As we cross the 4000 mark of deaths of US service men and women and nearly 90,000 Iraqis killed in the war, Newsweek reports on the difficult work of being a chaplain and offering hope in the midst of death.
Chaplain Kevin Wainwright was preparing his Easter Sunday sermon in Iraq when there was a knock on his door.
The news was grim: 1st Lt. Phillip Neel was dead. The young officer and fellow West Point grad had been a regular at the chaplain’s Sunday church services. Wainwright knew and admired him. Now he had to find the right words to honor him.
Wainwright chose the legend of Sir Galahad, King Arthur’s noble knight, and the poetry of Alfred, Lord Tennyson to salute Neel in a memorial.
He spoke of his compassion, his devotion to his soldiers. But in trying to understand Neel’s death, the chaplain also posed an agonizing question: “Why does it seem that the good guys are the first ones to fall?”
On Easter night, the sad milestone of 4,000 American deaths in the Iraq war was reached with an announcement by the U.S. military that four U.S. soldiers had been killed in a roadside bombing in Baghdad.
Read it all here.
Read about reaching 4000 US deaths in the New York Times here.
Other new stories here and a roundup of news stories here.
The Office of the Bishop Suffragan for Chaplaincies and news of military chaplains of the Episcopal Church here.
Bishop for Chaplaincies The Rt. Rev. George Packard’s blog is here.
UPDATED at 11 a.m. 3/25
More on activities marking this day here.