When he left for his second tour of duty as an Army chaplain in Iraq, Roger Benimoff noted in his journal: I am excited and I am scared. I am on fire for God He is my hope, strength, and focus. But not long after arriving in Iraq, the burdens of his job began to overwhelm him. Benimoff felt the pillar of strength he'd always relied on to hold him up-his faith in God-begin to crumble.

ROGER BENIMOFF was a chaplain in the U.S. Army from 2002 to 2008. He spent two tours of duty in Iraq and was a chaplain in residence at Walter Reed Army Medical Center. He is currently a chaplain at Methodist Hospitals of Dallas. He lives in Texas with his wife and two children.

EVE CONANT is a staff writer for Newsweek, covering the evangelical movement, politics, social issues, and health.

From the Hardcover edition.

IRAQ
Left Seat Ride	p. 1
Gearing Up	p. 18
Camping Out	p. 36
Ghost Town	p. 41
Camp Cappuccino	p. 52
Cold Fusion	p. 63
Comfort Zone	p. 82
Draining the Pond	p. 95
Crash Landing	p. 111
48 Hours	p. 124
Home
Runner's High	p. 131
Walter Reed	p. 149
Side Effects	p. 165
Trigger Points	p. 175
Homecoming	p. 195
Walking Wounded	p. 221
Grace	p. 229
Wounded Healer	p. 236
Communion	p. 248
Author's Note	p. 257
Roger Benimoff's Acknowledgments	p. 261
Eve Conant's Acknowledgments	p. 265
Reading Group Guide	p. 269
Table of Contents provided by Ingram. All Rights Reserved.

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1

Left seat ride

I am excited and I am scared. I am on fire for God . . .

—Army Chaplain Roger Benimoff just before start of his second deployment to Iraq

Maybe it was just another example of how war can warp your judgment, or at least how it warped mine. But I didn’t question the impossibility of leading a prayer for forty people in less than sixty seconds. Forty members of our senior command and staff had crammed into a yellow tent at our new base, Camp Sykes, a crumbling, former Iraqi airbase on the outskirts of the ancient city of Tal Afar. We were not in friendly territory.

Tucked into Iraq’s most northern corner, Tal Afar was an insurgent’s haven. With its dizzying labyrinth of alleyways and beehive housing blocs, the remote city was the perfect place to stockpile weapons from bordering Syria. Hidden in those alleys just 10 kilometers from us were hundreds, if not thousands, of AK-47s, rocket-propelled grenades (RPGs), improvised explosive devices, and antitank mines. Managing that arsenal was a growing army of technologically savvy Iraqi and foreign fighters who were, to put it mildly, displeased with our recent arrival.

First impressions always stick. I had one minute to assure these men and women, their metal chairs propped unevenly on the vinyl tent floor, that I was capable of being their spiritual and personal counselor for the next ten months. These were the people who made decisions that could spell life or death for the soldiers convoying “outside the wire” of our base and into Tal Afar. In the coming months it was likely some of these officers would be injured or killed, and we all knew it. If previous deployments were any guide, others might cave from emotional or mental stress and need to be airlifted out. There would be wives or husbands back home who would divorce them by satellite phone or e-mail. We all knew the stakes. We just didn’t know who would be lucky and who wouldn’t.

“Chaplain, let’s begin the meeting,” offered Lieutenant Colonel Harrison. He was the deputy commander of our regiment, in charge of northern operations as more than six thousand soldiers, with attached units, shifted north from Baghdad to Tal Afar to stamp out the growing insurgency here. This had all been so hastily put together; just two weeks earlier we were settling down close to Baghdad when suddenly we were sent up North. We hadn’t trained or planned for this region, and our base wasn’t yet equipped for the type of military offenses that would be asked of our soldiers in the coming months.

Nor were we prepared on the spiritual level. When operations were set up at Camp Sykes, we’d have thousands of soldiers but only four chaplains, three Protestant and one Catholic. I would be the only chaplain for my squadron of a thousand soldiers. For now, I was also the acting regimental chaplain until my superior, Chaplain David Causey, arrived in two weeks.

“Brave Rifles, Sir,” I replied to Harrison. That was our motto in the Third Armored Cavalry. When approaching another cavalry soldier, you had to say “Brave Rifles,” and the other had to respond with “Veterans.” That dated back to 1847 when Gen. Winfield Scott, rallying the troops during the capture of Mexico City exclaimed, “Brave Rifles! Veterans! You have been baptized in fire and blood and have come out steel.” Sitting there in that vinyl tent that April morning, I did not suspect that in the next ten months I would also be baptized in blood. But it would be the blood of others, and I would not come out like steel.

I did know that my tongue was dry and my palms were sweating, even if the brutally hot days when soldiers joked about the “dry” 120-degree heat were still months away. At thirty-two, I was one of the Army’s youngest chaplains, but after a short break in F

Excerpted from Faith under Fire: An Army Chaplain's Memoir by Eve Conant, Roger Benimoff
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