and receiving. “No weapon formed against us shall prosper,” he says, recasting one of God’s promises to the Israelites (Isaiah 54:17) in the first-person plural of the U.S. Army. “I would ask,” he continues, shaking his Bible, “people of America, pray that God sends the rain to Kandahar, and they’ll know that our God answers prayers.”
I asked Young if he wanted to contextualize remarks that seemed, on their surface, to radically transcend his mission as a soldier. He did. His battalion, 450 strong, was responsible for logistics support for combat operations throughout southern Afghanistan. In practice, that meant working with warlords, two in particular, to whom he said he paid a million dollars a month each to transport army supplies. “My staff and me sit down with these guys. I ask, ‘What can we do to get this country going?’ I’m thinking, sweatshops. Get ’em working. ‘No,’ they say, ‘we’re agricultural people. What we really need is rain.’ So I say, ‘Back in America, our Native Americans used to do a rain dance.’ I even did the little woo-woo-woo, you know? ‘But,’ I say, ‘I am not going to do the rain dance. But I will ask my friends back home to pray to the God who made the heavens and the earth for rain.’ ” Young activated a prayer network that stretched from Hawaii to Georgia to Afghanistan, pastors and chaplains and evangelical congregations around the world.“Okay!” he said to me, preparing to disclose the results, which this one time God had let him witness. “Are you ready?”
I said I was. He told me to Google “Kandahar, rain, January 2005.” The result he was looking for was an article in Stars and Stripes, “Rainfall May Signal Beginning of the End to Three-Year Drought in Afghanistan”—3¼ inches in just two days.
“That’s some real rain,” I admitted.
“That’s what I’m saying, brother!” He told me to read the article aloud.
“‘Afghans say “this is a sign from God,” said Khoshhal Murad,’ ” I read.
“Y’see!” Young shouted.
“ ‘When the Taliban were in power,’ ” I continued, “ ‘some of its leaders grew so frustrated by the drought they randomly rounded up dozens of people, drove them into the desert and demanded they pray for rain. It didn’t come.
“ ‘You can’t force people to pray,’ Murad said. ‘They should have gone out in the desert themselves.’ ”
I was confused. What, I wondered, was the difference between the Taliban’s God and Young’s? Simple—theirs isn’t real. “Allah is a moon god, is my understanding.” Beyond that, though, he said, they weren’t as far apart as you’d think. He thought America could use a lot more piety, Taliban-style. “I’ll put it like this. I think there is more hope for a revival in Afghanistan than there is in L.A. They’re not hostile to God.”
What they lack, he said, was Jesus. “What you got is people like the Jews and the Muslims, who, according to the Bible, can’t know God, fighting about God. If they knew the humanity of God they would—” He decided he needed a real-world example. “I made an observation, I think profound. The Christian soldier is willing to lay down his life for a Muslim, but a Muslim wants to give up his life to kill an American.”
I asked him about another one of the captain’s allegations, that Young had made some remarks that had led him to be relieved of command. It was true that he had been relieved of command, he admitted, but he had appealed on the grounds that his commanding officers had problems of their own—adultery and drinking, he explained—and he had won; his record today is as clean as Christ’s robes. And the remarks? “All that was, I was speaking in reference to inner-city problems and whatnot. I said that the irony is that it would be better for a black to be a slave in America—I’m thinking now historically—and know Christ than to be free, now, and not know Christ.”
With that cleared up, I asked him about the last of the captain’s allegations, that he had given a presentation on Christianity to some Afghan warlords. Absolutely not, he said. It was a PowerPoint presentation about America. He e-mailed it to me as we spoke, and then he asked me to open it so he could share with me the same presentation he had given “Gulalli” and “Shirzai,” as well as their aides and his staff. Without the sound track, that is. He had brought in the chapel band to strum some contemporary Christian music, though he had warned them not to sing explicitly about Jesus. “You know, just stuff like, ‘My God Is an Awesome God.’ ”
Since it had been Presidents’ Day, he had begun with a picture of George Washington. Washington, he explained, had been protected by God; evidence was an incident during which thirty-two bullet holes were found in Washington’s cloak following a battle in the French and Indian War, though Washington himself was unscathed. The presentation continued: pictures of buffalo and the story of Jamestown, the Pilgrims. His goal, he explained, was to show the Afghans that nation building is a long and difficult journey. He included the text of the Mayflower Compact—“Having undertaken, for the glory of God, and advancement of the Christian faith”—and the story of the Boston Tea Party; a picture of Washington in prayer and the text of the Emancipation Proclamation, which, he noted, ends with an invocation of Almighty God. “I did stress the fact that in America we believe our rights come from God, not from government. Truth is truth, and there’s no benefit in lying about it.” There were slides about the Wright brothers, the moon landing, and NASCAR—Jeff Gordon, “a Christian, by the way,” had just won the Daytona 500. And then, the culmination of American history: the Twin Towers, blooming orange the morning of September 11, 2001. Embedded in the slideshow was a video Young titled �
��Forgiveness,” a collage of stills of people running, bodies falling, a Photoshopped image of the Statue of Liberty holding her head in her hand. Swelling behind the images was Céline Dion’s Irish-inflected ballad from Titanic, “My Heart Will Go On.” Following the video was a slide of the Bush family, beneath the words: “I believe that God has inspired in every heart the desire for freedom.”
At the heart of Young’s religion is suffering: his own. Before his battalion deployed for Afghanistan in 2004, he tried to armor them with prayer. He invited several local churches onto the base at Schofield Barracks, along with the highest-ranking officer he could get—Lt. Gen. Van Antwerp Jr., who was then president of Officers’ Christian Fellowship—and his battalion. About five hundred people came, and before them all Col. Young offered his testimony. He told his troops that he’d been raised a Catholic, and hadn’t much cared; how he’d joined the army as a high school dropout under President Carter and had quit when the Democrat gutted military spending; how he’d gone to college and had come back to the army an officer; how he’d made ranger; how he married a blue-eyed blonde and fathered two children and left them all in the care of his best friend from his enlisted days when he deployed to Korea.
The details, he allowed, were not important; biography is prelude to crisis, a life story simply a vehicle for a testimony, the heart of evangelical religion. “There are two kinds of phone calls you might get,” he told his soldiers. “The first kind, you find out your wife is leaving you.” It was 1993, and she’d taken his one-year-old son and his two-year-old daughter with her, and when he’d called his best friend to ask what had happened, the friend said Young’s wife and kids were at the beach, and that he had to go, too; they were with him now. Young tried to think like an officer. “Military course of action development,” he lectured himself. “Course of action one: kill him. Two: kill them both. Three: kill myself.” Somebody, he decided, had to die. In the end, somebody did: Young, to the flesh. Raised nominally Catholic, he had never read scripture. Now, every page seemed to speak to him. I can’t go on, Young thought. He opened his Bible and found Matthew 6:34. Do not worry about tomorrow. An eye for an eye, Young thought, then flipped the pages. Love your enemies. I have nothing to go home to, he thought, and then he came to Mark. Let us go over to the other side. They did, in a ship, and “a great windstorm arose,” Young read, the murder in his mind subsiding as the story overcame him. “And then Jesus said, ‘Peace! Be still!’ Then the wind ceased, and there was a dead calm.”
