Reprinted from the National Conference on Ministry to the Armed Forces newsletter

They were supposed to be spending a day leading Mass, talking to soldiers about love and marriage, readying for their own deployment. Instead, the military chaplains of Fort Hood found themselves on the afternoon of Nov. 5 scrambling to the front lines of the worst shooting massacre on a military base in U.S. history.

Thirteen people were killed and more than 30 wounded. Authorities charged Maj. Nidal Hasan with murder.

As some of the first to arrive on the chaotic scene that day, the chaplains counseled dazed, injured soldiers, comforted witnesses and prayed over the bullet-ridden bodies of the slain. Now they are being asked to lead the healing process. The pace and success at which they counsel the wounded and their families will determine how quickly the post returns to normalcy, said Ralph Gauer, past president of the local chapter of the Association of the United States Army, a group that counsels military families through tragedy.
“Chaplains right now represent the glue that holds an awful lot of units together,” Gauer said. “But they have to come to grip(s) with it themselves. They have to try to understand what they saw themselves as they explain it others.”

There are 75 chaplains at Fort Hood, most of them assigned to units, said Lt. Col. Keith Goode, deputy 3rd Corps chaplain. Ten more chaplains have been flown into Fort Hood, including an imam and a rabbi, to help with the counseling. Untangling their pain will be challenging, said Lt. Col. Ira Houck, 56, an Episcopal priest and chaplain for the III Corps who was one of the first on the scene. “We’ve been traumatized, too,” he said. ‘Total chaos … pools of blood’

At first word of the shooting, Col. Edward McCabe, the highest-ranking Catholic chaplain on the post, broke up a meeting and sped over to the Carl R. Darnall Army Medical Center, where staffers were caring for about 15 of the wounded, he said. “Total chaos,” he said. “Everyone’s running around. There are pools of blood on the floor and on the walls and on the medical staff uniforms.”

While he was there, one of the wounded died, McCabe said. He said a short prayer and used his thumb to place prayer oils on the forehead of Lt. Col. Juanita L. Warman, 55, of the 1908th Medical Company. When he got to the nearby medical screening building where nine of the dead were taken, McCabe, who had done tours in Iraq and Afghanistan, started to shake. “You’re looking at all these bodies and blood,” he said. “But I couldn’t allow this display of evil to control me.”

The following evening, when his cellphone finally quieted, he poured himself a few extra snifters of cognac. “That helped,” he said.
Houck was the first chaplain to arrive at the Soldier Readiness Center. One woman asked how God could let this happen. “I said, ‘That’s not a question we’re going to answer here,’ ” Houck said. “What we need to answer is, ‘How do we get through this? How do we bring back life’s balance?’ ”

An officer asked Houck to bless the bodies of those killed inside the medical screening building. When he arrived, he recognized the faces of two of the slain men, Pfc. Aaron Nemelka, 19, and Michael Cahill, 62, a civilian contractor, who had helped him with his paperwork a week earlier. He said a small prayer from the doorway.

Houck returned to his house, knelt and prayed, then softly sang Amazing Grace and other hymns until sleep overcame him, he said. Having served 31 years as an ordained priest and 18 years in the military, Houck said his training kicked in, but the personal toll has been heavy.

“We’re all going to remember the people who died in that room,” he said.