The following story may be used as a sidebar to UMNS #527. Photos are available.
A UMNS Feature
By Kathy L. Gilbert*
HINESVILLE, Ga.--Sheri Lewis remembers clearly the day her husband, United Methodist Chaplain Maj. Mitchell Lewis, left for the pending war in Iraq.
She stayed by his side until the bus pulled away. "A lot of people chose not to go. They said goodbye at home but I didn't want to have a second that my eyes weren't on him," she says.
The fact that chaplains don't carry weapons into war really hit her hard that day.
"I went to the battery range and everyone else is picking up their weapons, everyone except my husband. Guys were standing there with their M-16s and their 9mms. I turned to him and said, 'I would feel a lot better if you had one of those.'"
"He just laughed and said he probably end up shooting himself if he had one. He had the confidence that he was going to be taken care of," she said.
That is just what chaplains do, Mitchell says. Chaplains don't fight, they minister.
That meant when he and his unit were going into battle, Mitchell was driving the truck so his chaplain assistant could provide protection.
"I started to drive more or less permanently in the middle of the night without any headlights-with night vision goggles," he says. "My first time in these night vision goggles was while we were in a hostile firing zone. It was kind of a bizarre experience."
Mitchell said in some ways the whole war experience was very surreal, "kind of like listening to a radio that is not quite tuned in."
"One of the things I was afraid of was that I would be so afraid I won't be able to do my job. That never happened to me," he says.
"We got in a couple of sticky situations where we had to keep our heads to get out of them. I thank God that I was able to keep my head with the rest of the soldiers."
When a large missile hit the second brigade headquarters, Mitchell was sent to minister to the wounded.
"I was the chaplain where the wounded were being treated. That may have been the whole reason I was meant to be there (in the war) because several were seriously wounded, burns as well as traumatic injuries."
He knelt and prayed with each soldier.
"One thing that impressed me the most was how brave all these people were who were hurt. There wasn't a whole of screaming or a whole lot of panic; just everybody was doing their job."
Another important part of Mitchell's job was to minister to the other chaplains under his command.
Memorial services are hard on chaplains, he says. After a death, chaplains work non-stop visiting the surviving soldiers and planning the memorial service.
"My advice was always take a break, take a nap, eat a meal, get out a Bible and read it for an hour alone, not to minister to anyone else. They need to decompress."
When he returned home in at the end of August he took a month off to just be with his family. His daughter Audrey, 19, is a sophomore at Georgia Institute of Technology; his son Drew, 15, is a sophomore at Bradwell Institute, the public high school in Hinesville.
"The living conditions and the violence of the whole thing made it a lot harder," he says. It was tough not being able to talk to his wife and children for extended periods of time, he adds.
"I became very aware of my own mortality while I was gone, not so much in the sense that I thought I was going to die, but that I might not see my family again."
Laughing, he says a moment in the war reminded him of a scene from the movie "Joe vs. the Volcano."
"There is this scene when Tom Hanks is floating on his luggage out in the ocean and he sees this big moon coming over the water and he says 'O God, whose name I do not know, I thank you for my life.'"
"It was the middle of March, war was only a few days away and this big huge moon comes up over the desert. I can just remember thinking, 'O God whose name I DO know, I thank you for my life.' That's my big memory of what my state of mind was right before war began."
Since coming back on duty, he says his counseling caseload is higher than normal. Although the war has touched everyone, it is not the only problem the soldiers face. They find it difficult to deal with some aspects of everyday life because their families can't really understand what they have been through.
"It is hard to say it is all due to the conflict," Mitchell says. "It is sort of like a knot of yarn; you can't really unknot it."
As far as his future, Mitchell says: "I am not anxious to go back but it is what I signed up for. My family is definitely not anxious for me to go back but who knows what the future holds?" # # # *Gilbert is a United Methodist News Service news writer.
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