The Lessons Of A Little League Coach, A Navy Nurse And “Chaps”

There’s a problem – actually, many – in teetering on the edge of eighty and half-a-century as a priest: We tend to think of the now-grown folks we’ve worked with in counseling or as altar servers as “kids.” 

Amidst the ugliness of the recent presidential campaign and election, one “kid” – now married and a parent, an esteemed professional at a major research university, who’s dedicated himself to serving his community as a high school baseball coach – reached out searching for his personal response to the anger and vitriol. 

Our conversions were neither brief nor casual.

Days after the election, he posted the following on his Facebook account:  

“Like many, I try to keep my political and spiritual views to myself so as not to be incorrectly judged or misunderstood. It’s clear to me this will not be the popular opinion of many in my orbit, but it is what it is.

“As for politics and this election, it is my view this nation has lost its moral compass and placed blind faith in someone who won’t hesitate to exploit it in order to further his own agenda. Somehow, he’s been dubbed a ‘savior’ or the ‘divine vessel’ in which the Lord’s will is to be realized. I’ve seen scripture used by some, twisting messages, giving a pass to behaviors Jesus himself would likely have never embodied. And to draw comparison to characters in the Old Testament in my mind is short-sighted. Per scripture, Jesus came to bring the New Testament in which the lessons were to ultimately love God and love each other. Christianity was never the intention. But somehow Christianity has evolved to a place where it’s ok to disrespect, ostracize, and marginalize at any moment if the perception is that it advances God’s will. It’s my strong opinion that if there ever was a second coming, Jesus would say we’ve gotten the message all wrong.

“It's for this reason I do not subscribe to religion (although I was raised in the Catholic Church). I DO believe in a higher power. And if God is love, then that’s where we should be looking. Not to some political idol who’s found a way to manipulate the faith of others.

“I’m not saying that the other candidate was the perfect option either. But at the end of the day, if we are to judge on rhetoric and actions then the decision becomes clear. My vote was for someone who sounded much more like a Jesus, or someone who wishes to unify and lead with love. And in my vote was the hope of the future I’d want for my daughters. Kindness, civility, inclusiveness, and love.

“If the argument is ‘he tells it like it is… he’s honest’ then that’s absolute BS. Scripture s full of Jesus telling it like it is, and never once used hateful speech to get his message across. The words we say matter and the manner in which they are said matters. Again, nobody is perfect but we should be striving to live virtuously day after day. And in that pursuit is where we will see the best version of ourselves. For some that will be a challenge because it’s difficult to be honest with themselves.

“My hope is we start waking up, not as Christians or followers of other religions, but as humans recognizing that were put on this earth to work together with love leading the way.

“This is the world I wish for my family and children, and anyone who comes not my live searching for the same.” 

Teetering on the edge of eighty, I recognize that I’ve never “converted” anyone to my Faith (or Christianity). As the (no longer a “kid”) mature husband, father, professional, coach and genuine lover of baseball spoke about his struggles, I could offer but one encouragement: “Be good. Be kind. Be just.”

In response to his post, some people “defriended” him.

I… 

I am proud of the man this “kid” has become. I am humbled, honored and grateful to a gentle God for the privilege of calling him “my Friend.”

Never having met author, Marine, (New York and Jesuit) Regis High and Dartmouth College alum, Phil Klay, I can only guess at his reaction on learning that President Barrack Obama included his first novel, Missionaries, in his list of favorite books of 2020. While still at Dartmouth, Klay attended Marine Corps Officer Candidate School and was commissioned a second lieutenant upon his 2005 Dartmouth graduation. He served as a Public Affairs Officer in Iraq between January 2007 and February 2008.  

The Iraq experience colors much of Klay’s 2022 Uncertain Ground: Citizenship in an Age of Endless, Invisible War and his impressive canon of nonfiction, fiction and essays. His Iraq writings also serve to tell us both who we believe we are as a nation and, more importantly, who we can and should be.

Klay described the struggles of a surgical team when

“…a Marine arrived on base with severe wounds. He’d been shot by an enemy sniper, and the medical staff swarmed around his body, working frantically, skillfully, but it wasn’t enough. He died on the table.

“Normally, there’d be a moment of silence, of prayer, but the team got word that the man who killed this young Marine, the insurgent sniper, would be arriving a few minutes later. That dead Marine’s squadmates had engaged the sniper in a firefight, shot him a couple of times, patched him up, bandaged him, and called for a casualty evacuation to save the life of the man who’d killed their friend. 

“So he arrived at our base. And the medical staff members, still absorbing the blow of losing a Marine, got to work. They stabilized their enemy and pumped him full of American blood, donated from the “walking blood bank” of nearby Marines. The sniper lived. And then they put him on a helicopter to go to a hospital for follow-up care, and one of the navy nurses was assigned to be his flight nurse. He told me later of the strangeness of sitting in the back of a helicopter, watching over his enemy lying peacefully unconscious, doped up on painkillers, while he kept checking the sniper’s vitals, his blood pressure, his heartbeat, a heartbeat that was steady and strong thanks to the gift of blood from the Americans this insurgent would have liked to kill. 

“This wasn’t just a couple of Marines and sailors making the right decision. These weren’t acts of exceptional moral courage… This was standard policy, part of tradition stretching back to the Revolutionary War, when George Washington ordered every soldier in the Continental Army to sign a copy of rules intended to limit harm to civilians and ensure that their conduct respected what he called ‘the rights of humanity’ so that their restraint ‘justly secured to us the attachment of all good men.’ 

“From our founding we have made these kinds of moral demands of our soldiers. It starts with the oath they swear to support and defend the Constitution, an oath made not to a flag, or to a piece of ground, or to an ethnically distinct people, but to a set of principles established in our founding documents. An oath that demands a commitment to democracy, to liberty, to the rule of law, and to the self-evident equality of all men. 

“The Marines I knew fought, and some of them died, for these principles. That’s why those Marines were trained to care for their enemy. That’s why another Marine gave his own blood to an insurgent. Because America is an idea as much as a country, and so those acts defend America as surely as any act of violence, because they embody that idea. That nurse, in the quiet, alone with that insurgent, with no one looking as he cared for is patient. That was an act of war.

In his December 4, 2017 The American Scholar essay “Tales of War and Redemption,” Klay writes of United States Navy Commander (Chaplain) Patrick McLaughlin, who served with Marine Corps surgical shock trauma and mortuary affairs units in Iraq. (Immediately prior to Iraq, McLaughlin was the chaplain (2002 - 2005) at Camp David during the George W. Bush presidency.)

In his service with the surgical shock trauma (operating room – serving the most traumatically wounded) and mortuary teams, the Lutheran minister was present – praying - as medical teams fought to save the lives of American military, their Iraqi allies and enemies, and civilians. He was there – praying - when Marines prepared the bodies of their fellow Marines to be returned to their homeland and their families. 

Klay tells us:

“Given the amount of violence in Anbar Province at the time, this meant being witness to some pretty horrific things. The worst, for everybody, was seeing what war did to children.

“Military triage is a cold, logical process. If there’s no hope, you make the individual comfortable and move on to some other patient who might survive. But the doctors, who felt every loss keenly, would never just shove a dying person in a corner. They wanted someone to be there, caring for them until they passed. 

“This was especially true when it came to children, and it was this responsibility that Chaps [the term by which Chaplain McLaughlin was known] took upon himself. When there was nothing the doctors could do beyond providing morphine, Chaps McLaughlin used to hold kids in his arms and rock them gently as they died.

“At first, he did this standing, or on his knees, outside the hospital. The first child was small, maybe six or seven years old, in the throes of agonal breathing, three or four respirations a minute - 'ragged,’ Chaps described it to me years later in an email, ‘gasping, tiny chest heaving, lungs expanding as the mouth gulps air as though this breath is the very last and yet it’s not.’

“Chaps, a father of five, held that boy for an hour as he clung fiercely to life, his brains slowly seeping through his head, no family around to comfort him, the family unknown, perhaps dead. ‘When my nameless little boy died,’ Chaps wrote me, ‘I kissed his forehead.’

“For the second child, a three-year-old girl, her body tattered from an IED blast and half her face missing - a sight so awful that two of the medical staff, men long inured to every kind of injury, left the hospital to vomit outside - Chaps whispered calm words in her ear as a female corpsman, who had a daughter the same age, held her hand. It was after that girl passed that he asked the Seabees, a group of military engineers, to make him rocking chairs, ‘combat rocking chairs,’ the corpsmen called them, with which he could rock the dying children for as long as they held on to life.

“Over the course of his time in Iraq, Chaps McLaughlin would rock 11 children in those chairs. Eventually, before redeploying, he took the chairs to a unit bonfire, threw them in, and watched as the embers rose heavenward to, as he put it, ‘the children that once occupied them in my arms’”

A high school baseball coach, a Navy nurse, Phil Klay, George Washington, and a Navy chaplain have much to teach the American people.

If nothing else, through all that the coming year might bring, let us “Be good. Be kind. Be just.”