Here's an example from a New York Time's interview with Bishop
George E. Packard of how individual spiritual development
can be rooted in
communal daily prayer; decisions made in the context of communal prayer so the Holy Spirit fills and
enfolds us.
Ex-Soldier, Now a Bishop, Deals With Blood on His Hands
By Chris Hedges December 20, 2002 New York Times
RYE, N.Y., Dec. 15 — Bishop George E.
Packard has a burden. He carries it with him. There are times in
his sleep when it overpowers him and wakes him in agitation.
There are days when stress mounts. And in the ticking of the
clock, the race toward oblivion that is the fate of all human
beings, he seeks atonement in everything he does as a husband, a
father and an Episcopal priest.
When he was in his 20's, before he went to seminary and
became ordained, Bishop Packard was an Army lieutenant who led a
platoon in Vietnam that set up ambushes. He and his men killed
in each encounter anywhere from 12 to 15 North Vietnamese,
Vietcong and perhaps Chinese mercenaries. They did it clinically
and efficiently and then stacked up the bodies. He said he
stopped counting how many men, and women, that he killed.
"But with about 30 ambushes and firefights you can do the
math," he said.
He received the Silver Star and two Bronze Stars for valor.
But he returned home disillusioned, "hating the war."
He said he joined the seminary in 1971, not so sure that he
wanted to be a priest, but "to study the ethical and moral
issues that confronted me in Vietnam." It was in seminary
that he found the solace and reassurance that he needed.
"I violated the commandment, `Thou Shalt Not Kill,'
" he said. "Nothing will be gained by
intellectualizing this. I killed other people. I took lives. It
was exactly that. I became in Vietnam a professional killer. I
was proud of what I could do. There are days when I meet with
people, trying to do what is good for the church, for others,
and think I am probably the only person here who has killed
another human being."
Bishop Packard is not a pacifist. He believes that there are
times when war is inevitable, forced upon a nation for survival,
or justifiable to stop unjust acts such as the genocide in
Rwanda. He said he had spent much of his life since Vietnam
reading and studying theories about Just War, searching out the
moral maps that permit the use of violence.
He served as a parish priest for two years after he graduated
from Virginia Theological Seminary. He became an Army chaplain
in 1977, he said, "to redeem my experience in the
Army." He said he grew up believing in "good behavior,
in noble service and patriotism," values that endured
despite the war. But he wanted to carry out this service another
way, his faith no longer rooted in the state but to the church.
Three years ago, he became the Episcopal Church's bishop to the
armed forces.
"It seemed logical," said Bishop Packard, 58.
"I had the deepest experience anyone could have in the
military. I can communicate with those facing these ambiguities.
Soldiers seem to feel great comfort in my presence. I wanted to
give the sacraments to soldiers, to give them strength to face
the requirements of being a soldier. We need to be people of
honor and defend our country. If it is necessary to stand up
amidst danger then this is noble. Courage is fear that has said
its prayers."
The struggle is always there, rising and falling with life's
daily tribulations. Bishop Packard said he is sustained by the
power of the liturgy, the scriptural passages that the faithful
read each day.
"The liturgy communicates the presence of God," he
said. "And it is this presence that endures beyond the
trauma of war. When I read the liturgy to the soldiers I want
them to feel the promise of hope and the reconciliation even in
the midst of the terror they may face."
Bishop Packard grew up on Long Island in a middle-class,
churchgoing home. He went to Hobart College in upstate New York,
graduated, got married, went to law school for a year, and then
heard the hoofbeats of his draft board. He enlisted and was
sent, after basic training, to become an officer. It was 20 days
after he arrived in Vietnam in 1969 that he led his first
ambush. As he stood over the bodies he viewed them with a
disquieting lack of emotion.
"In the war movies you see soldiers vomit after they
kill for the first time," he said. "I looked at those
I had killed and knew it should have been overwhelming, but I
felt only that I had accomplished my task. The Army trains you
well, to make you do extraordinary things under fire."
He said he quickly learned that the cries of the wounded
North Vietnamese or Vietcong soldiers had to be silenced swiftly
and ruthlessly so he and his men could avoid detection.
"I would throw area grenades at the wounded until they
were dead," he said. "I remember in one firefight
killing a man who crawled toward me with his legs blown off. It
was not pretty."
Most of the ambushes were set up at night. In the dangerous
cat-and-mouse game he played, the one between the hunter and the
hunted, Bishop Packard learned to leave his own men behind to
kill enemy soldiers who were trying to follow his platoon to the
ambush site. His first thought, once the shooting stopped — a
thought he now finds rather strange — was how to tell others
about the clash he had just undergone. He began, in the minutes
after a firefight, to give a coherency to the violence that took
place around him.
In the half light of the mornings he said he and his men went
through pockets of the bodies. He often found photographs,
reminders that those he had killed had mothers, fathers, wives
and children. The unit once discovered the picture of a young
blond woman on a body, most likely taken from an American the
North Vietnamese soldier had killed in an earlier battle. He
would collect the pictures he found and make a pile.
"I burned the pictures I found, although no one in my
platoon saw me do this, because I felt that I had in my
possession tokens of the lives of those I had killed," he
said. "I held in my hands something precious, something
ultimate that I had taken away from another human being. I have
often thought about trying to find the girlfriends or the
parents of those I killed and write to say I was sorry."
Bishop Packard was, by most accounts, a good officer —
aggressive, professional and able to keep his head under fire.
"The men liked him," said David Rogers, 56, who as
a conscientious objector worked as the platoon's medic. "He
was a good lieutenant," said Mr. Rogers, now a reporter for
The Wall Street Journal. "He called in artillery close, but
he could read a map."
The bishop said that after the war he was
"unapproachable, angry and distant." It took a
tremendous toll on his wife and two daughters. He was divorced
in 1997, after 28 years of marriage, in large part because of
unresolved issues from the war, he said. In 1999 he married
Brook Packard, a single mother, and they have a daughter, Clara,
9. He said he speaks little to Clara about the war, but it comes
out in "curiosities," like his discomfort crossing
bridges.
The weight of what he did grew harder to bear as he grew
older, especially when he began to take part in a church program
a decade ago to give food at night to the homeless in Manhattan.
"It brought back the memories of searching for bodies in
the darkness," he said. "But this time it was to give
life. It was redemption. I had to face the pain. It was like
trying to reconnect pieces of broken wire in the darkness."
He began to have vivid nightmares, especially one that was
repeated. It went like this, he said: "I had killed
someone. No one knew about it. I was trying to hide my crime. I
buried the body in a pile of leaves. I was terrified I would be
caught."
He stopped and looked somewhere far beyond the walls of his
small living room in Rye, the town that has been his home since
1996.
"Night is the worst," he said. "Nearly all the
ambushes I carried out in Vietnam were at night."
He started therapy, something he did for the next eight
years.
"You get wrapped in cellophane so you can function in
this world of war," he said. "Only much later, long
after you come out, something pricks that cellophane and it all
comes out. Then you pray. You pray, `Lord, forgive me for what I
have done.' And you pray to get out of this."
Bishop Packard said his anger prevented him from dealing with
his violation of the commandment.
"A few years ago I could not have spoken about it,"
he said. "I needed to cough up the bile. My deepest
sentiments were blocked by anger. I needed to integrate it all,
to let it out, to learn to think and feel another way. I needed
to understand what happened to me."
The commandment, even if broken for a good reason, scars all
who must violate it, he said. As an Army chaplain, he has the
awful understanding that comes from having been in combat, an
understanding that allows him to help shoulder a soldier's
burden. He knows the cost. And he finds his greatest solace in
faith.
"When my life is all over," he said, "when in
those last 30 seconds that I am fighting for breath in some
room, I will make a plea to God. I will say that I did the best
I could in the oddities life gave me. I will ask to be
forgiven."
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