Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly . INTERVIEW . Joe Angotti . October 22, 2004

Read more of Bob Abernethy's interview with army chaplain Joe Angotti.

Photo of Joe Angotti

I joined the army in 2000, four years ago. We arrived in theater on February 11, 2004. We're now in the eighth month of our unit deployment, the 9th Engineer Battalion with the 1st Infantry Division. We're stationed in Schweinfurt, Germany when we're not somewhere else. We're in Tikrit, Iraq. The 1st Infantry Division has several forward operating bases around Tikrit. We're one of them.

There was a need for Catholic priests to deploy, and I was willing to be a part of a unit that we knew was going to go. Everything for a chaplain is volunteer because none of us have to be there. We all have denominations; we all have what we call "endorsing agents." When we're commissioned to be officers in the army, it's with our denomination's permission.

I wanted to go to Iraq -- well, I didn't want to go to Iraq, I wanted to be with soldiers who had to go to Iraq. I enjoy working with soldiers. They're good people to minister to because they sacrifice so much. It's so rare in our society that you see young people who are giving up the luxuries of life. They're giving up, on a volunteer basis, so much of what young people like, and that makes it a very rewarding group to work with.

I'm on the road a lot because I'm a Catholic priest, and I cover a large area of forward operating bases, each of which has its own chaplain. But being a priest, I have to go and say Mass at all of them. That takes up a good deal of my time. In addition to that, I'm a chaplain for my own soldiers. I have two jobs. I'm a chaplain for my soldiers, and then I'm a priest for everybody else in the area.

Right around Holy Week was an especially difficult time, back in April. Beginning on Palm Sunday, things seemed to be heating up. And, of course, that's a very busy time for me because I was preparing for all the liturgies for Holy Week and Easter, and that happened to be a time that, where I live, we started getting mortar fire and began to have to go run to the bunkers and protect ourselves from incoming fire. One day in particular I was getting ready for the liturgy and we were mortared, and I had to put everything aside. And another time, on Holy Saturday night, I was getting ready for the Easter Vigil, which is a big part of Catholic tradition. It's where we baptize people who have been preparing to be Catholic. I had a whole service set up and ready, and as soon as we lit the candle to start, we were hit by mortar fire and the whole thing had to be postponed. That wasn't so much frightening as it made me very angry.

Separation from families is very stressful for most of [the soldiers], so they do come to me about that. And then in addition to being separated from family, their lives are very dangerous. There's a lot of danger in what they do. I have had soldiers I've gone to see who have been involved in roadside bombing incidents. I've dealt with soldiers who have lost comrades. There's a lot of grief, and there's a lot of pain when those things happen. They very often want to pray. They want a sense that God has not abandoned them, that God is in their midst, and that's really what a chaplain is there to do, to be a presence to them in those times.

They are committed to their mission. They are committed to their chain of command. Soldiers are trained that way. Politically everyone has an opinion, and soldiers are no different than every other American. They're encouraged to vote. The military has a very strong campaign to make sure that everyone votes, and people are going to vote in different ways. But they're very committed to what their operation is, what they're told their mission is. And they're ready to fulfill what they're asked to do. They will give it their best shot. From commanders all the way down to the lowest private, everyone's going to try to do what they're told to do, even if it's unrealistic.

When we first arrived in February, we did an approach march from Kuwait to Tikrit, and the people were very welcoming. You saw a lot of people waving, smiling, a lot of children on the roadside, a lot of women, and that was a very good feeling. Since that time, you're not seeing as much of that. You're not seeing people waving. You don't see the kids out as much -- a little bit, but not as much as you did. I've been in vehicles and I've had things thrown at us, and I've had people come out and yell. In the eight months we've been there, I sense that there's been a change. Many of the Iraqis are still grateful that our presence is there, but it's not as much as it was when we first arrived.

My own reaction is that I need to keep taking care of soldiers. I know that it can be stressful for them to be in that situation, and I hope that things will improve.

Morale is fairly good. The circumstances that they're in are difficult. The kinds of things that are helping morale [are] that soldiers are regularly going for R & R now. They're taking their leave. That makes a big difference in morale, and I think it's caused a lot of improvement, because before we got there it was not as good. Soldiers now knowing that they can leave and get some breaks has improved morale quite a bit.

There is a difference that I've heard about from people who did tours in Vietnam. The tours were done as individuals, and in Iraq they're being done as units. That seems to have an improved effect on soldier morale, because they're with people that are more like family, and they don't find themselves strangers with different groups of people. That's helpful for all of us.

I'm ready to go back. I'm ready to do the ministry and to care for soldiers who need me. I am hoping it won't be too long that we have to stay there. We're coming up to 12 months by February, so I hope it goes quickly.

It can be stressful, especially because I have so many responsibilities there. I'd like to do a good job whatever I'm doing, and sometimes that's difficult. I do find it helpful to talk to other chaplains if my stress level is getting high. I'm very lucky that I can go to my commander any time and tell him, "It's too much," and he'll say, "Okay, I understand." That makes life a lot easier.

We chaplains get together at least once a month and we share our stories and talk to each other, and do "lessons learned" with each other. That provides a support system, because we're all dealing with similar things, and we help each other out by telling each other how we deal with those things.

One of the things I've heard from soldiers [is] that some of them feel like they're a gerbil on a wheel, and they are making the wheel go around. It's a little bit frustrating because everybody wants to see improvement. When you're putting a lot of effort and work into something, you want to see things getting better. Our soldiers right now don't have the blessing of seeing things get better. That can always change, but in the time we've been stationed in Iraq, they have not gotten better. That's one of the difficulties that soldiers come to me with. They really want things to be better. They want Iraq to be a free country, they want elections, they want freedom for the people. It's very frustrating when the elements in the country are there to prevent that from happening.

I tell them that it's important not to despair. It's important to keep hope. I believe very strongly that prayer is important, that we have to pray, and that ultimately we are not in control of our destiny. Being in Iraq is a good place to learn how little control anybody really has, because you just realize it's not there. When soldiers ask me for Scripture, I find myself recommending the Book of Job quite a bit, because it is involving an individual who could very easily be tempted to despair, but in realizing his own powerlessness and trusting in divine providence he's able to survive and come through a difficult situation.

Outside of our compound we have very little interaction with Iraqis. For me that's very difficult, and I think for a lot of soldiers that's difficult, because we pass their marketplaces and their bazaars, and a lot of us would like to stop. We'd like to go and shop and talk to them, and argue prices with them, and try their food, and it's very hard not to be able to do that. The Iraqis themselves are very hospitable people, and many of them would like us to come to their homes, and they express that: "We'd like to entertain you. We'd like to have you for supper." And we can't do that because of the security situation.

Some of the Iraqis that come onto our compound to work -- there seems to be a fairly good relationship the soldiers have with them. I see a lot of smiling. I see through sign language, joking around kinds of things, through universal symbols people can come up with. Most of the soldiers distinguish between the insurgents and the other Iraqis. Most soldiers are able to make that distinction.

I have visited the holding cell where Iraqi prisoners are held for a short time. I have not actually ministered to them because I don't know their language and because we do have imams come in and take care of that. We have translators that I talk to, and they ask me a lot of questions about faith, but not actual ministry.

One incident that I recall very vividly is when some of our soldiers had been wounded by an IED (improvised explosive device), a roadside bombing, and we went to the hospital. We got there, and we heard that one of the soldiers was actually shopping at the PX because he was ambulatory and he was well enough to go, and we rejoiced about that because that seemed to show that he wasn't injured. When he got back, I offered to pray with him, and when we prayed he broke down and began to weep. Even though he was physically all right, he was very wounded emotionally from that event. I spent about an hour with him just helping to get through that and deal with that. That brought home that there's these unseen scars that our soldiers are vulnerable with, that sometimes we assume that if nobody's seriously hurt then everybody's okay, and we forget that psychologically and emotionally the wounds can be very deep there. ...

When we first arrived in Kuwait, I was in a tent with 30 soldiers, and here I am, a 40-year-old man sharing a tent with 30 eighteen-, nineteen-, twenty-year-olds, male and female, and wondering, "What have I gotten myself into? What am I doing?" Especially when you have to do something like change and go to the shower, and there's all these female soldiers around, and you have to adapt considerably to a situation like that. However, it also provides that opportunity for presences that a lot of people don't have the opportunity for -- that a clergyman is actually that close to their daily lives, that a clergyman is there brushing his teeth and shaving right next to them in the morning, that a clergyman is sleeping in a sleeping bag right next to them at night. ... I think especially for young people that's a good presence to have in their midst. I'm with the soldiers where they are. I did not volunteer for this job so that I could sit in an office and have to deal with a lot of office nonsense. If I wanted that, I could very much be at home in any parish anywhere. But the "presence" factor has made it very rewarding for me. I feel very useful, and I feel needed. One of the greatest things for me is in the morning to see soldiers, and when they see me, they smile, because the chaplain is the one that doesn't yell at them. The chaplain is the one that's always nice.

There is a critical need for Catholic priests in the army. Almost one out of four soldiers claims to be Catholic and puts that down as their faith preference when they join the army. There is an abundance of non-Catholic chaplains, but we really need Catholic priests. I always try to explain to bishops, when they're contemplating letting a priest go into the military, that these soldiers who are Catholic belong to these bishops, and these bishops, I'm sure, are concerned that they be ministered to when they're away from home. I have at least one soldier from my diocese, which is the Diocese of Gary, Indiana. He's from the city of LaPorte, and I'm able to write to his pastor and say, "Your soldier is here. He's going to Mass. He's providing music for us at Mass." And so the religious side of his life is being provided for.

Most of [the soldiers], when they hear about criticism, they don't take it personally. They know they're not the decision makers, they're not politicians. There's always a distinction between the soldier and the conflict. I think most soldiers feel that they're being supported, even if people don't agree with the politics of the war and the occupation.

Coming home just for our R & R, we were greeted by veterans and their wives, and when we were getting off the planes, we were applauded. I mean, people were clapping. They were giving us candy. They were giving us all kinds of stuff. That makes a big difference for a soldier. There was probably a diversity of opinions about the political situation. But nevertheless, they were going to support the soldiers. I think the soldiers sense that -- that even if people are critical, they as people, as soldiers, are still being supported.

Everybody is very concerned that the powers that be are watching very carefully what's going on, and that the commanders on the ground are being listened to, that the information isn't all getting lost in a black hole somewhere. I think that's what we need most of all. We get regular news. We have CNN. We have Fox News. We have that breakfast, lunch, and dinner; it's always on, so soldiers can see what's being said. Michael Moore's movie [FAHRENHEIT 9/11] has made its rounds already. A lot of soldiers have seen that, and there's a variety of comments about it. Some soldiers say he's right on the mark; other soldiers say he's way off.

Soldiers are like Americans at large. There's not one opinion. They don't say, "Well, we all agree, we need this one thing." Some think we need to use more force. Others think we need to use less. But everybody knows that it's not their decision to make. They're going to fulfill what comes down. And what I think everyone would agree on is that we want our leaders to listen to our commanders who are there, who are on the ground.

Our president has said there was a miscalculation in some of what has transpired, and as far as what I see I would have to agree with the president on that particular point. There was a miscalculation, and we have to go forward. I don't know, and I don't have answers. And I'm very confused at this point about what a good idea would be as far as how to go. I'm not a military professional, and I'm not a politician. And so I really don't know what the best thing is right now to do. But I would agree, and I think our leaders have been honest about some of the miscalculations that were made. The main miscalculation was the emergence of an insurgency, and apparently nobody thought that was going to happen. That was the major miscalculation.

Everybody's bitter when they're being fired at and weapons are going off and killing their comrades. There is some bitterness about that, that there is an insurgency and that they're having to deal with it. It's hard in a war like this to be trained, because so much of our training is geared towards a particular kind of warfare. It's very hard to train for an occupation and an insurgency. A lot of what we're doing -- we're having to plan as we go along, depending on what the situation is. We seem to get to a point where we have things figured out and then the enemy figures us out, and so we have to refigure things out and stay one step ahead of the insurgents. It's a frequently changing situation. It can be frustrating.

I'm like everyone else. I'm surprised at the magnitude of the insurgency. If you had asked me a year ago, I would have thought the people will be very happy to have Saddam Hussein gone, we will be leaving very soon, some kind of an international presence would emerge, something like in Kosovo. If you had asked me a year ago, that's what I would have thought. I am surprised, as everyone else is, I think, at the magnitude of the insurgency and the Islamic fundamentalism that is emerging in a country -- that it wasn't there before, because Iraq was in many ways a very secular Islamic nation, and the Islamic fundamentalism seems to be growing in magnitude. If it comes up [in conversations with soldiers], we're usually surprised in the same way, and I tell them to pray that things get better.

When [Abu Ghraib] first started to come out, I remember going into the dining facility, and there was a form we had to sign about ethical conduct in our interaction with the Iraqi people, and I had no idea why we were being asked to sign this, and I signed it like everyone else did. And then we started to see the pictures and I made the connection that this is what it was about. When those pictures came around, we were all shocked. We just could not believe that soldiers would do that. In my own mind, the photographs of Abu Ghraib left a terrible impression. It took me about a week to get those images out of my mind, wondering what was behind them, what the motivation was for doing those things. And where I actually found peace in all of that was I began to ask myself, could I ever picture one of my soldiers doing something like that, if you were to take the photographs and put my soldiers' faces in there? And I began to find peace by realizing that I could never imagine my soldiers doing that, that these really must have been some bad apples, because my soldiers would never do that.

It's hard to sum up [my experience in Iraq], because it's not finished yet and because I am going back. I would say that I continue to be edified by the sacrifices that our soldiers make, that they're willing to make, that they are continuing to be willing to make even when things aren't going well.

Once in a while a soldier will bring up how to reconcile using their weapon to defend themselves with biblical teachings about peace and killing. I had a lot of questions about that when I was a basic training chaplain and when soldiers were first being trained to use their weapons, and even though we have an all-volunteer army, it starts to sink in that they may have to use that weapon to harm someone. They would come to Mass, they come to chapel, and for the first time they're wanting some reconciliation between those two things. And that would be an opportunity to talk to them about the "just war" theory that goes back to St. Augustine and how things like the Geneva Convention play into warfare, what we've learned in the past.

It's hard to tell with young people when you're explaining things like that to them if any of it's actually sinking in, or of it's going in one ear and out the other and then they're thinking about the next thing that they're doing that day. But it seems to answer the question that they have.

Faith and religion help them because they're reminded that even if something does happen to them, even if they are killed, that they're still a soul that will be tended to by a loving God. That helps people when they're involved in any difficult situation, but especially in battle when their own lives are threatened.

One of the disappointments on this deployment has been that we're not seeing the religious practice that we would like. The chapel attendance is not as strong as we would like, at least in some places. And there may be reasons for that, because soldiers have missions to go on, they have tasks that keep them from going. But I think if you compare this to other wartime situations, you would probably see a much lower attendance at chapel than you did, say, in Vietnam or Korea or World War II.

I think a lot of it has to do with the younger people today. It's interesting, when you look at lists of religious preference of soldiers. There was a time when soldiers would say, "I'm Methodist," "I'm Presbyterian," "I'm Catholic." Today, you're seeing a lot of what we call NRP -- no religious preference. We're seeing a lot of soldiers that would call themselves "Christian." The Protestant religious identification, Methodist, Presbyterian, etc. -- you're not seeing that much anymore. You're seeing a few who will still identify themselves that way.

And the worship situation -- sometimes they feel like if they go and attend worship, then they're going to be leaving someone else to do the work back in the unit, and they might feel guilty about that so they don't go. Other times, they just want to sleep if they have time off. Other times they have missions that they have to do. And for a fair number of them, there's just not an importance to religious practice in their lives.

I thought [combat] would change them, because there's that saying that there are no atheists in a foxhole, and I find that's not true. Even in a battle zone there's still a fairly large number that's not practicing a faith, at least by chapel attendance. I have had conversations with people who will say that religion for them is very private, and they just don't go to chapel, but they do pray, they do read Scripture. There is that element as well.

There's always the understanding that when you go out on a convoy there's a possibility some people won't come back. If you dwell on that all the time, you can probably make yourself crazy. What many of us develop is a fatalistic kind of an attitude -- that if it happens, it happens, and we're not in control of most of these situations. We [take] some refuge and some comfort in statistics that it probably won't happen to us of all the people that are out on the road that particular day, but there's always the possibility that it can. If you think about it too much, it'll make you crazy, so you just try not to think about it.

God's world is a creative world, and it's an ordered world, and things happen for a reason. We have God's intending will and God's permitting will, which are different things. God permits things to happen that he does not intend to happen, going all the way back to the Genesis story of Adam and Eve and original sin. God did not intend it, but he permitted it. In many ways, that's still the same world that we live in. Humans have free choices to do good and to do evil. God's intention is that we do good, but unfortunately there is evil, and that's the design that he's created.

I'm hoping for peace. I'm hoping for a country that is prosperous, that is healthy, that is free, and that is self-sufficient and can take over its own security. Then we can all come home. That would be wonderful.