Behind The Cloth

Behind the Cloth

John Britto

After two years in the Army, one of which spent in the war-torn jungles of Vietnam, thirty-year-old Isaiah Mason’s struggled to readjust to his rural hometown of Copper Creek, Texas. It was as if his return flight had landed on a different planet. Nothing looked or felt familiar.

During the first forty days, Isaiah detested everything about living among civilians. He avoided making small talk with his former friends and neighbors. He had forgotten how to be a loving husband, and he rejected everything he heard on the nightly news. But worst of all, he was failing to resume his sacred obligations as an ordained pastor—he couldn’t honestly reconnect with his close-knit congregation at Ebenezar AME Church.

Sitting at the oak desk in his home office, Isaiah was as rigid as a mannequin staring at his father’s thick, leatherbound bible. The soft cover was shiny, smooth, and soft from decades of constant use. Like thin threads of a brilliant rainbow, multicolored ribbons splayed out from pages marking favorites prayers and passages.

He was supposed to be writing his weekly sermon, but his mind wandered. The smallest distraction was enough for him to lose his concentration. A sound, a scent, a song on the radio, even a familiar prayer caused him to remember images from a far-away place—or too often, an ugly memory connected to war.

Ruth Mason, his wife of ten years, respected her husband’s privacy. But as a pastors’ wife, she assumed added responsibilities. It was not uncommon for her to listen and comment on his first drafts, or to make suggestions for potential topics for his sermons. And since his return from Vietnam, she began to pay closer attention to his changing moods.

She entered the office and walked behind him, wrapping her arms around his shoulders without saying a word. She leaned forward and placed her cheek on his waiting for him to respond. Their brief infrequent conversations about his time in Vietnam had been imprecise by mutual agreement. He didn’t volunteer anything. And she avoided asking for memories or about his nightmares—and more recently, his chronic lack of focus.

Isaiah placed his hand over his wife’s arm. “Looks like the house cleaning is finished. Do you have any ideas for my sermon?” he asked. “I can’t seem to come up with a suitable topic.”

Ruth walked around to the front of the desk and sat in one of the two leather chairs. “Actually, I do.” She placed her hands on her lap and cleared her throat. “I’ve been thinking about a before-and-after piece.” She didn’t speak for a long moment to gather her strength. “There are plenty of examples you could use.”

There was a pause. “I think I know where you’re going with this.” Isaiah nodded slightly but didn’t ask for clarification. Then, unexpectedly, he blurted, “This might be the best time for us to begin talking about my deployment.” He pushed back into his chair and said, “Okay, what do you want to know?”

“What was it like—being there—as a man of the cloth?” Ruth asked.

Isaiah didn’t answer. He leaned forward and carefully arranged the papers on his desk into neat stacks signaling an end to his writing—using the quiet to collect his thoughts before speaking. Looking up from the papers, he waited for a moment longer to consider his response.

“At thirty meters, Americans in uniform look the same. Cloth or not, everyone becomes a target in battle. Including chaplains. Soldiers live with risk every day. It’s the constant unknown that changes everything. The long periods of boredom punctuated by moments of sheer terror. We can see that far-away look in each other’s eyes. Every guy knows that a stupid mistake, the slightest loss of focus, even making a tiny sound unintentionally, could get them or their buddies killed. That’s a lot of stress on a young soldier.”

“People over here face stress, too.” Ruth uttered.

For a moment, Isaiah’s brow wrinkled, and his nostrils flared, but he remained quiet. “Yeah, I guess. But you don’t hear the distinct crack of an AK-47 in the produce section of the grocery store”

“I’m sorry, I just wanted to—"

“Yeah, I know. And now, many of us live with memories that haunt us. Some men fill that void with drugs or alcohol. Some gamble—some use all three in a hopeless attempt to find their own privacy.”

“You don’t.” Ruth then quickly added. “Do you?”

Isaiah shook his head. “I’m lucky—I know how to pray. But make no mistake, war changes everyone it touches, even me. I was numb when I left Vietnam.”

Ruth was stunned. “I don’t understand. You were a chaplain.”

“Most days, being a chaplain in-country demanded more than I could give. I didn’t exactly keep regular office hours over there. My uniform was my office—and it never closed. Every interaction with a soldier led to something deeper—more complex. Sometimes it was a simple request for a prayer, or they’d ask when my next service was—and almost always, I’d receive a quiet confession about their fear of killing another human being. When soldiers are in small groups, they laugh, joke, and pretend to be grizzled grown men. But privately, they’re scared.”

Isaiah inhaled deeply and exhaled slowly as if expelling demons. His words began to flow more easily.

“And I helped them write letters—a lot of letters. Not because they couldn’t write, but because at eighteen or nineteen years old, they didn’t know how to find the correct words to tell their mothers, fathers, and sweethearts, ‘Goodbye, I’m never coming home, I’m dead, please remember me.’”

Ruth gasped and covered her mouth.

“A lot of those kids asked me to keep their letter for them until they came back from patrol, or to mail them if anything happened. Many of those young men were Black, right from inner-city streets. A hundred days before landing in Da Nang, not one of them could find Vietnam on a map—even if you gave them three clues. They flew into in a war they didn’t understand, being fought in a place they never heard of, and were ordered to kill a people they had never seen before. But they trusted me to make sure their families found out what happened to them. I carried their letters—and now, I carry their memories.”

Isaiah lowered his head, pursed his lips, and closed his eyes as if he were trying to envision a faded memory. He sat quietly, searching his soul for a full minute before he spoke again.

“No one ever brings a chaplain good news—we’re supposed to heal souls, give hope, make sense of killing. And dying. For some—for too many—a chaplain’s face might be last earthly image they see before passing.”

Ruth’s heart beat rapidly, but she sat motionless and remained quiet. She listened as Isaiah unveiled memories—deep feelings about what he did, what he saw, what he couldn’t fathom about war, even now. “But you preached too, right?” she asked.

Isaiah’s voice was softer, almost muted. He spoke as if he wanted to share his innermost feelings but wasn’t sure that he could. After another deep sorrowful sigh, “No part of my job was easy—none of it—the letters, the counseling, visiting with the wounded and dying, providing services to a bunch of frightened kids. But I always struggled with giving sermons. And it looks like I still do.”

“Before you left, you were admired for your sermons. I’m sure that’ll comeback.”

“Are you sure? How could I reconcile the absurdity killing in war with the sacred notion of brotherly love? How could I possibly create any message that made sense? How could I say, ‘pray today, kill tomorrow’ and pretend that I was doing God’s work? What words could I write—speak—that gave them hope—and gave me peace? How could my entire life’s experiences, my education, my core beliefs make me comfortable with this horrific reality of death and dying ten-thousand miles from home?”

Listening to Isaiah’s dark assessment of war scared Ruth. She recalled sitting in church every Sunday and marveling at Isaiah’s ability to inspire the congregation, to explain God’s words, to make sense of their world. He was always so strong, so confident. But that was before Vietnam.

“There are things they don’t—can’t possibly—teach you in divinity school. Like how to comfort a sobbing eighteen-year-old kid from Ohio with dried blood still on his hands from patching-up bullet holes in his buddy twenty minutes earlier.”

Ruth inhaled deeply, struggling to believe her husband experienced such ugliness. “How did the other chaplain’s handle that? You weren’t the only one.”

“You’re right, I wasn’t the only chaplain over there—I was one out of a couple hundred in the entire country. In fact, I never saw another Black chaplain in Vietnam-—not one. Ever. And I was always on my own when it came to performing my chaplain duties. I travelled a lot—usually a few hundred miles each week. I became a professional hitchhiker grabbing a helicopter connection from one firebase to another. I’d spend a day or two in different places. On the rare occasion when I met with other chaplains, personal feelings were absent from our conversations. That’s how it was in the army. It’s a rigid, tradition-bound warrior culture. And pretending to be bullet-proof—literally and figuratively—is another subject we didn’t discuss in divinity school.

“We usually spoke about the hardships of providing religious services on the front lines. Like using the hood of a Jeep or stacked ammo boxes for a makeshift altar. Or asking soldiers to sling their rifles and sit on their helmets for prayer. From where we were, we saw America at war with itself. But we were too consumed with trying to make sense of the war we were in.”

As the daylight began to fade, they sat in silence. Ruth’s mind raced as she tried to understand what she had just learned. She stood and walked behind Isaiah, wrapping her arms around her husband again. She kissed his cheek and rocked back and forth without speaking.

But the ugly war-inflicted sadness remained locked in Isaiah’s bones—along with his deepest secret, a secret that he couldn’t tell anyone, not even his wife.

Isaiah was sickened by the ineptitude in the nation’s capital that caused the loss of so many innocent lives. The silent rage within him was steadily destroying his soul—and his inability to forgive President Nixon and the political class driven by their bottomless greed, and lust for power.

The reckless indifference of government tortured him day and night. The agony of keeping his fury and resentment hidden, coupled with his growing doubts about his faith, was rapidly becoming a heavy burden. As a man of the cloth, he felt the weight of his sins steadily ripping him into pieces as he struggled to find a path forward. Secretly, he wondered if these soul crushing regrets were a sign—a sign that his days as a pastor were quickly coming to an end.

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