The Chaplain as Instrument of War

As front-page fodder, the image of a U.S. missile being fired at an enemy target has become old hat, just another instance of our nation’s squandering its dwindling resources by discharging the responsibilities entailed in taking up “the White Man’s burden” and imposing order upon Kipling’s “lesser breeds without the law”--a killing endeavor in every sense that her majesty’s government abandoned more than a generation ago.

For me, however, the image of the destroyer Laboon firing away in all its martial glory last month, sending Saddam Hussein a message via Tomahawk missiles, was peculiarly evocative. For the Laboon is named after a Jesuit priest, Father John “Jake” Laboon. Thirty-five years ago, he was a chaplain at the American naval base at Yokosuka, and I was a Jesuit seminarian studying Japanese at a nearby language school.

Jake Laboon was a man among men. He stood well over 6 feet, and his lantern- jawed good looks, whose effect on officers’ wives must have been devastating, recalled Steve Canyon, the macho flyer of Milton Caniff’s comic strip. A 1944 graduate of the Naval Academy, where he had played end on the football team, he served on a submarine in the Pacific and won the Silver Star when he swam to the aid of a downed flyer off the Japanese coast despite machine-gun fire from the shore.

I liked him. One couldn’t help liking Jake Laboon, but I never got to know him well because I avoided the base as much as I could. My thoughts on war and peace in 1962 had not yet evolved to the point that I saw modern warfare as altogether contrary to the teachings of Jesus, but, still, the base made me uneasy. Perhaps it was because I was familiar with such enclaves, having spent a few months at an Army camp in Kyushu after my airborne regiment had returned from Korea.

When the destroyer Laboon was commissioned, Catholic peace activists objected to a warship being named after a priest. I doubt that Jake would have shared their misgivings or even objected to its firing cruise missiles against Iraq. All of us are shaped by our times.

Gordon Zahn, the dean of American Catholic pacifists, did a study in the 1960s of British chaplains in World War II. The Royal Air Force chaplains Zahn interviewed had had the spiritual care of young men who, thanks to the strategy of area bombing, were in effect committing mass murder every day by attacking civilians directly and intentionally (the Dresden massacre of February 1945 being the most heinous example). This was something expressly forbidden by the “just war doctrine” long preached by the church. Yet the major concern expressed by the priests and ministers Zahn interviewed had been that their brave young airmen resist the sexual temptations that abounded around air bases and, if they had to die, would die in a state of grace. It’s OK to roast women and children and babes in the womb, boys, but keep your zipper up off-duty.

What of today, however? Today, when the horrible legacy of violence begetting violence is so much more apparent, or should be, to any thoughtful Christian? How can a Catholic chaplain preach the gospel of Jesus Christ to men and women who prepare every day to mete out death without gravely disturbing their consciences? (A destroyer was called a destroyer originally because it was designed to destroy submarines, but now a destroyer armed with nuclear-tipped missiles can destroy cities.) And what is he to tell them about following an order to kill that has been issued by a president unsupported by any declaration of war, another condition of the just-war doctrine? And if a famously unmilitary president like Bill Clinton can do such things--Bill Clinton who chose to send a message to Saddam Hussein by launching cruise missiles against a sleeping Iraq--what happens if we get a kick-butt-and- take-names president like Bob Dole or Jack Kemp?

How can a chaplain be free if the Pentagon pays his salary? Ministers--whether of the gospel, the Torah or the Koran--should not be military officers, and their salaries should come from their religious faith groups. If the Pentagon is unwilling to accept such an arrangement, then we have all the more reason to be terribly concerned about what plans the Pentagon has in store for us.

That a Jesuit of Jake Laboon’s generation, Dan Berrigan, should strike out in a radically different direction is perhaps but an exception that proves the rule. Such exceptions are of great significance, however, and they occur frequently enough to make the “great ones” of this earth wary of Christianity.