by Jeff Sharlet
But I lacked that courage. I thought of my conversation with Hunter. At what point, I’d asked him, are you giving cover? At what point was I?
Bahati had taken up another matter. This was a friendly lunch, and we should not limit ourselves to the problem of homosexuality; we should all get to know one another, exchange views. Our new topic was a media regulation bill being considered in Parliament that would require Ugandan media organizations to be evaluated for “values” and licensed anew on a yearly basis. We discussed it civilly, debating its pros and cons.
Robert was opposed. He saw it as one more vestige of democracy slipping away from Uganda, the end of a semi-free press. Semi-free? That meant the kind where the worst he had feared for our visit this afternoon was perhaps a brief detention, some bribes required for policemen, and even that had not transpired—we had been welcomed. But the bill, Robert thought, would end all that because if it passed he would never get to be a journalist at all. The Bahatis of Uganda would make that decision for him.
Bahati saw it differently. He was an accountant, and every year he paid dues to professional associations in Uganda and the United Kingdom. He took professional development courses. You could do business with him and depend on certain standards. Should Robert be held any less accountable?
“The issue is,” Bahati said, thoughtfully trying to see it from Robert’s perspective, “Will government exploit this power to suppress the media?” A valid concern. But not to worry. Parliament would establish an independent tribunal. Top men, reasonable men, who would hear appeals. Did Robert not trust him?
Robert laughed, incredulous; but he could see it was no longer wise to speak plainly.
Bahati laughed, too, glad for that recognition of their common ground.
“What is important, Robert, is for us not to fear to sleep because we will dream bad dreams. Eh?”
Robert looked sick.
Me, I thought we were still being civil. “I don’t understand, David.”
Robert did. “Honorable,” he said. “Honorable.” But that was all.
There was a pause between the two men, and in the space between them, as I observed the conversation instead of occupying one side, I suddenly grasped the nature of the recognition Bahati demanded. It was the same as at C Street in America; the same as Coburn in Beirut, Inhofe in Nigeria. He was asking us to trust his good intentions. He would be our night watchman.
“You see?” Bahati said, turning back to me. He waved a few fingers at Robert. “They fear to go to sleep because they fear bad dreams.” As if they had a choice. God had already decided for us. That’s what Bahati had learned from the Family. Not religion or law but love, trust, sleep, the killing to come like a dream.
A servant appeared, her eyes downcast, to summon Honorable and his guests to the dining room. Our meal was prepared, the table set.
5
THE WAR
STAFF SERGEANT Jeffery Humphrey woke at 7:00 AM. Easter in Iraq, he thought, and then put the holiday out of his mind. He and his squad of nine men, part of the 1/26 Infantry of the 1st Infantry Division, were assigned to a Special Forces compound in Samarra. Although Humphrey was a combat veteran of Kosovo and Iraq, the men to whom he was detailed, the Tenth Special Forces Group, didn’t speak much to grunts like him. They called themselves the “Faith element,” but they didn’t talk religion, which was fine with Humphrey. Muslim hearts and minds wouldn’t be won by an army proclaiming another religion.
Humphrey’s first duty that Easter Sunday 2004 was to make sure the roof watch was in place: a machine gunner, a soldier with a squad automatic weapon, or SAW (a gas-powered automatic rifle on a bipod), and another man armed with a submachine gun on loan from Special Forces. Together with two Bradley fighting vehicles on the ground and snipers on another roof, they covered the perimeter of the compound, a former elementary school overlooking the Tigris River.
Early that morning a unit from the 109th National Guard Infantry dropped off their morning chow. With it came a holiday special—a video of Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ and a chaplain to sing the film’s praises, a gory cinematic sermon for an Easter at war. Humphrey ducked into the chow room to check it out. “It was the part where they’re killing Jesus, which is, I guess, pretty much the whole movie. Kind of turned my stomach.” Humphrey considered himself a Pagan—a conviction he kept to himself after too many encounters with superiors who told him he served in the armed forces of a Christian nation—but he liked Jesus, too, and he couldn’t understand why the Faith element seemed to take so much pleasure in watching their savior being tortured. He decided he’d rather burn trash.
He was returning from a run to the garbage pit when the 109th came barreling back. Their five-ton (a supersized armored pickup) was rolling on rims, its tires flat and flapping and spewing greasy black flames. “Came in on two wheels,” remembers one of Humphrey’s men, a machine gunner. On the ground behind it were more men from the 109th, laying down fire with their M4s. Humphrey raced toward the truck as his shooters on the roof opened up, their big guns thumping above him. When he climbed into the back, the stink was overwhelming. He reached down to grab a rifle covered in blood; his hand came up wet with brain.
The rest of that Easter was spent under siege, as insurgents held off Bravo Company at a bridge across the Tigris and ammunition ran low. “We were at 100 percent. Everybody and anybody able to fight is on the roof.” But down in the day room, The Passion kept playing for exhausted men, fake blood flayed off a fake Jesus for hours on end. “They must have had it on repeat.”
As dusk fell, the men prepared four Bradley fighting vehicles for a “run and gun” to draw fire away from the compound. Humphrey headed down from the roof for a briefing. He found his lieutenant, John D. DeGiulio, with a couple of sergeants, snickering like schoolboys. Somebody had commissioned the Special Forces interpreter, an Iraqi from Texas, to paint a legend in giant red Arabic script across the armor of one of the Bradleys.
“What’s it mean?” asked Humphrey.
“Jesus killed Muhammad,” one of the men said. The soldiers guffawed. JESUS KILLED MUHAMMAD was about to cruise into the Iraqi night.
The Bradley, a tracked “tank killer” armed with a cannon and missiles—to most eyes, indistinguishable from a tank—rolled out. Instead of taking the fight to the enemy, the men would invite every devout Iraqi to join the battle. Meanwhile, the interpreter took to the roof, bullhorn in hand. The sun was setting. Humphrey heard the keen of the call to prayer, the crackle of the bullhorn, the interpreter answering—in Arabic, then English for the troops. “Muhammad was a pedophile!” A Special Forces officer, “a big, tall, blond grinning type,” says Humphrey, stood next to the translator. “Go on,” the officer told the Iraqi. “Keep it going.”
“Jesus killed Muhammad!” chanted the translator. A head emerged from a window to answer, somebody took a shot at the Iraqi who was holding the bullhorn, and the Special Forces man directed a response with an Mk 19 grenade launcher. “Boom,” says Humphrey. The head and the window and the wall around it disappeared.
“Jesus killed Muhammad!” Another head, another shot; boom. “Jesus killed Muhammad!” Boom. In the distance Humphrey heard the static of AK fire and the thud of rocket-propelled grenades. He saw a rolling rattle of light that looked like a firefight on wheels. There couldn’t be that many insurgents in Samarra, Humphrey thought. He heard Lt. DeGiulio reporting in from the Bradley’s cabin, opening up on every doorway that popped off a round, responding to rifle fire—every Iraqi household was allowed one gun—with 25 mm shells powerful enough to smash straight through a front door and the back door behind it. Lt. DeGiulio was on a mission. “Each time I go into combat I get closer to God,” he’d tell me.
Humphrey was stunned. He’d been blown off a tower in Kosovo and seen action in the drug war, but he’d never witnessed a maneuver so fundamentally stupid.
The men on the roof thought otherwise. To them the lieutenant was a hero, a kamikaze on a dea
th mission to bring Iraqis the American news:
JESUS KILLED MUHAMMAD
When Barack Obama moved into the Oval Office in 2009, he inherited a military not just drained by a two-front war in the Middle East but fighting a third battle on the home front, a subtle civil war over its own soul. On one side are the majority of military personnel, professionals who, regardless of their faith or lack thereof, simply want to get their jobs done; on the other is a small but powerful movement of spiritual warriors concentrated within the officer corps.
There’s Maj. Gen. Johnny A. Weida, who, as commander of Squadron Officer College, at Maxwell-Gunter Air Force Base, created an evangelical code for subordinates: whenever Weida said “air power,” they were to respond, “Rock, sir!”—a reference to Matthew 7:25. Weida took the code with him when he was promoted to commandant at the United States Air Force Academy, where he turned its ostensibly ecumenical National Day of Prayer, an event derived from the Family’s Prayer Breakfast, into an explicitly Christian consecration of the academy.
There’s Lt. Gen. Robert L. Van Antwerp Jr., who lent his army uniform to the Christian cause, in direct violation of the Department of Defense regulations. He did it first for a Trinity Broadcasting Network tribute to Christian soldiers, Red, White and Blue Spectacular. The second time was at a Billy Graham rally, televised around the world on the Armed Forces Network, at which he declared the baptisms of seven hundred soldiers under his command proof of the Lord’s plan to “raise up a godly army.”
There’s Maj. Gen. Robert Caslen, who, in 2007, was found by a Pentagon inspector general’s report to have violated military ethics by appearing in uniform in the Christian Embassy’s promotional video. Caslen was promoted to commandant of West Point. Cadets say he infused the academy with religiosity, preaching his faith at mandatory events and declaring the future officers “God’s children.” “I feel like I’m back in church in the front pews,” Steve Warner, a top-ranked senior cadet, told me. “It’s like Bible school.”
For his work at the Air Force Academy, Weida received a second star; Van Antwerp is army chief of engineers. And Caslen is on a fast track: in 2008, the secretary of the army, Pete Geren, also featured in the Christian Embassy video, bumped Caslen up yet again, awarding his brother in Christ one of the army’s ten division commands, that of the 25th Infantry, Tropic Lightning, at Hawaii’s Schofield Barracks. In his last speech at the academy, Caslen advised the next generation of officers to “draw your strength in the days ahead from your faith in God.” In 2010, he was promoted again, to the command of the Combined Arms Center, responsible for doctrine development for the army.
What such men have fomented is a quiet coup within the armed forces: not of generals encroaching on civilian rule but of religious authority displacing the military’s once staunchly secular code. Not a conspiracy but a cultural transformation, achieved gradually through promotions and prayer meetings, with personal faith replacing protocol according to the genuinely best intentions of commanders who conflate God with country. They see themselves not as subversives but as spiritual warriors, “ambassadors for Christ in uniform,” according to Officers’ Christian Fellowship (OCF), which, with fifteen thousand members active at more than 80 percent of U.S. military bases, is the biggest fundamentalist group within the military. According to Campus Crusade’s Military Ministry, the wealthiest of the civilian fundamentalist organizations that “target” young officers, these men are “government paid missionaries.” Both groups have roots in the Family’s early days, but the military movements lack the Family’s subtlety—and its constraints. In the civilian world, the Family seeks invisibility; in the officer corps of the armed forces, secular men and women keep quiet about their beliefs. “It’s a fucking clown show,” says a three-star general on the wrong side of the divide. He’s afraid to put his name to his words lest his secular views dead-end his career.
Taken as a whole, the military is actually slightly less religious than the general population: 20 percent of the roughly 1.4 million active-duty members checked off a box that says “no religious preference,” compared to the 16.1 percent of Americans who describe themselves as “unaffiliated.” These ambivalent soldiers should not be confused with the actively irreligious, though—only half of 1 percent of the military accept the label “atheist” or “agnostic,” a number far lower than in the general population. (Jews are even scarcer, accounting for only one service member in three hundred; Muslims are just one in four hundred.) Around 22 percent, meanwhile, identify themselves as affiliated with evangelical or Pentecostal denominations. But that number is misleading, because it leaves out those among the traditional mainline denominations—about 7 percent of the military—who describe themselves as evangelical. Among the 19 percent of military members who are Roman Catholic, a small but vocal subset tends politically to affiliate with conservative evangelicals. And 20 percent of the military describe themselves simply as “Christian,” a category that encompasses both those who give God little thought and the many evangelicals who reject denominational affiliation as divisive of the body of Christ. “I don’t like ‘religion,’” Army Major Freddy Welborn, who goes by the MySpace handle “Ephesians 6 Warrior,” told me. “That’s what put my savior on the cross. The Pharisees.”
Within the fundamentalist elite of the officer corps, the best-organized group is Officers’ Christian Fellowship. With six magazines for military personnel of all ranks, conferences, retreats, missionary trips, three “major military education centers,” and countless small groups, OCF functions most effectively as a propaganda mill, grinding down religious difference in the name of a unity founded on the principle of us (the believers) versus them (everyone else). In a lecture titled “Fighting the War on Spiritual Terrorism,” offered on OCF’s website as a “resource,” Lt. Col. Greg E. Metzgar, of the army, explains that good Christian soldiers must always consider themselves behind enemy lines, even within the ranks; every unsaved member of the military is a potential agent of “spiritual terrorism.” The strategic question then becomes, says Metzgar, “How do we train our personnel to overcome unconventional spiritual warfare in a predominantly non-permissive environment?”
OCF’s answer lies in the ideas it shares with C Street. A manual by retired colonel Dick Kail, OCF director of leader development, declares the group’s interest in senior officers (lieutenant colonel or commander and above) as rooted in its mission to “claim and occupy territory for Jesus Christ within the military services.” It’s the how that most clearly echoes the ethos of C Street: Col. Kail encourages officers to follow the same “concentric circles” model of authority favored by the Family. At the heart of the first ring is God; the circle around him represents struggle for his authority over the armed forces. The next ring is family. Wives are advised to “adapt yourself to your husbands.” And then there is the military itself. Like the Family, OCF teaches that promotion to power is not the result of merit but God’s plan. Rank itself ultimately exists for the dissemination of His orders. But the road the Christian officer must walk is paralleled by a ditch on either side. To the left is “abuse of your authority.” Don’t worry about that one: “when you fall into the left ditch, at least people start talking about the proper relationship between the Christian faith and the military profession.” The real risk is on the right, the ditch of passive Christianity. “Those who hold senior positions in the U.S. Armed Forces will never have a neutral effect on their comrades-in-arms,” advises the guide. “Will your influence be godly, or will it be tainted by the values of this darkening world?”
OCF’s world has been “darkening” since it was founded, in 1943, as Officers’ Christian Union. But from its first days, the organization was as much about America’s growing power in the world as it was about providing spiritual solace to officers. OCF’s official history, More Than Conquerors, makes much of the ministry’s predecessor organization in the fading British Empire, conceived of following World War I as a spiritual antidote to
what officers feared would be the coming peace. Peace, that is, that would make men too soft to spread the gospel by force of arms. Founding general Hayes A. Kroner, a crisply alert Georgian with a black brush mustache, had married an aristocratic Englishwoman and adopted her manners while serving in China, and at early meetings of the group that would become OCF, he and several British advisers made certain that the tea was strong. Sipping alongside them were the C Streeters of the day, a group of congressmen organized by Abram Vereide: segregationist Democrats and the isolationist Republicans who’d been opposed to war with Germany. Kroner was an “ardent supporter” of Abram’s movement, according to Family documents, responsible for establishing prayer cells at West Point and Annapolis. He also brought an ulterior motive to the cause. Toward the end of the war, not long before he joined the Family’s board of directors, he told a committee investigating Pearl Harbor—he’d been head of Military Intelligence on December 7, 1941—that “religious societies” and missionaries were tools of the spymaster’s trade.
His successor was Lt. Gen. William K. Harrison, nationally famous as “the Bible-reading general” who negotiated the truce that ended the Korean War. Near the end of his life he declared that he had read the New Testament 280 times, achieving what one admirer described as a “mind programmed with God’s Word.” The Word that mattered to Harrison was Matthew 24:6, “wars and rumors of war.” Until the Second Coming, war is our natural state, preached the old soldier, to be accepted and even embraced in anticipation of Jesus Christ’s imminent, and most likely violent, return. In the 1980s, OCF modernized Harrison’s gospel of permanent war—the Family’s so-called Worldwide Spiritual Offensive, made material—as a doctrine of “Christian realism” with which to justify nuclear escalation. The “don’t ask, don’t tell” debates of the 1990s sidelined OCF into a losing fight with homosexuality, but the attacks of 9/11 reinvigorated the organization, nearly doubling it in size and provoking its most militant turn yet.