Chaplain tells solidiers in Iraq that their faith makes them bulletproof

[Classical_Liberal]

The soldiers of the 1st Battalion, 22nd Regiment swear they have divine protection and say the easiest place to be attacked is in what they call "RPG alley.......

For the convoy riders, their success is thanks to God.

The soldiers often explain they overcome their fear on patrol by reciting their officer's refrain: "We are immortal until God decides otherwise."

Russell, a 40-year-old teetotaller from Oklahoma with five children, strums hymns on a guitar before a sortie and reminds his men nobody has been wounded on one of his convoys.

A letter from his eight-year-old daughter inspires the commander. "Dear Dad, hope you kill the bad guys. Love, Patricia."

But it is his unswerving faith that drives him through RPG alley. "I truly believe we are protected by God," he said.

Russell, like all the soldiers, says he respects the Muslims of Iraq and that his fight is only against the guerrillas.

His own conviction has been fortified by two episodes when rocket-propelled grenades slammed into vehicles in his battalion.

One failed to blow up when it hit a stack of water bottles, which wrecked the grenade's activation device. The second barrelled between two rows of soldiers sitting opposite each other and flew out the other side of their vehicle.

The chaplain of the battalion, whose official motto is "Regulars by God," reinforces the unit's conviction that God is on their side, seeing the war in the same way President Bush has presented it: good versus evil.

Captain Xuan Tran, a Vietnam refugee distributes books entitled "Bullet-proof Faith" and thanks God for protecting the unit at Sunday service sermons......

"We are fighting darkness here, we are fighting the devil," he said. But not all the battalion's soldiers are believers.....



U.S. Troops Run RPG Gauntlet with Guns and God

[wtmusic]

1. Though God makes them bulletproof

no one goes out without their Kevlar.

Does that demonstrate a lack of faith?

[eleny]

2. Does he handle snakes, too?

[neebob]

3. Holy crap! nt

[Paranoid_Portlander]

6. That's not just a figure of speech.

The Divine Protection really is holy. And it really is crap.

[htuttle]

4. Does that mean that those who've been killed or wounded so far...

...were by definition 'without God's grace'? Of course it does.

F*cking Calvinists...everywhere you look in this country...:eyes:

My question remains: Who Would Jesus Bomb?

[Classical_Liberal]

5. Not many Calvinist say that to soldiers, today

New England Calvinist believed things like this because Science hadn't caught on yet. The religious right aren't Calvinists. They are something other than Christian entirely. They are just a way to brainwash poor people into serving republicans. There have been many good christians killed in wars.

[TolstoyAndy]

7. Iraqis are the devil??

Are these people insane?!

I want our folks to come back alive, but at the cost of making them into jihiadis?

What happens when some Bush 2012 demagogue wants to convince them they are doing Dog's work when they kill people at an opposing party's convention?

Not to mention - how would we act if a Muslim group in Iraq was talking about their faith making them bulletproof?

Would we respect that as "their belief" and just accept it?
I submit: No, we wouldn't, and we would call them names like "primitive animals" and "religiously-insane killing machines".

But actually, we don't have to hypothesize about "how would we react" - we have a not-too-cold-case from ?1896? when the original inhabitants in South Dakota held a "ghost dance" uprising. The dance was going to make them immune to our bullets.

In China, the Boxer rebellion was a similar case.

Did we respect the people rebelling against white power then?
Did we say, oh, that's just holy soldiers going out to do their God's duty?

Hell, no - we called them primitive thugs.

Ladies and Gents - these are scared guys who didn't think they'd be sent to Vietnam. Desperate people will believe crazy things.

What's going to happen the first time this unit gets somebody hurt or killed? Can you say, crisis of faith causing possible mental illness?