Ethics, orders and the of war

'To allow incompetent leaders to remain in the service [is] an immoral act.... Incompetence gets people killed.'

--Former instructor, speaking off the record

I began my trip from St. Louis to the military complex at Leavenworth on a damp, muggy morning under fair skies and in a state of persistent mental unrest. Minutes before departure, I finished reading a stream of e-mails from the student body at my seminary. Many seminarians of various denominations were denouncing the arrival of a woman named Gwendolyn, a compact and friendly African-American in her mid-40s. Her presence at Union Theological Seminary was, for some, loathsome. She was coming to Union in full dress blues as a chaplain in the United States Air Force.

"STAND UP for the victims of the UNITED STATES MILITARY!" wrote the first student. "NO RECRUITING in our HOUSE!"

An Internet debate followed. Vigorous and sincere but mostly disrespectful, as Internet debates tend to be.

Some saw a threat to the already-fading pacifist movement among modern Christians, while others saw a much-needed service aimed at generally working-class young men and women holding orders and rifles far from home. Neither camp seemed to consider the contradictions of faith that this chaplain's service peeled open and exposed. Instead, each burrowed deeper into its opposing ideas, illuminating belief with well-argued, impassioned lines of reasoning, all of them ultimately unreconciled. The unrest in my head did not clear, and perhaps I should have expected that.

I was heading to Fort Leavenworth to visit a military college. My father had been a student at West Point in the years following World War II, trained as an infantry commander, and ultimately served in two wars. In civilian life he was an ardent admirer of Jesuit Fr. Daniel Berrigan and routinely gave money and support to groups preaching disarmament. He was the only officer, I believe, in my home state of Nebraska to vote for George McGevern for president in 1972. He thus understood two opposing cultures from the inside, while I did not. Catholicism I knew by instinct, but never felt the slightest need as the son of a brigadier general to follow in those heavy, muddied footsteps. After he passed away, and I became a seminarian, I found myself living among pacifists who honestly regarded the military as monolithic, an arm of empire, a collection of citizens deluded into a misplaced religion of nationalism. I soon recognized how sympathetic I had been to certain aspects of military culture, especially the deeply paradoxical personal ethics of someone who is compelled to choose that life. Our modern military, after all, has become an army of volunteers. I very much wanted to understand whether my father's own sense of the ethical--self-scrutiny, humility, and a talent for honoring contradictions--were at all shared among contemporary officers, men and women asked by our current administration to fight and die in an unpopular war.

As of this moment, I do not know what happened to Chaplain Gwendolyn. A few students had specifically asked her to come, apparently in order to field questions on the logistics of ministry for soldiers. Those students (Catholics, Methodists, Baptists, Episcopalians and others) felt that Americans their age in Iraq or Afghanistan needed the comfort and guidance of chaplains, good ones, during an unpopular war when the line between occupier and insurgent was like nothing but a set of timed explosions. I can still imagine the troubled faces of my pacifist seminarian friends, politely shaking hands with an ordained minister and asking themselves, silently, if this quiet woman in her Air Force uniform was friend or foe.

Core beliefs

The military, like Catholicism, feeds upon doctrine. In both institutions, a set of core beliefs is illuminated by a catechism of Big Questions: Who are we? What is our purpose? What are we doing, and why? Both institutions can be said to focus on the future--whether anticipating conflict or waiting in joyful hope--while constantly looking backward for answers, into history and tradition, Reeking the guidance of a reliable paradigm.

Catholic thought regarding war arose from the church's most influential doctrinal architects, Sts. Augustine and Thomas Aquinas. Catholic and Protestant theologians, as well as most contemporary politicians, have yet to escape the reach of their reasoning. Augustine, ever mindful of the greater good, tried establishing "the preservation of peace" as guiding criteria for engaging in armed conflict, though the means of achieving that peace could prove to be morally hazardous. Aquinas, ever mindful of root causes, expanded upon his predecessor by means of an appeal to logic: Authority and intention must be demonstrably "just" in order for the conflict to claim legitimacy in the first place. Legitimacy, in time, became the West's ethical standard.

"The interesting thing about the just war theory," said Timothy Challans, seated at a plastic-topped table in a noontime diner, "is that right now, and I mean during this indefinite 'war on terror,' the theory is so flexible that people can get anything out of it that they put into it." He sits back in his chair and pushes away his untouched hamburger. "When a theory is used like this, when it generates so many inconsistent, contradictory judgments, maybe it's time to ask the question whether or not there's something simply wrong with just war theory."