March 11, 2011
By Pat McCaughan

The U.S. service men and women deployed to Afghanistan's austere Camp Leatherneck needed few reminders of mortality, ashes or death; instead Ash Wednesday services hoped to offer them "a little taste of home and a moment of sanctuary," according to the Rev. Rick Tiff, an Episcopal chaplain, from the Diocese of Los Angeles.

It was a moment "to be real with God, themselves and others … to help them get through their deployment, to offer them a spiritual resting place," said Tiff, who serves with the Naval Mobile Construction Battalion -3, in a March 9 telephone interview from Afghanistan.

At Camp Leatherneck, a 1,600-acre U.S. Marine Corps base located in southwestern Afghanistan's rugged Helmand Province, "there are no trees, just dust, gravel and sand. But it's protected because you can see for miles away if anyone's coming," he added.

Tiff is one of seven Episcopal chaplains – two of them women – serving in Afghanistan, "which is a relatively high number for any church, and especially the Episcopal Church," said the Rt. Rev. Jay Magness, bishop suffragan for armed services and federal ministries.

In total, the Episcopal Church has 60 active duty and 35-40 more reservist chaplains serving in the Far East, Germany and other posts throughout the world. It is Magness' goal, he said, to double the number of chaplains. (There were many more chaplains in the late 1990s and the early part of the last decade, he said.)

The challenge, Magness said, is to increase the number of Episcopal chaplains serving during a time when federal budget cuts are causing the military to downsize some of its service units, which decreases the number of chaplain positions, as well.

But, he added, the Episcopal Church has a reputation for providing some of the best trained chaplains who are better prepared to compete for the remaining, tougher-to-get chaplaincy positions.

Tiff, 41, a lieutenant who at four months is about halfway through his deployment to the camp, is among more than a dozen chaplains whose mission is "spiritual readiness. People are able to do their jobs because they are spiritually well. In a sense we offer people an opportunity to have spiritual wholeness."

Included among those jobs is developing infrastructure such as digging wells, steelworking, building roads, bridges and schools in the country. The camp is like a small city, composed of other battalions and conjoined with Britain's Camp Bastion, even including its own airport. Developed in 2008 by the U.S. Marine Corps, it offers engineering and construction support to the region and also employs civilian contract workers for laundry, food and various other services.

"This is not an easy environment," said Tiff, who was drawn to military chaplaincy by a desire to "really get into the trenches and meet young people where they're at, to bring the gospel out to where people are."

Some days he helicopters to troop locations or flies to other camps, including Camp Payne near the Pakistani border. Rarely does he travel overland by convoy because of the danger of IEDs – improvised explosive devices, he said.

"I hand out chocolate, candy, beef jerky," he said. "I get to know people. A lot are younger and are not used to talking to clergy or officers. I get to know them on an informal basis."

"On an average day I make a plan and it will be basically blown out of the water," added Tiff, who recently taught a class on suicide intervention and leads three regular weekly services and a Bible study.

It often involves worship in a tent and what he calls his "deck-plate" ministry of presence. "Deck plate means you're just getting out there where other people are, not in your office all day."

"I'm always feeling like I don't do enough of that, but people always tell me I'm never in my office. I think that's a good thing, that I'm not in my office."

He first got hooked on ministry of presence while living at the Episcopal Center at the University of South Florida as an undergraduate student, he said. "We'd put a table outside and try to engage people, saying we're the Episcopal Church. They walked right by us. But then we started to offer lemonade. And in the Florida sun, people came over and began to talk."

Overwhelmingly, he counsels those deployed, mostly 20-something men and women of diverse ethnicities, many of whom are away from home for the first time, he said.

"A lot of people are dealing with just being here, the struggle with also being a young person and being here and being in a job that is not necessarily ideal." In January, he logged about 80 counseling sessions. Already, this month he has had 25.

"Deployment strains relationships. I do a lot of marital counseling or helping people deal with very young marriages that are under strain, who don't have the life skills to handle it. Everything that's difficult in a marriage is compounded by this; if a couple doesn't have great communication skills, add eight months of not being around and you can see the situation."

But he added that it's important to realize "we have a lot of young men and women out here who are working probably on average 60 hours a week and who are working under very difficult conditions. We have a lot of people here who are working very hard and are making a sacrifice."

Anti-war sentiment rarely filters to the rank and file and there is "a general sense that what we're doing is effective but not necessarily impacting, if that makes sense," he said.

"There is a sense that the problems that exist in this country go pretty deep. People get blown up every day out here. We're dealing with issues of poverty; the people are not empowered. About 70 percent of the population is illiterate so religious extremism thrives."

Tiff said he couldn't respond to anti-war criticism except to say: "a lot of people here are just trying to do what they know how to do best. They're in a different place. A lot are just trying to get through deployment."

Which makes the Ash Wednesday services even more meaningful, he added. "We talked about how our faith is about learning to break down walls so that we can have reconciliation with God and others and our selves, to come to terms with our own limitations and frailty," he said. "There were a lot of people there I'd never seen before."

Episcopal News Service
The Rev. Pat McCaughan is a correspondent for the Episcopal News Service. She is based in Los Angeles. Lynette Wilson an editor/staff writer for Episcopal News Service, contributed to this report.