| | Benimoff wasn't supposed to be on the front lines. He was a chaplain with the Third Armored Cavalry Regiment, within a support squadron not designated for combat. But in Iraq, that distinction is easily lost. On Nov. 29 that first year, Benimoff was resting in his office when the headquarters troop commander rushed in to say a convoy had been ambushed. Benimoff raced to the hospital to meet the choppers; he helped identify two dead soldiers. He recalled a verse quoting God from Isaiah 54:10, which he had passed out to soldiers earlier in the week: Though the mountains be shaken and the hills be removed, yet my unfailing love for you will not be shaken nor my covenant of peace be removed. He continued to use that verse in sermons; it captured the soldier's sense of grief and his own belief in God's steadfast presence. But it didn't explain why bad things happen to good people, a question Benimoff would face again and again from the soldiers he served with—and from within himself.
Once back in safe territory at Fort Carson, Colo., Benimoff learned he would soon be deployed again. This time he asked to be placed with a combat maneuver squadron. "These are the guys that go in and kick down doors and drive tanks," says Benimoff. "I wanted to be there for them." He confided in his journal, however, that he was not sure he'd recovered yet from the deaths he endured during his first deployment. And he was terrified of getting killed.
He headed back to Iraq in February 2005, this time to Tall Afar. "It was a ghost town when we got there, no one went on the roads," he recalls. "There were decapitated bodies on the street." Benimoff often traveled in Bradley fighting vehicles or Abrams tanks to reach soldiers in small outposts. "I could go to one post and the next day the soldier there might be killed by a sniper," he says. He writes in March, "I feel that God is maturing and blessing me ... [This] is almost a monastic type of existence." Later that month he quotes to himself from Hebrews 11:1, What is faith? It is the confident assurance that what we hope for is going to happen.
Yet Iraq is a place that often kills hope. Soldiers come to him distraught as marriages fall apart. Others feel tricked by the military when their tours are extended. On April 20, he writes of a memorial service he just finished for a private first class. A week later a Bradley crew is badly shaken up after a roadside blast. On April 29, two soldiers are killed by an IED. "Already, I am repeating my pattern from [the first tour]: I am doing more memorial ceremonies than preaching ... I feel numb."
One day in May, snipers take aim at him and other soldiers on a hospital rooftop in Tall Afar. "The Army must be warping me," he writes, "because it was not a big deal to get shot at. Last time I was petrified." The adrenaline rush soon wears off; he writes that it is "hard for me to feel at all."
He's racked by contradiction. He is "getting to impact soldiers spiritually ... and personally as they go through this difficult time ... I am in the middle of history and I have a captive audience!" Yet looking back, he says, he could see that he was reaching a point "when your cup of grief gets full, you can't hear another horrible story." In a single two-week period there were four suicide bombings in the area he was stationed. He counseled his men on many questions he was struggling with himself. "They would ask me: if I'm a child of God, then why isn't God protecting me?" he says. "In the book of Job we see that God rains on the just and the unjust, but that's not always easy to accept. Some soldiers stop believing in God, others grow closer to him. Everything is accelerated in a war zone."
Soldiers would also feel hopeless because of domestic troubles "like when the water heater breaks at home and they can't help." In a June 19 entry, he writes of one of his men threatening to hurt himself to get home to a wife demanding a divorce. By this time, Benimoff's own wife is uncertain about what is happening to her husband, with whom she communicates by e-mail, instant message and hurried phone calls. "He would say some things that flew in the face of my own beliefs about God," Rebekah recalls. "Sometimes he would ask me: why does a loving God allow suicide bombers to attack civilians? We were both brought up with a picture of God that was different from the world he was seeing. But I was afraid he might turn away from God completely. The things he said didn't sound like something I wanted my husband to be saying. But after a while, I realized that he was having a crisis. So I said, 'OK, better to let him test than to tell him 20 reasons why he's wrong'."
As the months go on, there are more killings; more blood and shattered glass in the Humvees; and the suicide of an American soldier in another squadron. On Aug. 13, Benimoff writes, "I start the service in 45 minutes and I am really feeling 'out of it'." Two days later he admits to himself, "I don't have a desire to totally give myself to God. However, I am praying that God changes my desire."
By November, exhaustion sets in: "24 critical stress debriefings for over 300 soldiers and six memorial services later I am very tired. I have so much anger inside." Yet Benimoff has been offered a chance to join Walter Reed as a chaplain working with wounded outpatients. He is excited by the prospect, but daunted by his own misgivings. Flying home in January 2006, his group is met at the Bangor, Maine, airport by a group of veterans. They include a World War II vet who speaks to them of his joy and pride in liberating Jews from a concentration camp. Benimoff later admits in his journal, "I do not feel the same about what I have done but maybe I will feel different years from now."
As time goes by, though, he feels worse. He sees himself growing emotionally detached and begins taking anxiety medication. When the insomnia subsides, there are nightmares. When he's awake, he's hyper-vigilant. He can't stop the visions: flags draped on caskets, C130s lifting off on "hero flights" to take a fallen soldier home for burial. He finds solace in running, sometimes several times a day; he loses 30 pounds in six months. He forgets to eat. "I was back in the States," he says. "I thought everything was supposed to be fine, but it wasn't." He avoids public places and he avoids his faith. "I am not doing my readings and I don't care," he writes on Aug. 28. "I have been ruined." Three months later, he adds: "Have I wasted 10 years of my life? My God doesn't protect me and I feel vulnerable!"
Benimoff becomes distant to his wife and sons. "He wouldn't respond to the smallest things," says Rebekah. "I'd ask, 'Do you want a sandwich?' and he'd say, 'I can't talk about that right now.' ... It was hard to go through that time, and in a way, we're still figuring it out." Benimoff's fear of groups even made it hard for him to attend church. "We went to a megachurch one time, with 5,000 people, and we won't do that again," says Rebekah.
Benimoff's journal ends Jan. 22 of this year. The last lines read: "I do not want anything to do with God. I am sick of religion. It is a crutch for the weak ... We make God into what we need for the moment. I hate God. I hate all those who try to explain God when they really don't know." By late March, during his first interview with NEWSWEEK, he was recovering his faith but the pain had not subsided. "The symptoms are still there; this past year has been the most challenging of my life," he says. "But I have a new relationship with God. I tend to be much more blunt with him."
As part of his daily rounds at Walter Reed, Benimoff strolls the campus gardens or the lobbies where outpatient vets congregate. Some are on crutches, some walk with prosthetics and some are in wheelchairs. His job is to be there, to say hello and to see if they need someone to talk to. Benimoff even offers up his cell-phone number, and tells the vets they can call 24/7. He invites 22-year-old Army Specialist Brent Hendrix, a Southern Baptist, to talk. Hendrix lost his right leg, and suffered multiple other injuries when an IED hit his vehicle last June in Al Anbar province. He talks with Benimoff about NASCAR—and later about how there's no time to think of commandments like "Thou shalt not kill" when enemies are shooting at you. Army Sgt. Andrew Buchanan, 25, who lost part of his right heel in an IED blast in Baghdad, tells Benimoff he's not much of a believer—but that his brother's a born-again Christian. He shows Benimoff a medallion of Saint George that his mother gave him before he deployed, and they chat about patron saints.
The rounds make Benimoff feel a certain kinship. The patients talk about their spirituality, and they can discuss "the same issues I am dealing with—anger towards God and grief over loss," he says. He shares a verse that best describes where he is today with his faith, Psalm 40:1-2. I waited patiently for the Lord; he turned to me and heard my cry. He lifted me out of the slimy pit, out of the mud and mire; he set my feet on a rock and gave me a firm place to stand. After two deployments and his new mission serving the wounded from Iraq, anger and grief are daily companions. But, Benimoff says: "God gave me room to cry out as I flashed back to traumatic events and the soldiers my unit lost in those two deployments. He allowed me to slowly move through the mud and the mire." Now Benimoff is trying to look forward as much as back. "It's messy, it's not a pretty ending," he says. "I cannot tie a pretty bow on my story and I don't believe that God would want me to." He thinks of the soldiers whose lives were lost, but also of those who survived. He hopes that the verse of Psalm 40—I waited patiently for the Lord—which is so meaningful to him, might help to lift the spirits of other soldiers who fall into the same slimy pit.
With Dan Ephron, Babak Dehghanpisheh and Rod Nordland
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