Truck after truck. Mission after mission. The simple gesture was the same.

Before each vehicle left the security of Afghanistan’s Kandahar Air Base, Capt. Earl Weigelt — a chaplain with the Maine National Guard — touched them.

“I would put my hands on every vehicle that was going out on the convoy,” he said.

On his mind were safe returns and the grace of his God.

“I wasn’t shy,” Weigelt, a big, outdoorsy former police officer from Winslow, said. “I’d walk up to the nose of a truck  I would slap my hand on the truck, and I would put my head down. There would be no mistake. This dude’s praying.”

Sometimes, the soldiers glimpsed the cross on his uniform and laughed quietly, he said.

“I prayed for safety for the driver and the assistant driver and the men in the gun trucks,” he said.

He prayed hardest on nights like the one in July 2009.

Weigelt, an Advent Christian, believes a miracle happened that night.

It began with dread.

Though he didn’t go on missions with the men and women in the 286th Combat Support Sustainment Battalion, he carefully monitored their jobs.

Part of that was necessary for his work counseling soldiers.

“You get up very early in the morning,” he said. “You get chow. You go to the office.”

Outside his door, he’d put out an archery target — the figure of a deer he shipped from home — as a kind of shingle to let folks know he was in.

Soon he’d get a knock on the door.

“I need to talk with you, Chap,” a voice would say.

“It would not be uncommon to have half-a-dozen knocks on the door in a day,” Weigelt said.

Weigelt listened. Though he carefully protected the confidentiality of each person who talked with him, his job included serving as a kind of barometer for the morale and health of the battalion’s men and women. He submitted periodic “religious support estimates” to his commander.

And he ingratiated himself with the soldiers. During scarce off hours, he’d shoot hunting arrows and tie flies with the soldiers. 

“This is the way chaplains make inroads,” said Col. Valmore Vigue, who supervises Maine’s chaplains.

Weigelt calls it a “ministry of presence.”

The work demanded that he keep up with the soldiers’ military activities.

“I would go into the intel room, and I would study to get a feel for what a mission would be like,” he said.

He did that before the men and women left for a mission in July 2009 that would take them to a remote base.

“I had a bad feeling about it, too,” Weigelt said.

As always, he said goodbye in his own way.

“It became very important to me that they would see me prior to missions and that I would be the last dude that they would see when they left the compound, waving them off and wishing for the best and praying for them.” he said.

On July 29, he was rousted from his bunk with news that the men and women had come under a surprise attack.

“They were ambushed hardcore,” Weigelt said. “It was one of the biggest and longest firefights in that arena in that year and one of the biggest ones to date.”

The battle lasted nine hours, according to a U.S. Army press release.

“There were some half-a-dozen vehicles that were disabled by IEDs,” Weigelt said. “There were vehicles hit by rockets  That was the night we had half-a-dozen casualties that were medevaced from the battlefield.”

The Army news agency had its own story.

“Some insurgents used armor-piercing rounds,” the Joint Sustainment Command-Afghanistan Public Affairs reported. “Militants fired machine guns and assault rifles from nearby homes, the tree line or from dug-in positions on the mountain ridges. Although the militants were well-covered, many soldiers recalled the enemy had been close enough to see faces.”

That night, Weigelt accompanied the battalion commander to the forward base where the unit sought refuge.

“I was there were they came in directly from the battlefield,” Weigelt said.

Though several people were hurt — at least one severely — every member of the battalion returned alive.

 “We had rounds flying right by our heads and by our feet — maybe 6 inches off, everywhere when we were running to the medevac, and it’s a miracle that nobody got killed,” a private from Texas told the Army news. “It’s a miracle.”

The thanks returned to Weigelt, too.

“Soldier after soldier after soldier, when they saw me, would throw their arms around me and say, ‘Chaplain. This was a miracle. Thank God for the power of prayer’ or something along those lines,” Weigelt said. “It was uncanny how many folks said that.

“It was so brutal, it was so concerted and it was so well-executed that we should have had scores of soldiers killed and many injured, but they were not, by God’s grace, by virtue of their ability to respond.”

Sitting in his office in Augusta, Weigelt wept as he recalled the experience.

“I am by no means trying to claim anything, other than for my God’s sake on his behalf that he did answer prayer,” he said.

“It was after that battle, that whenever I would bump into soldiers prior to a convoy, they would say, ‘Make sure you get your hands onto my truck, Chappy. Make sure you get your hands onto my wrecker, Chappy.'”

And they spread the word.

Weigelt continued his prayers for the convoys for the remainder of his nine months in Afghanistan, ending in 2010.

He still heard snickers from new soldiers as he slapped the hood of a truck and bowed his head.

At least once, Weigelt also heard a voice stifle the laughter.

“That soldier was told, ‘You don’t want to laugh about that. You probably want chaplain to pray. You want all the prayers you can get, soldier,'” Weigelt said.

dhartill@sunjournal.com

Kandahar 286

The dust! Friggin’ dust! “It’s enough to make a preacher cuss!”

I mumble to no one in particular, picking my way across the yard.

And I must focus on my stepping, careful to not turn an ankle

on the fist-sized hardscrabble scattered underneath.

A slow-rolling MRAP squirts out a rock in passing, narrowly missing my shin;

grinning ground guide watching.

In the DFAC line — invariably right after a bus,

Blue Man Crue, a uniform ribbon bailing for the door;

smiling faces and acrid cigarette smoke trailing, laughter and fast voices.

“How badly do I really want lunch?” I ask, again, no one in particular

and decide that if I don’t brave the line I’ll snack myself silly

on Girl Scout Cookies and Pop Tarts and Saltwater Taffy.

“What will I do without the roar of aircraft?” C-130s, C-17s, Chinooks, Apaches and Blackhawks? Tornadoes lighting afterburner 50 feet off the deck, giving all of KAF a reality check?

“It’s an airfield, after all and we’re at war,” I remind myself as air power night shift

kicks into high gear at Oh Dark Thirty, skittering my half-empty Near Beer

or weird-sized can of Mountain Dew along the steel rail beside my rack.

And those Warrior Warthogs thumping out nighttime cannon music — Oh! But it warms my heart!

And the Jingles — those colorful, carnival, outright comical conveyances, sometimes staging

(oftentimes not) and so, much waited-for. Bearded drivers, frequently smiley, barefoot or booted,

rugs on the ground, rig-side, sipping chai with flatbread and goat.

“What Berries!” I say as I wave at them, convoy after convoy, “Driving thin-skinned whitetrucks

into who knows what, targets if they do, hungry families if they don’t —

trusting our warriors with their lives, and putting it all on the line.”

Yes, our Road Warriors — Mighty, precious brood of foul-mouthed, trash-talking, family-missing gems! Sixes numb from CONOP and mission brief, ringing for prayer in the Dome or out by the trucks

calling for Almighty protection — Ultimate Route Clearance — by Warring Angels who screw with the enemy in advance of their approach, causing their evil plans to fizzle or recoil upon themselves, “…and everybody says, Amen!” Music pounding from Battle Wagon cab, and Ma Deuce all headspaced

and timed — high fives and ass slaps, hugs and breakfast, armor and Kevlar, then “Let’s get it on!”

And they roll … Oh, Sweet God, bless ‘em all!

Unwinding time with Captain Black, Man O’ War, Gurkha

shooting the bull with the best of friends in the dusty dark.

Heavy aroma of Honduran or Dominican, or maybe Kentucky,

duking it out with horrible whiff from the West — “Poo Pond’s in rare form tonight.”

Alarm sounds and garbled voice mouths out a warning and we’re on the deck when the boom comes.

“Damn it! They made me break off my ash!”

Then it’s out to the airstrip at two in the morning, with a lump in my throat and a weight in my gut.

Big Bird settled solemn on tarmac — the ramp is down, and “Charleston” scrip’t on the tail.

Warriors from a host of nations marching and standing and lining the cordon

Facing movements, Colors, At Attention, then Rest. Spirit warrior has a say and a prayer.

Then on down they come, carrying brother, with flag smartly draped, and footsteps in unison.

Colors dip and salutes snap; some shoulders shake, and bitter tears fall. Then TAPS raises ramp

and we all bid farewell.

And so mark we the time — some in months, some in weeks, others in days (and some geeks in hours).

Thanksgiving’s coming followed on hard by Christmas and we all miss our loved ones —

our Sweethearts and Kids and our Mamas and Papas.

And some miss that ground, that so-sacred ground; those rivers and hills; those towns and both oceans.

But to keep it all safe, we count it an honor and we lean on each other and we’re all driving on,

looking forward to greetings and embraces and kisses and thankful that GOD has shed us His grace!

— Capt. Earl Weigelt

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