The Chopper Chaplains

Ever since Bunker Hill, the man behind the man behind the gun has carried a Bible, comforted the wounded and prayed for the dead. Matching the U.S. military buildup in Viet Nam, the armed forces now have 274 chaplains on duty there and are steadily recruiting more.

Viet Nam is a new kind of war, and new also is the chaplain's method of ministering to it. Since U.S. troops are so widely scattered, chaplains have be come airborne circuit riders. "It's now a matter of riding helicopters and going where the troops are," says Major General Charles E. Brown, a Methodist minister who is the Army's top chaplain. "We used to hold three or four or maybe ten services a week. Now our chaplains are saying services in the combat area to at least ten and sometimes as many as 50 separate detachments of soldiers."

Constant Fear. By no means does every soldier get to church on Sunday --nor do all of them want to go. "I don't believe for one minute that old saw about there being no atheists in foxholes," says Chaplain (Major) Frank Vavrin. Only about 17% of U.S. troops in Viet Nam regularly attend services on an average Sunday--35,000 men at 1,000 services. Chaplains estimate that more than 60% of the soldiers never go at all. One reason for the low attendance, suggests Air Force Captain Robert Cortez, is that the Viet Nam war is considerably less deadly than World War II, in which he saw combat duty in the Navy. Then, he says, "there was constant fear in so many cases--sitting all alone in a foxhole getting shelled, or on a rolling ship scanning the sky for kamikazes. The fear was there and it made you think of God. Here, relatively few guys are confronted with death every day."

While most of the troops in Viet Nam may be indifferent to churchgoing, they nonetheless have a high respect for the churchmen who share the dangers of War with a quiet heroism that wins affection and awe rather than medals. One such chaplain is Lutheran Hugh Lecky, 34, a "helipadre" who last summer rode a chopper to Ba Gia, a remote outpost that was under Viet Cong attack. With a chaplain's kit on his left hip and a medical corpsman's bag on his right, Lecky ministered to a dying helicopter pilot, then turned to helping others--even though he was wounded by a mortar shell.

Something Special. Still another clerical hero is Captain James Hutchens, 31, a Church of the Brethren chaplain who at his own request was reassigned from an engineering unit to the combat-tested 1st Battalion of the 173rd Air borne. On a patrol one day last November, Hutchens' company walked into a Viet Cong ambush. Although crippled by a bullet wound in his thigh, Hutchens helped two rescue patrols bring the company's wounded back to safety, comforted the sick for 22 hours until engineers could hack out a landing zone large enough for medical evacuation choppers. After a month in a Saigon hospital, Hutchens talked his way back into duty with the 173rd; in January, two weeks after his return, Hutchens led another rescue patrol that brought a G.I. back to safety under Viet Cong fire. Understandably, Hutchens is something special to the men of the 173rd, who flock to his services. "I can't talk about him," says one G.I. in the unit. "You just wouldn't understand. You haven't been with us."

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