The Rev. Neal Clemens, a Catholic chaplain at Whiteman Air Force Base, was deployed to Iraq for six months, where he helped many airmen through hard times.

WHITEMAN AFB, Mo.--Virtually everyone in the country knows someone who has been deployed to the Middle East for some amount of time. Some have been sent multiple times. But people rarely think about members of the clergy being deployed with the troops.

The Rev. Neal Clemens, Catholic chaplain at Whiteman Air Force Base in Knob Noster, has recently returned from a six-month deployment to Iraq, where he lived with the military men and women and provided spiritual support to them in the midst of war.

“I was not so much there to ‘do’ religion, but to ‘support’ it,” Clemens said about his deployment. He did celebrate Mass and carry out other religious functions for Catholic members of the military, but he says a bigger part of his role was to provide psychological and spiritual guidance for them.

“I was there to take care of ‘the person,’” Clemens said. “That was my first priority.”

Clemens, 48, seems like a good person to provide that sort of support. An easygoing man with a constant smile on his face and bright, kind eyes, he speaks conversationally and punctuates many of his sentences with hearty laughter. It is obvious that Clemens is a social man who truly cares about the people around him and has a great respect for those in the military.

Leaving loved ones

“These people are the future of our country,” Clemens said with a serious note in his voice. He commented on the relatively low percentage of the American population that gets involved with the military to take care of the rest of the country. “They leave loved ones at home, but they leave them because they love them. They want the next generation to be safe.”

Clemens was born and raised in northern California, and he was first inspired to join the military by some of his parishioners when he was a priest in the Oakland area. Some members of his congregation were family members of people who lost their lives in the United Airlines Flight 93 crash in Pennsylvania on Sept. 11. One of the men who had stormed the cockpit to try to overcome the hijackers was a member of his church, too.

After Sept. 11, many of his parishioners were deployed to Iraq, and hearing the stories of what they went through over there made Clemens want to get involved with the troops.

“Being in the military was never on my list of things to do in life,” Clemens said. “I never imagined this, but I felt God was calling me to help.”

Clemens wrote a letter to the bishop of his diocese to get permission to become a military chaplain, and he said the bishop replied by saying, “If I told you ‘No,’ I wouldn’t be able to sleep at night.” There is a major shortage of Catholic chaplains in the military, given the large population of Catholic airmen and soldiers, so priests were “desperately” needed on active duty.

So, Clemens went through basic and Commissioned Officer Training (COT) in Moffett Airfield in Sunnyvale, Calif., and was later stationed at Whiteman AFB. The COT program is for professionals entering the military – doctors, lawyers and teachers, as well as chaplains – and since those people have degrees, they technically enter as officers in their professions.

Non-combatant

As a chaplain, Clemens is considered a non-combatant officer, said Sgt. Jason Barebo with Whiteman’s public affairs office. Clemens is not allowed to carry a weapon, and chaplains are not supposed to be shot at. “If he is clearly identified and he’s shot, it’s considered a crime of war,” Barebo said.

Being a member of the clergy also gave Clemens some special privileges. “I was able to cross boundaries that no one else could,” he said. “People could say things to me and know it would go no farther.” Clemens was immune from being subpoenaed to share information that any of the deployed military told him, so that he was a totally confidential outlet for the airmen to turn to.

Clemens’s deployment began in early January and he returned home in mid-July. He was sent to Ali Air Force Base in southern Iraq. All branches of the military were present there, international as well as U.S. troops. Clemens lived alongside the deployed airmen in the Air Force compound and acted as sort of a spiritual and emotional psychiatrist for them.

Clemens said the major struggle he helped the deployed men and women through was relationship strains with loved ones back home. Such problems seemed sharper for the younger airmen, he said, and he could see it worsen after they returned to Iraq after they had been home for their mid-tour leave. They had had to say goodbye to their families again to go back to Iraq.

“People would come talk to me about stuff like that, and I would walk into the room where people could communicate with their families back home and sometimes hear heated arguments between airmen and their families back home,” Clemens said, shaking his head. “It’s two different worlds, being deployed and being at home, and neither side can fully understand the other.”

Problems at home

The chaplain acknowledged the difficulties faced by spouses, children and parents of deployed military men and women, left home to deal with everyday life without their airmen and the worrying about his well-being and the pain of missing him. But trouble with home relationships just adds to the stresses the deployed military men and women face in a foreign and far-away country, a country that doesn’t want them there in the first place.

“No one from home can understand what they’re going through, even if they try to explain it to them,” Clemens said. He tried to act as sort of a “witness to home” for the troops. Besides the familiar religious services and psychological reassurement he provided, he was also simply a positive person from home who was there with them, sharing their experience. Clemens’s upbeat attitude likely boosted morale for the troops.

Relationship issues with those back home were not the only thing the airmen needed help with. They would also come to him for reassurance about the challenges of a military deployment.

“They are under a lot of stress, both physical stress and the mental stress of ‘Can I really handle this?’” Clemens said.

“I helped people find answers,” he said. “Most often, they had the answers themselves; I just listened to them and let them figure it out.”

Helping all

He was the only Catholic priest at Ali, so he provided counsel to all branches of the military. He joked that the Army tried to “kidnap” him, since there wasn’t another priest to offer spiritual leadership for the soldiers.

Another of Clemens’s roles as chaplain was, surprisingly enough, tour guide. The region is full of ancient history, so chaplains are in charge of giving tours to the people at the military base to help them understand and appreciate it.

“We were in Mesopotamia,” Clemens said. “This was the cradle of civilization. There was an ancient ziggurat [a pyramid-shaped place of worship] and 4,000-year-old buildings that included the home of Abraham, spoke about in the Bible.” In his olive fatigues with a cross patch on the right shoulder, he pulled a large Bible off a shelf and flipped to Genesis Ch. 11.

Clemens read some passages from Genesis about the ancient city of Ur and its inhabitants, the Chaldeans. Abraham came from this place, and this place is part of present-day Ali base. With his religious background, Clemens was able to add historical detail to his tours of the ancient ruins, a positive thing for the foreign troops, he believed, because it helped them appreciate Iraqi history and culture, fostering peaceful relations.

The most moving part of Clemens’s deployment, he said, was an honor ceremony he helped officiate for an airman who had died in a Humvee accident.

Somber respect

“They never, ever just place a casket on a plane,” Clemens said soberly. “Everyone showed such respect in sending him home. It was incredibly moving.”

That honor ceremony was the only one Clemens had to do. He didn’t necessarily feel scared over there, although the booms and sirens of Iraqi attacks frequently filled the air.

Clemens remembers watching the inauguration of President Obama on television, and hearing bombs go off,just as Obama was being sworn in.

“They must have been watching it, too,” he said, with a chuckle in his voice, “because they attacked right as he reached his hand for the Bible to take his presidential oath.”

No one was hurt, Clemens said, which is why he spoke of the attacks so lightheartedly. “As long as no one was hurt, it was sort of exciting to be attacked,” he said. He added an off-the-cuff remark that “the Iraqis had bad aim; they never really hit anything.”

Wake up call

He remembers being awakened by an attack at 3 a.m. once, and being annoyed that everyone’s sleep was disturbed. “That’s just rude,” the chaplain said, seriously.

Clemens told of how he and the troops just “grew attuned” to the attacks. He said that now when he hears a loud boom of some sort here in Missouri, he stops and straightens up alertly, then remembers, “Oh yeah, I’m home, it’s fine.”

“You live more intensely over there,” he said. “You’re trained to be so attentive to your surroundings, because you need to be.”

Clemens hopes the international military presence in Iraq will help the Iraqi people see a kinder view of the world. The U.S. troops hand out school supplies and provide medical care to the local people. Such giving and aid is different than the Iraqis’ harsh and often hostile world, Clemens said.

He enjoyed his deployment with the airmen, but he was glad to come back to the green grass and blue skies of the U.S.

Shades of amber

In the Iraqi desert, “Everything is a shade of amber, all the time,” he said. Blue sky showed only occasionally through all the dust and the desert’s heat.

After debriefing at Whiteman, Clemens returned to California for a few weeks, returning just in time to celebrate his mother’s 83rd birthday.

Because of the shortage of Catholic chaplains, a rough rotation of six-month deployments every two years has been set up for military priests. Clemens will likely be deployed again in January 2011.

But he doesn’t mind being deployed; after all, being able to provide spiritual and psychological counsel to the people who fight to protect the nation is the reason he joined the military.

“They’re all so heroic, the deployed,” Clemens said respectfully. “They are doing something powerful to make the world a better place. I just try to help the individual. If I can take care of the individuals, they can do their jobs better and take care of our country.”