Chaplain Assistants

Chaplain Assistants

In the U.S. Army, Chaplain Assistants are enlisted personnel who assist the chaplains in their ministry to the troops.  At the battalion level one is usually in the rank of E4 and is considered a Specialist, thus referred to as SPC4.  There is no requirement for a chaplain’s assistant to be religious.  When enlisting, a person may request an M.O.S., Military Occupation Specialty, and if selected for that specialty they will go to that particular school for their Advanced Training following Basic Training.  In the case of chaplain assistants, they go to the Chaplain’s School for special training.  Obviously, some seek this M.O.S. because they feel that it will be easier than other jobs.  Hopefully one enters this specialty because he/she has an interest in religious matters, but it is not required nor are any questions asked about one’s spirituality. 

This fact leads to many interesting combinations of Unit Ministry Teams, U.M.T.s.  There may be a very spiritual chaplain with an assistant who is an agnostic or even an atheist.  Another team may be a chaplain who is not very concerned about spiritual matters, but his assistant is.  To complicate matters more, if one serves in a unit with women the Unit Ministry Team may have a male chaplain with a female assistant or vice versa.  With my twenty-three years in the military (both active duty and National Guard), I have had a number of assistants, both good and bad.

I was fortunate as a new chaplain at Ft. Riley, Kansas, to have as my first assistant a SPC4 Kieferdorf.  Kief, as he was called, had served two years in Germany and seemed to be well experienced.  He was matched up with me because he was indeed experienced and I was a newly appointed chaplain.  He had been reared attending the Christian Missionary Alliance Church and seemed genuinely interested in our ministry to the battalion.  We were assigned in late November to cover the First Infantry Battalion in the First Brigade (The Devil Brigade) of the Big Red One.  By the middle of December the entire battalion went to the field for a few days.  December in Kansas meant freezing weather.

During this, my very first field experience in the Army, I began to be concerned about Kief’s experience and ability.  His job was to get the Jeep and utility trailer from the motor pool, check all fluids, and load the trailer with our tent, camouflage netting, poles, small kerosene stove, and everything else needed for an extended time in the field during cold weather.  This he did, and we were loaded with our duffle bags and in line at the motor pool for our movement to the field.

After a very circular route which made the twelve miles to the field training area more like fifty miles we were assigned a spot to bivouac.  We were part of Headquarters Company, H.H.C., and were setting up within their perimeter.  Evidently, the battalion S3 had planned the movement so that each company would arrive at their field areas just before dark, so each section was under pressure to get tents and equipment set up ASAP.  “Good training” according to the First Sergeant.

We managed to get our tent set up using our flashlights but decided to wait until morning to set up the camouflage netting over the tent.  I asked Kief to go ahead and set up the stove since it was below freezing and we desperately needed to get warm.  He began to pull the little kerosene stove off the trailer whenever I heard him utter an expletive.  I asked him what was wrong, and he explained that he had failed to load the stove pipe.  Without the stove pipe to run from the stove through the roof of the tent there was no way to use the stove.  It was a cold night in more ways than one!

The next morning we managed to set up the camo net over our tent with the extension poles and were quite pleased with ourselves.  At 2100 hours that night, however, orders came for a night move.  Everything had to be taken down and loaded as the entire HHC was moving to another location.  Everything was done tactically by flashlights with the red lenses.  No white lights were allowed--the enemy could see white lights.  We managed the night move along with all the other sections, but it was well after midnight before we were set up again.

When involved in a field exercise--fighting the enemy with clear perimeters--one does not leave the field.  One trains as one would fight.  Going outside the perimeter could mean capture or death.  Looking back on the situation I should have and would now simply go to the HHC commander and tell him that we left the stove pipe back on main post and needed to go get it.  He probably would have given permission.  Then, however, being new to the unit neither Kief nor I wanted to admit to the commander that we left something behind.  Plus, by the time we discovered the stove pipe missing it was well after dark and neither of us could have found the way back in the dark (headlights in the field are not permitted.)  So we endured the entire field exercise without heat.  During the days we visited other sections in our company and in the other companies and got into tents with heat as much as possible.  Our battalion staff meetings were daily in a heated tent, but at night it was back to the below freezing temperature in our tent.

SPC4 Kieferdorf went with me when the entire battalion went to Fort Wainwright, Alaska, for thirty-one days in February.  Kief turned out to be a good assistant, but I always double-checked his work.  Wasn’t it President Reagan who said concerning the Soviets, “Trust, but verify.”  That was my motto with Kief!