This Really Ticks Me Off
I had to calm down a bit before I could report on this without scaring the cats: Atheist soldier claims harassment
It eventually came out in Iraq in 2007, when he was in a firefight. Hall was a gunner on a Humvee, which took several bullets in its protective shield. Afterward, his commander asked whether he believed in God, Hall said.
“I said, ‘No, but I believe in Plexiglas,”‘ Hall said. “I’ve never believed I was going to a happy place. You get one life. When I die, I’m worm food.”
The issue came to a head when, according to Hall, a superior officer, Maj. Freddy J. Welborn, threatened to bring charges against him for trying to hold a meeting of atheists in Iraq. Welborn has denied Hall’s allegations.
OK, one of the most disturbing things I’ve seen in the reports by embedded reporters is all of the prayer circles among the troops being led by NCOs and officers. You don’t discuss religion or politics in the military. It is in the DoD directives.
That is not to say that the military bans praying before a mission or saying grace at meals, it doesn’t, but it is supposed to be private, and it is not supposed led by people with rank, unless they are chaplains. The embedded reports were constantly showing organized evangelical prayer before and after missions, at meals, everywhere but the chapel.
Among the 65 guys in my basic training flight there were Catholics, Protestants, Mormons, a Sikh, a Muslim, 2 Jews, and several with “no religious preference”. The designation was on your dog tags, so the military would know how to bury you. You didn’t talk about it, but it came up. The Sikh had to make some major religious sacrifices to join the military and it wasn’t a popular decision with his family. The Muslim was a Nigerian who had tribal scar patterns incised in both cheeks. He and the two Jewish guys had a lot of trouble getting a meal they could eat in basic training and had to ask the rest of us what was in certain dishes.
You are a team, a unit, and that’s why you don’t discuss politics and religion. People are allowed to be different in those areas, and differences affect unit cohesion. When you interject religion into the unit, you weaken the unit. You listen to all the crap about unit cohesion when Congresscritters discuss women in the military and people being openly gay, well exactly which of the thousands of wars that humans have started was a result of those issues. If you want a war, religion has always been a reliable trigger.
I don’t know that Maj. Welborn acted as claimed, but based on what I’ve seen and read, I would have to say the “preponderance of evidence” is that he did.
13 comments
Well said, Bryan. I’ve been freaked out by these reports. Why on earth would we need a Christian military unless we were planing .. say.. a holy crusade into the center of the Islamic countries to try to start a conflagration that would trigger the rapture?
The problem is some of these people actually think like this and welcome the chance to kill heathens….
Amazing we haven’t learned anything from the past 2000 years. Just how many people have been brutalized and killed in the name of God?
I’m terrified that our military is becoming the modern day “Christian Crusaders.”
I’m so hoping we get a new President and Congresscritters who aren’t “hellbent” on bringing on Armegeddon.
I am a recently retired military chaplain. I have met hundreds of young men and women like SPC Hall. I would like to make two comments.
1. As I read this article, I do not read anything negative about SPC Hall. Everyone makes decisions about there faith, but faith is a growing thing. I am glad that I am not the person of faith that I was when I was in my early 20’s. I have changed and that is not unusual. Odds are that SPC Hall will change also. It is called growing. Actually, I see a good solid respectful faith. If I was Hall’s chaplain, I bet he would enjoy the conversations we would have.
2. I am not surprised by some of the reactions of people around him. Most people grab on to any faith they can find in combat. Because Hall is not doing that , it marks him as unusual. It would frighten people that he is not doing that. Don’t get me wrong, people’s reactions to Hall are wrong. But they are understandable. People who are in combat have elevated levels of everything – if you haven’t been there then don’t judge Hall OR his collegues.
I am anixious to see how this playes out. Hall has an absolute right to his beliefs and to live by his beliefs and so does everyone else even if it leads them to talk to Hall about their faith and his. Don’t read more into this than is actually there.
“Been There” – As someone of a “different” religion, I’ve “been there,” too, and I’m not “read[ing] more into this than is actually there.” I am sorry, but Bryan is right about this, and you are wrong.
I am not in the military, but I have been in work-related situations in which my supervisors insisted on discussing religion. Did tension result? You bet it did. Did “unit cohesion” suffer? No kidding. And my bosses weren’t even legal representatives of the U.S. government, as military commanding officers necessarily are.
My religion (no, I’m not an atheist) isn’t even that unusual in the United States, but I am not a Christian. And I am certain that allowing commanding officers to proselytize soldiers under battlefield conditions is not what our nation’s founders had in mind when they spoke of religious freedom. There is no freedom to impose your beliefs on someone else under the most stressful job-related conditions, especially if you are legally a representative of the government. The First Amendment means that, or it means nothing.
If Welborn did as he is alleged to have done, he is completely out of line. There are, indeed, atheists in (metaphorical) foxholes, and no commander has a right to make them talk about it.
Apparently my reference to basic wasn’t enough, “Been There”, so: I have a Vietnam Service Medal and an Armed Forces Expeditionary Medal. I’ve logged more take-offs than landings. I’ve kissed the bottom of fox holes and slit trenches as indirect fire was headed in my direction. I know what it’s like to have people actively trying to kill you. I know what it’s like have to walk very carefully through an area so you don’t pull a wire or step in the wrong place. I was very lucky, friends weren’t.
There is truth in Marx’s comment, “religion is the opium of the people,” because it does help some people deal with their pain and turmoil. I have no problem with that. But those people had better be watching my back, because that’s their job. If they are praying instead of watching, that is a problem that is going to get people killed. War is serious business that requires all of your attention.
When religion becomes an issue in a combat unit, you no longer have a unit and people are going to die because of it. That’s why there a military directives forbidding superiors of discussing it with their subordinates.
There are atheists in foxholes – that’s where a lot of people become atheists and no few become Quakers.
I’ve been putting off commenting, until I read your last comment above Bryan. As you know, I have been there too. And I agree with you. I do understand what “Been There” is saying also, but I think the comments are in the wrong context here. In over a year I spent trying to survive hell on Earth, I saw many loose faith completely and others suddenly find it. And I saw many, including myself, go from one state to the other and back again, though never the same again. I saw friends die in battle, and others suicide when it all became too much, some there, some after returning. I considered it. I wrote a poem after my tour about a good friend who was one of the ‘never mentioned’, a forward scout. The bravest of men who is usually the first to die.
Hall sounds like the perfect man to have at your back. No distractions and practical in the face of constant danger. I would rather go to war with a platoon of men like him than the moronic Major who will get good men killed. Australians KNOW a lot about intolerant fools like Welborn. Read our ANZAC history. We recently had ANZAC Day. Though all of the WW1 ANZAC veterans are now gone, we still remember in their honor. Because we want to ensure debacles like that NEVER happen again! The immortal words “Lest we forget!” are in every Australians psyche. America and other nations could do well to learn those lessons! I was so proud and pleased ANZAC day to see so many of the young generation participating and understanding what it’s all about. 🙂 It almost makes my year in hell worth it, that’s something I guess. 🙂
Gallipoli has always seemed like a re-run of the worst of the Crimean War. It was a bad idea from the start and it was only the bravery of those who dug in and persevered that prevented it from becoming even worse. The best thing about it would be that the experience shaped the D-Day landings – we now knew what wouldn’t work.
Other than a few encounters in unnamed places during the unpleasantness in Southeast Asia, I didn’t know much about the Australian military, and then I saw the movie version of Gallipoli which lead to Breaker Morant, The Light Horse, et al. Although movies, they made me reread some of my military histories looking for the connections, which existed, but only in passing. The ANZAC were usually included in “and others”, rather than addressed separately. After becoming familiar with units, then you can trace what they were doing and where.
It sort of makes sense that your guys backed our stupidity – your politicians seemed to get involved with the whacko leaders of other countries, while you don’t start any wars on your own.
Back to the main point. When you are responsible for the lives of those who serve under you, you end up with their problems as well as your own. There’s enough trouble to go around without introducing religion into the mix. You need people focused and aware. I don’t want to be out in boonies with people who aren’t concerned with dying because they are on their way to paradise. It’s hard enough getting them to shed their personal problems to concentrate on a mission, I don’t want to fight with their belief system. Our job was not to be noticed if at all possible, so you didn’t need people who vocalized, or played with objects, or played with their equipment, or did anything that prevented us from hearing others before they could notice us. That takes a unit, not a group of people.
http://www.hotkey.net.au/~marshalle/9RAR/imagine.htm
This sums up ANZAC. 🙂
The Spirit of ANZAC
Australia has never had a ‘Bill of Rights’. Until John Howard stole our nation and tried to sell us out to Bushland, we never needed one. We all had the ANZAC spirit, and understood what it meant to us all.
Australia has spent an inordinate amount of time fighting other people’s wars. Sometimes because it’s the right thing to do, sometime because it’s politically expedient or necessary (from a politician’s viewpoint of course), sometimes for other reasons. But few people really understand what we do and have done. How many know that Australian’s spent 11 years in Vietnam? We became involved in Aug ’62 and withdrew our last troops in June ’73 according to history. But the reality is that we were involved longer helping to clean up the mess in Laos and Cambodia after the Vietnam conflict was *officially* over. Of course, since many of those campaigns were UN ‘Peace Keeping Missions’, they don’t really count for many people. Some people do get it though. 🙂
Winning the heart and mind… yes. Seems a quint notion these days.
Remember that at the time of the Vietnam Conflict, Australia had a population of less then 20million. Yet we sent almost 61,000 people to serve in Vietnam. Our combat and support forces spent most of their time in the field. The Royal Australian Army was involved in some 260 official ops (Operations) from ’65 to 71. An impressive number. The RAAF and RAN (and others) were also involved in many ops. One example of time spent on ops: 3 Troop C Squadron 1 Armoured Regiment spent 274 days in the field, and traveled 2,900 kilometers during its tour in South Vietnam, in 1968.
For anyone interested:
A Brief History of the Australian Forces in Vietnam
As for why Australia became involved in the Vietnam war, suffice to say that the Australian commitment to Vietnam was largely dictated by political concerns and was therefore limited by the same concerns. The predominant theory of defence during the sixties was the containment of communism and “Forward Defence”. Both of these policies relied heavily on the presence of America in Southeast Asia combating the perceived Chinese threat. In Vietnam, this translated into the policy of supporting American military involvement and encouraging the continuation of this involvement until such time as China was sufficiently dissuaded from any further adventuring or until Australia could more capably defend itself.
Regarding ANZAC, maybe this will help:
ANZAC History
BTW Bryan, to be an ‘ANZAC’ is really a way of life, a way of living. To any Aussie or Kiwi who truly understands the ANZAC Spirit, we know that anyone can be an ANZAC, even non- Australians or New Zealander’s. 🙂
I think you would make a fine ANZAC. Thanks for everything, from all of us.
Cheers!
I guess no one bothered to notice that the Vietnamese and Chinese hate each other, and that the Soviets were the sponsors of North Vietnam and the reason I was involved. There was some real-world weapons testing going on and there was an interest. The Chinese and Khmer got along, but neither liked the Vietnamese.
There were so many different wars for different reasons going on at the same time as well as the various criminal activities that even a scorecard didn’t help. You would head for a “safe area” and hope the locals were still allies, but there were no guarantees.
Americans, in general, don’t know who our allies were in various “bush wars” around the world, and seriously doubt well have many available for the next problem after the Hedgemony.
It is going to be a long hard slog back to respectability. These goons have destroyed our credibility. If there high definition time lapse recordings of Syria building a reactor and making nuclear warheads, I wouldn’t be convinced if it was presented by anyone in the current administration.
I understand what you are saying. From an Aussie perspective though, it’s a bit complicated! LOL I have spoken to many Aussies recently, and many are angry at America, but at the same time, feel sad or sorry for Americans! 🙂 We understand that many, even a majority, of Americans hate what is happening to their one great and proud nation. We understand because of what Howard did to us. We don’t hate Americans, we despise what *America* has become. We are able to distinguish the people from the Nation (if that makes any sense). We believe you will get back on track, as we are. We despise what happened to out Nation too, and will work hard at fixing it. Your greatest problem that we see is that your system has become so complex and corruption so ingrained, that we don’t see how you can fix it! But, people with the ANZAC Spirit *ALWAYS* have hope and always find a way. 🙂
It will be a hard slog, but you do and will have friends. And Australia may be small in numbers, but we are huge in spirit and ability! 😉
We may not like *America*… but some of the individuals are OK! 😉 LOL
Cheer up mate! AS we say… ‘She’ll be right!’ 😀 Have faith in yourselves, that’s all you need! You were conned and your Nation was hijacked! You have a right to be royally pissed! SO, turn that into constructive energies and DO something about it! We did, you can. 🙂
You (Americans) don’t have the time or the right to be standing around feeling sorry for yourselves right now! 🙂
Cheers!
It wouldn’t be so bad if we politicians with some spine who were ready to fix things and get dirty cleaning up some of these messes. People need to go to jail as a warning to others that this will no longer be tolerated.
People aren’t as angry as they should be at what these jerks have done. They’ve been screwed over and can’t figure out their children and grandchildren have been robbed of their future because of these people in Washington. The Treasury was looted by these cretins and the money given out to friends and relatives.
It isn’t a “few bad apples” the whole damn orchard needs burning to prevent the spread of the disease.