Wednesday, March 19, 2003


Speaking of God, preparing for war
JUAN O. TAMAYO
Knight Ridder, 19 May 2003

CAMP COMMANDO, Kuwait - On the brink of war, chaplain Doug Dowling is thinking about the sermon he will deliver today to American leathernecks in his sandbagged chapel a few miles from the Iraqi border.

He will urge the Marines to treat enemy bodies with respect, to look away from the grotesque mutilations of war. He will tell them the war is not about getting even for 9/11. And he will tell them that amid the horror of war they may find the beauty of valor and comradeship and, perhaps, the presence of God.

A stocky Navy lieutenant with a blond mustache and bare-walls haircut, the 42-year-old Milwaukee native looks like a Marine in his digital desert camouflage uniform, floppy "boony" hat and military web gear.

But he wears a tiny black metal cross on his shirt and speaks with the fervor of a former Navy warplane navigator who was stationed in Kuwait during the Iraq-Iran war in the 1980s, who fought in the 1991 Gulf War and then became a pastor for the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America.

"There is a God who is a warrior, but God is the same always," Dowling said. "The God you believe in as you may go to war is that same God you believed in yesterday and the day before, so nothing changes for me on this day."

Dowling has baptized 32 people here, including a Navy officer he met briefly in a military base parking lot and christened with water from a plastic bottle.

He will hold one more service today in his tiny chapel with a cross on top, really a bunker dug halfway into the desert sand and then sandbagged for protection.

"I will pray for our men and for theirs, too," he said. "And I will pray especially for peace."


Tuesday, March 18, 2003

"It's really about the mind games," Doug Walker, co-president of the Toronto-based World Rock Scissors Paper Society, which sponsored the annual contest, told the Associated Press, according to a story in today's Kansas City Star. "There's a lot of trash talking and mental intimidation."

You might also say that about the diplomacy of the US War Party in recent months, days, hours.