A few weeks after the attacks of September 11, 2001, The Washington Post Magazine assigned four writers to profile people whose lives had been changed by the attacks. I was asked to profile one of the military chaplains who was was involved in rescue efforts at the Pentagon. His name was Timothy S. Mallard, and his story, which appeared originally on November 4, 2001, is just beneth the “kep reading” button. Here is a bit:
“We didn’t have to look far for something to do,” Mallard says. “People saw the symbols [the cross, crescent or Star of David] and they came up to us. Guys from ATF [the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms], the FBI, they’d ask, ‘Am I cracking up? Am I going crazy to feel this way? Where is God in all of this. Why is God allowing this to happen?’ ”
These latter questions can’t be answered with a few concise remarks while smoke wafts through the lungs and all around you, the remains of the victims’, most of them quite partial, are being tenderly tucked into body bags. Fortunately, what people wanted was to hear a familiar scrap of Scripture, to add their Amen to an extemporized prayer, or to accept a moment’s assistance in supporting their own weight. Mallard, who has a Baptist’s knowledge of the Bible, a preacher’s way with words and a catcher’s solid shoulders, was adept at all three.
Ministers, like therapists, know that in crises they become as vulnerable to trauma as those whom they are trying to help. Mallard’s moment came on the morning of the fourth day at the close of a “critical-incident stress debriefing” that he was leading for a team of 80 rescue workers, who were just going off shift.
“They were from Tennessee, and on the previous two days they had asked me to read Scripture with them,” he says. “The thing that overwhelmed me was the 23rd Psalm — that image of the Valley of the Shadow of Death. I looked over at the cut in the building, and to me that image came alive. I started weeping and said something to the effect that I had read that psalm hundreds of times, but I read it with new eyes that day. I realized that some valleys were deeper than others.”
By Jim Naughton
The surpassing strangeness of descending out of autumn daylight into the diffuse illumination of the Pentagon Metro platform washes over Capt. Timothy S. Mallard, a chaplain in the U.S. Army, every evening as he heads home. Below ground, for all outward appearances, everyday life in the federal city proceeds precisely as it did in the days before September 11. Outwardly, Mallard also seems his usual self. He is neither soot-smudged nor sweat-soaked as he was in those first days — just after the attack — when he accompanied the search- and-rescue teams that foraged for survivors in the burning northwest wedge of the Pentagon. He no longer carries the smell of the above- ground into the subway car below. But whether in camouflage or immaculate dress greens, he is a reminder to his compatriots on the platform that — in ways at once definitive and ambiguous — their world is not what it once was.
Capt. Mallard is a 38-year-old Southern Baptist minister with a wife and three children. A veteran of the Gulf War and Bosnia, he came to Washington from Heidelberg, Germany, 18 months ago to take a post in the Army chief of chaplains office. Like the other young officers in town, he is being schooled in the ways of power, with the understanding that he might wield it himself one day.
Mallard works in the ministry initiatives directorate. It is the department that deals most directly with the spiritual life of chaplains and their charges, but his is a desk job just the same. Sometimes he feels more like a shepherd of paper than of souls. Or he did. There is a new moment of before and after in American life, and like everyone else, Mallard is in the after-life, where, except for the black gash in the Pentagon and the rubble in New York, everything looks the same but feels different.
The seeming triumph of evil over good, however episodic, calls the entire spiritual calculus into question, and soldiers, who earn their living in harm’s way, are especially eager to hear that God, whatever the early returns, is still on their side. That is why, for the first time since he came to Washington, Mallard had people stopping by his office and approaching him in the halls to ask if he had a few minutes to talk, or share some Scripture, or to pray. The time of what he calls “spiritual triage” is over, but the onus of weaving this murderous episode into what Christian biblical scholars refer to as “salvation history” remains. As does the habit of holding his own life to the candle of faith in the hope it will make visible the designs of God.
What if, one day, God lifted you up into heaven — a choir of angels, smoke, “the whole nine yards,” as Mallard, then just 19, experienced it — and told you, in so many words, to go forth and preach the Gospel? And what if, on another day, in the service of this call, you stood amid more acrid smoke and blessed the shattered remains of a person you never knew, and still can’t identify, but who will be an ever-returning companion for the rest of your life? Through what act of faith, or feat of imagination, would you encompass those events in a story that would reconcile the God of the former with the God of the latter?
He was home in Springfield nursing his sick children on the morning of the attack. His wife had just called a second time from her office in Falls Church, to tell him what was happening in New York when he heard a distant explosion.
Is this useful information? Everybody was somewhere then, and almost everybody is somewhere now. What does this disclose about the why, or the what next? Even the fact that, save for his son’s ear infection, he might have been on an errand, returning videotapes to an office in that wedge of the Pentagon that isn’t there anymore, is a theological red herring. Believing that God “saved” Timothy Mallard, requires you to believe that God killed everybody else.
With the highways closed, he couldn’t make it to the Pentagon until the following morning, by which time the Army, Navy and Air Force had pitched a chaplains’ tent. By then, the grounds were swarming with search-and-rescue teams, and the unearthly heat billowing from the building made it obvious there were no survivors in the rubble.
The chaplains practiced what they referred to as a “ministry of presence,” that is, that they served simply by being there.
“We didn’t have to look far for something to do,” Mallard says. “People saw the symbols [the cross, crescent or Star of David] and they came up to us. Guys from ATF [the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms], the FBI, they’d ask, ‘Am I cracking up? Am I going crazy to feel this way? Where is God in all of this. Why is God allowing this to happen?’ ”
These latter questions can’t be answered with a few concise remarks while smoke wafts through the lungs and all around you, the remains of the victims’, most of them quite partial, are being tenderly tucked into body bags. Fortunately, what people wanted was to hear a familiar scrap of Scripture, to add their Amen to an extemporized prayer, or to accept a moment’s assistance in supporting their own weight. Mallard, who has a Baptist’s knowledge of the Bible, a preacher’s way with words and a catcher’s solid shoulders, was adept at all three.
Ministers, like therapists, know that in crises they become as vulnerable to trauma as those whom they are trying to help. Mallard’s moment came on the morning of the fourth day at the close of a “critical-incident stress debriefing” that he was leading for a team of 80 rescue workers, who were just going off shift.
“They were from Tennessee, and on the previous two days they had asked me to read Scripture with them,” he says. “The thing that overwhelmed me was the 23rd Psalm — that image of the Valley of the Shadow of Death. I looked over at the cut in the building, and to me that image came alive. I started weeping and said something to the effect that I had read that psalm hundreds of times, but I read it with new eyes that day. I realized that some valleys were deeper than others.”
He returned to the chaplains’ tent, asked for a few moments to collect himself. “I literally went and turned the chair around to the darkest corner of the tent and just sat there for half an hour,” he says. A Coast Guard chaplain waited nearby until he was ready to process his horror. When Mallard began speaking, he didn’t stop for more than an hour.
A believer can take intellectual comfort in the distinction between what God intends and what God allows, but this is a damp log with which to start a fire. In the weeks after the attacks, in an atmosphere of grief, anxiety and confusion, thousands of souls in the Pentagon workforce were searching for some source of spiritual warmth, even if it was only the lesson of a previous tragedy that would show them the moral of their own.
Mallard has known what by most measures was an extremely expressive God. The son of a career Army officer, he decided not long after his voice broke that he wanted to attend West Point. After five years of intense effort, he was summoned to the office of a local congressman whose support would cinch the appointment. But no sooner had the congressman offered to support his candidacy, than Mallard turned him down. Right there, in that meeting, he had heard the voice of God. It didn’t say a whole lot, just that God had other plans for him. But that was enough.
Mallard was afraid that his father would be furious. But Col. Gene Mallard was not only a career officer, but also a career chaplain, and if God was talking to his son, he was willing to let the boy listen.
During the spring of his freshman year at Stetson University in Florida, Mallard received his call to ministry — with the smoke and the angels and the whole nine yards — during a chapel service, and assumed he was destined to become a pastor. At about that same time, he had begun dating a classmate, Sharon Smithson, who was also a devout Christian. One night as they walked along a lakeside, she grabbed him by the arm and told him that she felt that God was telling her to tell him that he ought to become a chaplain.
There is a saying with serious bumper sticker potential: God draws straight with crooked lines.
“One of the reasons I could not go to West Point is that you are assigned to a part of the service other than the chaplains corps,” he says. “I had gotten to the point where I did not think I could train for war and possibly execute war. Being a chaplain was the perfect marriage between the two callings. I can serve with and minster to people I love, but I am a noncombatant. If I were not a chaplain, I could not serve.”
But after the attacks, God released no new data, so Mallard and his colleagues sought his meaning in the information they already had, in sacred texts, and ritual, and routine.
After almost two weeks at the attack site, most of the active duty chaplains returned to their offices while National Guard and Naval Reserve chaplains continued counseling the next of kin. In October, Mallard assisted the chief of chaplains, Gaylord T. Gunhus, in planning a memorial service for a man who had died in the attack.
After the service, the familiar began to reassert itself in his life. At home he mows the lawn and watches football. The former has never seemed more pointless, the latter more frivolous. Yet one can survive only so long in sorrow’s heightened atmosphere, and there is reassurance to be found in chores and diversions, in twist-top trash bags and the play-action pass.
At work, he and the other chaplains keep an eye on one another for symptoms of distress. They were invited to preview the documentary on the attack that was shown at the Defense Department’s memorial service on October 11. After just a few minutes of watching footage from the crash site, they were all weeping unselfconscious tears.
There, as at home, his pre-attack activities seem equally more trivial and more profound. What do all the conferences and outreach efforts and continuing education he is coordinating add up to in the face of the suffering unleashed on September 11? Yet what honors the dead more deeply than continuing in the duties conscience dictates and the pleasures that providence provides?
In his previous postings, he would have been called on to preach. Preaching is his passion. But in his current position there is not much opportunity for it. Yet he knows what he will say when he has the chance: “For me as a Christian, God has been through the deepest valley with the death of his Son. And he has come back to say, ‘I’ll hold your hand. I know a way out.’ ”
Alas, there is no way out but through. For the meantime, he has at least a partial fix on God’s whereabouts.
“We are the eyes and hands of God,” he says. It sounds reassuring in his soft, steady pastor’s voice, but it is not necessarily good news.