| Welcome Padre. I could probably recall a few stories about the Chaplains that I have had the good fortune to have met. Many of the stories are not of the funny variety but there are a couple that still make me smile.
One is about a young Chaplain that was assigned to my unit in Vietnam. He happened to come from a home town near mine so we had some things in common and we hit it off right away. Usually, we didn't often see Chaplains around much out in the remote firebases. This Chaplain was different though, he'd be out there more often than any I had seen any before him. I think that because we didn't see Chaplains very often, we considered them just another rear eschelon type and were kind of suspicious when they did show.
I was assigned to the heavy mortars at the time and we would regularly come under enemy fire and our outer perimeter was being compromised almost nightly. As a result, everyone was practising noise and light discipline. In the mortar platoon we would practice our "silent fire missions" where none of the commands were verbal. We would practise this during the day so that we'd be proficient at night.
Anyway, this new Chaplain would come around and seek me out to talk to. He'd ask about everyone in the platoon and I would direct him to anyone who needed to talk to him.
One day while we were doing one of those silent fire missions, he showed up. He sought me out and started to talk to me. He had his back to the guns when the signal was given for the mission to start. I signaled him to be silent and tried to signal him that the mission was about to commence. He wasn't used to the signals I guess and when the four guns went off he jumped so high that he lost his balance, slammed into me and I tried to catch him but he ended up landing in some paint that we had around and was virtually covered with it. After finding that he was physically OK, we laughed so hard. In fact the whole platoon laughed. From that day on he was "Padre Paint" and he became very well liked. The guys looked forward to his services and would ask for him when he couldn't come to our AO.
Unfortunately Padre Paint was killed when his chopper was downed while he was on his way to another fire base. After I came home, I looked up his family and told them how well liked he was. We all had a laugh at how he got his nickname. |