Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly . INTERVIEW . Bishop George Packard . February 14, 2003

Read more of Phil Jones's interview with the Right Rev. George Packard:

On just war:
It's very hard to see a war rise to the level of a just war these days -- very difficult. Here's the key: since America is afraid of body bags coming back to hometown USA, we increase the firepower. You increase the firepower, you definitely increase the chances of innocent people being killed. That has to come back to parity, and it's a hard parity for us to face. One of the propositions in just war is you'll only bring force to bear that is necessary to do the job. We ratchet up the force. Colin Powell came up with this idea in the last Gulf War -- all the massing of overwhelming force to bring the conflict to a conclusion quickly, and a lesson was learned. I worked in the Pentagon, and the Pentagon is full of very fine folks. There's nothing wrong with the Pentagon. But they learned a lesson: don't get too far ahead of public opinion. If you're going to be out there, make sure that you've got back-up. If you're going to bring war to a place, bring it quickly, supremely and with finality. That's what has goosed just war off the page. There's no just way to prosecute a war with that point of view.

Photo of Rev. Packard

When you are co-agents with others, the chances of lethal warfare are lowered but the intensity of the conflict is guaranteed. That's why it's so important to have French and German people behind this current move. The United Nations is no powerhouse here. It just happens to be the best worst-case scenario we have. The United Nations doesn't prosecute a war. They use all these agents. And the agents, because there's no central discriminating factor, gather around the United Nations, and perhaps just war is even more appropriate.

On being a chaplain:
I don't think I'm that unique. There are a lot of veterans who have come to this level of [realization about combat], this level of "Ah-ha, that's what happened." They may not have had the occasions to develop it, but there's an awful lot of wisdom out there, an awful lot of wisdom among veterans.

I've had conversations on the berm in Kuwait, and also at the Demilitarized Zone [in Korea]. The DMZ is actually probably a more frightening place than the barbed wire that rings northwest Kuwait, because they have these ominous peek-a-boo postures with the guards along the DMZ. That corridor in the DMZ between North and South Korea is just a warren of odd trails and potential conflagrations and contacts.

I remember one [soldier] in Kuwait who said, "What do I do?" The chances of his being in a firefight were pretty slim. I mean, he was going to be in a support unit, but you never know. I said, "Look, you're here. You're part of a long tradition of doing what's right for your country and the world. Your country has always done the right thing, and you're part of that tradition, and it's a noble tradition. And I know that you will do the right thing. You will do the honorable thing." And that's what you say.

I removed one chaplain in Korea who started to pick apart American foreign policy. I thought that was very ill-timed and not the kind of thing we do. We even had priests here in New York City right after 9/11 blaming Americans for exporting consumerism and [saying] no wonder the world is this way and we deserve what we get. That's not the kind of thing we say.

On soldiers and chaplains:
Soldiers aren't supposed to be amazingly self-reflective about what they do. They're not supposed to be philosopher kings, drawing their hands across their chins, wondering whether they should shoot that opposing soldier or not. That's not what we're ministering to. We're ministering to people who are within this bubble. They've committed themselves to this enterprise and process. What I pray for is that we'll be around after the battle is over. It's easy to think about the stereotypical chaplain running up with a prayer book and Bible, talking to the young men before battle -- the nervousness with the perspiration on the trigger finger. Who cares about that? It's after he has committed what he's been trained for and has to do by his duty -- that's a stand-up time of integrity, it seems to me, on the part of a culture, on the part of a nation, on the part of the chaplains, and I don't think we've done that very well. That's the part that worries me, because this stuff is going to rumble around inside of him or her -- it has to.

On killing:
"When you revoke the charter for someone to exist on this earth," as Chris Hedges said in his New York Times piece about me (it's a very poetic way to put it, but a very powerful way to put it), something is rearranged inside of you. I've been getting a lot of letters� "Oh, bishop, you should forgive yourself for standing up for your country and doing the right thing." A lot of groups have written to me saying, "You should know that murdering is different than killing in warfare. You're allowed to do that." My interior landscape tells me that God has a different kind of enduring wisdom.

On courage and forgiveness:
As a chaplain, I've seen people with enormous courage in hospitals facing their last days, the bad lab report. "Courage is fear that has said its prayers."

I don't think it's a question of forgiving myself. I think it's a question of what work is there to do. In the national headquarters of the church, forgiveness and redemption are words that we use a lot. I think that those postures can be easy. It's very easy to forgive yourself and then live a life that's completely disconnected to everything around you. Don't think you go through these powerfully traumatic experiences and then just live carefree and disconnected.

On torment:
It's not [that I am] tormented. I think it's more a question of being quickened... of finding yourself quickened, [of realizing] "that's what [war] was about." Is warfare to be avoided because of that? Is that right? What do you do about evil? What do you do about Hitler? What do you do about Rwanda? Ambiguities, oddities are going to be part of life. I think courage is different for me these days. It's standing in the midst of ambiguity (whether you're on your deathbed, or whether you're a 12-year-old kid in some nameless village in Africa, realizing that every adult in his family has died and he is the adult) and stepping forward into the next day with some sense of purpose. There's a purpose to reaching out for your brother or sister in their need. That's what was so powerful for me. I believe the Holy Spirit was with me [when I was working] on the streets of New York, searching the shadows for homeless people, not to kill them but to give them life... Believe me, I'm constantly surprised by all of this stuff. It certainly makes a lot of sense to me, and frankly that kind of making sense is a good thing.

On pacifism and facing evil:
People have said to me when I talk like this, "Oh, you're a pacifist." I say, "Absolutely not." I believe in noble service, standing up for what is right. My dad was a member of the citizens committee in Wantagh, New York. I grew up in this environment -- you did the right thing for your community. And I went to Vietnam under that flag, thinking those things. Nothing has disposed of that feeling. I think we are immature in our understanding of it.

What happened on 9/11 was a profoundly evil thing. Evaluating Islam on the basis of Al Qaeda is like evaluating Christianity on the basis of KKK. They're just evil, and that kind of stuff must be stopped. That's the ambiguity we're called into. You can't explain it away. You can't pretend it away. You can't "non-violent" it away. It has to be sought out and stopped. It must be sought out intelligently and resourcefully. But in some respects, our flag needs to be lowered a little bit, and we need to lock on with others in a confederation to apply ourselves to these things. There's no question that there is a need for the presence of the military in the world, as I understand it. I mean, until the Kingdom has come, the presence of the military in our lives is the best worst-case scenario. We just need to have them around. And thank God that they're here.

There's a peace movement in my church -- the Episcopal Peace Fellowship. I'm a member, but I disagree so supremely with what they say. They say serving in the military is a non-Christian thing to do. That is ludicrous. There has to be some place that says "no" to those things that will do us in. If the World War II generation didn't rise, and my dad didn't rise with all those others and stand up and be counted, where would we be today?

On war that is looming:
It's a very worrisome moment, in my opinion. If we become impatient with proof... it's a really tough thing, strategically. I know the military; I know what's going on. They want to finish this "exercise," euphemistically speaking, before it becomes summer in Southwest Asia. You want to prosecute a war in the summer, in June or July? You know what a nightmare that would be in the protective gear that you need against biological and nerve agents? This has got "bad news" written all over it... you've got some ambiguities here.

Photo of Rev. Packard with troops

On the military:
I've encouraged my middle daughter to join the military, but she decided she didn't want to. She went back to college. Service to our country is not a death sentence. It's just one of the offerings in life. It's an important part of the culture. You can't take your children and absent them from what life gives. That's what I worry about in Congress. I wonder how many of their children are of military age, or how many of them are in the military. I think Rep. Charles Rangel (D-NY) has got a point. Maybe we should democratize the military again. Maybe we should have a draft. [Then] somehow, I would imagine, the conversation would get very, very serious in the halls of Congress and not [be] theoretical.

On ambushing the enemy:
I gradually went down to my knees, thinking to myself that at this range, if I screw this up, we're all dead. We're dead. And so I put my finger in one ear, and I had to wait for them to pass in front of me. It was a full moon and the shadows were passing over my face, and I had to wait for the regiment to get in the middle of this field of fire, because we laid down these claymore [mines], and then I blew the ambush, and it was hell. It was just hell. The claymore created something like a football field, and arms, legs, just -- just chaos. And that moment, I thought to myself, "We survived." Lots of glory comes out of the fact that we have a big ambush, big body count. The criterion of success in Vietnam was a body count. What a desperately awful, inglorious way to think of warfare. I remember seeing Walter Cronkite at home, before I left for Vietnam; you'd get the report, and in this little encapsulation there would be a body count for that week -- how many have they lost, how many have we lost. This was all part of that Americana that's good for the globe, and here's proof positive. Look at the aggression, and we'll number them for you. I provided my commander and myself and others with verification of that. The body count was a really messy, messy thing, because the claymores cut you off at the knees, and there was lots of crawling into our perimeter.

Ambush was what we did at night. We did what we call search and destroy -- we'd move through a grid square. You tried to know those grid squares as well as you knew your own back yard. That's what we were doing. I was wounded by my own grenade.

Photo of Rev. Packard

On peace and patriotism:
There were lots of peace signs on helmets in Vietnam. It was a very odd and ambiguous environment. A full colonel would come in and inspect everything, and as he's leaving, the platoon will be giving him peace signs. I don't know about that. I sense, as I travel around the country and around the world now, there's more patriotism in the right sense today. Patriotism is a very fragile commodity. It can be used as a way of unification, if the patriotism is the common good, and the common good, which is also elusive, is the right thing to do. But the fragility of patriotism today... I'm not sure, in this complicated system that we're in, that we have the luxury to push our patriotism too far forward on the world citizenry. Anything we do today needs to be steeped in a global cooperation. That's what's making this war so worrisome. I mean, we even have members of NATO worried about how we're proceeding.

On 9/11 and its aftermath:
In the days after 9/11, New York City was transformed. People were reaching out and relating to each other. You'd go down to Ground Zero, and you had to walk below Houston Street. They had secure perimeters that you had to go through. But on the backs of mail boxes: "We love you. Central School, Lubbock, Texas." The whole country was brought together in this moment of, "This has been done to us." We're unsure of things, and so we reach out to our brothers and sisters. The cell phone usage in the country went through the ceiling in those hours after 9/11, because when it all came down to basic need, we checked in with those whom we love. That bonding was shared throughout the world -- messages and letters and contacts of all kinds. There's a basic sense of "America, you've joined the world citizens." Oh, at what a price. And this vulnerability was the gift.

We don't like being in that vulnerable moment, so we look to our commander-in-chief, and he brings us back to some sense of control, and he gave us a State of the Union address, and an emergency address from the Oval Office, and he said, "This is the way we will go. This is the plan." Control was reasserted. I submit that when control is reasserted, it should be reasserted in a kind of a confederation of nations. No one benefits from a world chaos with revolutionaries here and there hijacking and disrupting things.

On medals and valor:
I used to keep them [two Bronze Stars and a Silver Star] in the attic, and then my family gave them to me as a present one birthday, set in a frame with the platoon in it. They knew how I felt about the platoon, so they figured that I would tolerate the gift.

You have to remember, when you came back from Vietnam, they would spit on you. They don't want to remember how the value system we exported didn't work. Who wants to have a reminder around the house of something you did wrong? This is part of the folklore now about Vietnam veterans -- that they were not cared for. So, you just put away the memory. That's part of post-traumatic stress disorder, I'm told. You put it away, but you can't put it away for long.

In country I felt good about myself because I was a golden boy. (I had a high body count. I didn't have any casualties. And after an operation, the company commander would bring me into the battalion commander and say "Look what he did.") But as soon as I presented myself to my family and my friends, it was very hard because you almost developed this split personality. In country you're doing what you're supposed to do. Everything makes sense, it works. And then when you get back to the States, the criteria had changed. This is very disorienting.

[In Vietnam] I felt good only in relationship to the platoon I was with. I've read a lot about this since those days... your buddies and your friends, your chums give you a sense of reality. You don't crawl out to a squad that's pinned down to help them drag back a wounded guy because of America. You do this because this is your buddy. That's been true maybe ever since the first arrow was shot in the first war. It's this cohesion, this bond. It's quite wonderful to be around. And frankly, when you get back in the States, they're not around anymore, so talking about it, wearing medals and stuff seems very out of place and odd.

It hit me particularly when I was reassigned to Fort Lee, Virginia. I was in a unit that had not been to Vietnam, had no interest in being in Vietnam. Most of the guys did everything they could with their assignment structure to avoid Vietnam. You can't say, "You need to go; this is really a wonderful thing." I mean, you are in the military, you're in the army. That's what you do. And then I went to seminary, and boy, I felt like I was a pariah; there were some wonderful people in my seminary class, but I sensed a certain wariness of a Vietnam veteran.

I talked to my then-wife in Hawaii, during R&R, and she was very afraid, I remember. She was afraid that I was somebody she didn't know. Later on, she was enormously patient and supportive, but eventually it had an effect; it deteriorated a marriage and we just couldn't keep it together. It's what so elusive about post-traumatic stress disorder -- that you have it and you act it out, and then others react to it. Perhaps they develop their own pocket of it. She maintains to this day that's what happened. But we remained married for 28 years, a long time.

On answering his daughter's questions about war:
You say, "Well, Daddy was in the war, and it was a very hard time. And in war people have to fight each other. And we try to avoid war." Over time, kids in families of soldiers tend to start to avoid asking the questions because they have a sense that it's not easy to talk about it.

I have some peculiar things that are leftover from the war. When I'm driving, for instance, it's difficult for me to have a lot of commotion immediately behind me, so I always ask her to sit a little to the right of me... I can trace it back to times when I was in ambush sites, and at an ambush site, in the jungle, it has to be absolutely still because you own the jungle when it's quiet. The first person who makes a noise in a jungle gives up ownership.

If I'm crossing a bridge, I feel a little uneasy. And [my daughter] will say, "Don't talk to Dad now, he's crossing a bridge." I think we all have these oddities that we somehow put on a shelf of anxiety and keep it there. As she gets older, as a teenager, she'll ask the same questions her sisters have asked: How long were you there? Did you kill any women and children? I didn't, luckily, because I was pinned down by an awful lot of good shots. A lot of good snipers were women... but I never retrieved any confirmation of [killing] children or women.

Photo of Rev. Packard

On the experience of warfare:
The first time, I was thinking that I should have some reaction. And I said a prayer. I'm an Episcopalian, and Episcopalians say prayers. Liturgy is important to us. It's how we try to find a way to embrace a holy moment with God. I said a prayer, and I could have been reading a laundry list. It had not effect. I had no connection with the prayer and what I had done. That is what happens to you in these psychological moments; you surround yourself in this bubble. It just became a task to be done, work to be done.

One medic momentarily pricked that bubble. We had blown an ambush, and there was one guy who was still alive. And this doc tried desperately to keep this Vietcong kid alive. We had to move on. We were hearing movement. I'm looking at my watch. I said, "Doc, how long are you going to be doing this?" And he invited us into this moment.

Warfare only works when you don't think of your enemy as an individual. Once you do that, you're absolutely irrelevant. You can't be a warrior in battle any more. We came perilously close to that; the squad leaders, and me, and a couple of others were in a circle -- very dangerous. For artillery purposes, you should never be that close together. You should always be spread out. We were watching this young doc from Kentucky, who was applying his trade, getting very angry because he couldn't keep this young Vietcong soldier alive. He had a sucking chest wound. We were all starting to particularize this Vietcong kid's life, and you could see us starting to get a little disoriented. I didn't know at the time what was going on -- I do now. Maybe fortunately for him, or fortunately for us, he died. But that said a lot to me, because the image continued to bother me throughout the rest of the tour: Why that one? We had gone through his wallet, we saw [pictures of children] -- maybe they were his nephews, and we started to particularize the fact that he was alive.

When we would go through pockets and wallets at an ambush site for money and war trophies, it was like Christmas morning. It started to put me on edge, because we would take all the pictures and personal effects of these folks. One time my platoon found a picture of a blond girl in a pocket of a Vietcong solider. Obviously, he had taken it off of an American soldier -- I think he probably had, because it had an American address on the back. I would collect all these pictures and personal effects, and I would make some excuse and burn them, because it just felt to me that somehow we had taken something, this token of who these guys were, and appropriated it. We grabbed it from them. It began after the doc did that, I remember, because it's a truism in warfare: If you start to individualize your enemy, then it's not an enemy.

I don't think we're supposed to anesthetize our lives. You try to do the important things that are presented to you. I do think that we ought not to ignore the things that need to be done. That's what we have tended to do. A soldier goes in; they do what they need to do. They come out, and we forget them. And I think they want to forget certain things they've done. That's a very wrong-headed way to be.

On judgment and atonement:
I believe that Christ stands between me and judgment. I'm not perpetually in atonement. I think you go through these days for some reason, and it's what you do with the days afterward that make a difference -- what kind of repair work can you do?

I remember talking to a captain friend of mine that there should have been a debriefing place for Vietnam veterans. And there also should have been occasions and places for us to give back to the country [of Vietnam] -- orphanages, schools, hospitals. I think it's a question of wholeness, of trying to find ways to repair -- just as you may have subtracted, to add back in to the circumstances.

That's where I am. That's why I'm doing this work. It's because I think we should all know the consequences of warfare. It's just horrific what happens. If ever there was an oxymoron, pinpoint bombing is it, and the collateral damage is awful. We still haven't accounted for the Iraqi war dead from the last Gulf War. We have disabled the civilian support systems. War is a terrible, terrible thing. You can't understand how desperately awful it is until you've been inside of it. But then there's this second wave that comes back and echoes through those who are veterans if they don't connect with something that is wholesome.

When I was a young priest, I found Isaiah 58:5-9 by happenstance. I didn't understand its full effect until many years later: Is this the path that I choose? Is it a day to humble oneself, to fast? Do you put on sackcloth and ashes? Is that what God wants? Or is it that you bring the homeless poor into your house, that you help the oppressed to be free, that you clothe those who are not clothed? And then it says -- this is a great line -- is it to hide yourself from your own flesh? No, it's not to hide yourself from your own flesh or from your brothers. When you do that, when you become transparent to the other, to the brother or sister, which is exactly what you are in combat, when you assume that transparency, it says in scripture, "then will your healing spring up speedily and the dawn will rise."

For me, that captures it. You go through this journey not to worry, worry, worry about how forgiven you are, not to tally it up and make sure everything is right and all the boxes are checked: "God, you forgive me for that, okay, now I can go ahead with this," and so and so forth. It is to take your life and to spread it out and connect with those things that you dared not connect with before. That's what was being offered to us in that moment with doc on that trail. He was wasting all our medical supplies with this Vietcong kid. This guy would have shot us. But somehow doc took that moment and transported it somewhere.

Photo of Vietnam Memorial

On the platoon and the Wall:
Nothing has diminished the bravery and the camaraderie of those friends. I know one of those guys is dead. Six or seven of them were dusted off. One guy lost an arm. One guy lost an eye. One kid had a lower bowel wound. A great melancholy sweeps over me because I know how painful it was, particularly losing Tony Firak. I had just left the platoon. I was leaving country. The platoon had this reputation of being very effective in battle, no casualties, or casualties that wouldn't harm. We even had a guy get dusted off, and he came back. Tony was pulling immediate action on an M-60, and those things aren't worth the powder and shot to blow them apart. He sat up, and he got it in the chest. He's on the Wall now.

We went down [to the Wall] in the early hours before I got consecrated as bishop. I called these guys up and asked them to be part of the presentation in the National Cathedral, to present me to the presiding bishop to get ordained for this job. You want to be honest: Warts and all, this is who you're getting. Just as dawn was breaking, we went down [to the Wall] to see, to fumble. When it's dark, you need to feel the names. The genius of that memorial is that it really tabulates and puts before us how much it costs. And there is his name: Tony Firak.

I've been [to the Wall] three times. Some criticized the Vietnam Memorial because it didn't have a physical presence there, so they put up some statuary. When the doc was trying to save that Vietcong soldier's life, he particularized the individual. On this side of the war, that crescent of black granite particularizes the individual. That's why you see the name. There is a life there. It's not some memorial wrapped in blinding and blazing heroics. It talks about the sacrifice and loss of some dear ones. That's what it is.

When I'm in a room with people in the church, I'll look around and say, I'm the only person who has ever [killed another human being]. In some respects it feels a little isolating, and in some respects not.

On being a bishop and a Vietnam veteran:
I think it was part of the reason I was chosen. People always talk about getting "a call" to be a bishop. We think people have dispositions and preferences; I think that in the deliberations, this was a significant factor. I have to say, though, that I served as a chaplain for 21 years, after I worked as an infantry officer for five years. There are plenty of occasions for character-building where you're trying to throw together impromptu services on a back of the flip-down of a Humvee, or talking to young troops along the berm in some god-forsaken place, or trying to be with somebody who has just been dusted off from Korea because they got tuberculosis and they are disoriented and don't know what's going to happen. Those are the long days. It says in the Psalms you measure your days, and those are the days I treasure more.

On Colin Powell:
We benefit so much by being measured and considered in facing [war]. He is certainly one whom I admire. I was with him (he is an Episcopalian, by the way) in the Cathedral of St. John the Divine after I had finished working in the Pentagon. He came there and congratulated me, talked to me. I don't know if he remembers it, but he gave me a medal for Desert Shield/Desert Storm. I got the definite feeling that the man had some grit and some sense of reflection. I guess he has that effect on the [Bush] administration. I hope he does. I think it's a good and healthy thing.

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