{"id":54602,"date":"2016-06-02T15:15:17","date_gmt":"2016-06-02T15:15:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/127.0.0.1\/site\/2017\/2\/1985\/w_post_what_happens_when_the_military_chaplain_is_shaken_by_war\/"},"modified":"2016-06-02T15:15:17","modified_gmt":"2016-06-02T15:15:17","slug":"w_post_what_happens_when_the_military_chaplain_is_shaken_by_war","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/kendallharmon.net\/?p=54602","title":{"rendered":"(W Post) What happens when the military chaplain is shaken by war"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The pre-war Pastor Matthew Williams had gone to seminary, was ordained and thought he understood why people suffer. \u201cGod allows suffering because this world is temporary,\u201d\u009d is how he would have put it.<\/p>\n<p>Then came two deployments as an Army chaplain, one to Afghanistan and one to Iraq. Williams spent a year in an Afghanistan morgue unzipping body bags and \u201cseeing your friends\u2019 faces all blown apart.\u201d\u009d He watched as most of the marriages he officiated for fellow soldiers fell apart. He felt the terror of being the only soldier who wasn\u2019t armed when the mortars dropped and bullets flew.<\/p>\n<p>This Memorial Day weekend, Williams is no longer an active-duty military chaplain nor a United Church of Christ minister. He is a guitar player on disability whose outlook on God, religion and suffering was transformed by post-traumatic stress.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.washingtonpost.com\/local\/social-issues\/what-happens-when-the-military-chaplain-is-shaken-by-war\/2016\/05\/29\/4dd27dc8-237f-11e6-8690-f14ca9de2972_story.html\">Read it all<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The pre-war Pastor Matthew Williams had gone to seminary, was ordained and thought he understood why people suffer. \u201cGod allows suffering because this world is temporary,\u201d\u009d is how he would have put it. Then came two deployments as an Army<span class=\"ellipsis\">&hellip;<\/span><\/p>\n<div class=\"read-more\"><a href=\"https:\/\/kendallharmon.net\/?p=54602\">Read more &#8250;<\/a><\/div>\n<p><!-- end of .read-more --><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":794,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[48,39,40,175,143,168,141,435,184,177,129,108,165,34,150],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-54602","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-christian-life-church-life","category-culture-watch","category-economics-politics","category-anthropology","category-defense-national-security-military","category-ethics-moral-theology","category-iraq-war","category-ministry-of-the-ordained","category-parish-ministry","category-pastoral-theology","category-psychology","category-religion-culture","category-theodicy","category-theology","category-war-in-afghanistan"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/kendallharmon.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54602","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/kendallharmon.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/kendallharmon.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kendallharmon.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/794"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kendallharmon.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=54602"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/kendallharmon.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54602\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/kendallharmon.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=54602"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kendallharmon.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=54602"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kendallharmon.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=54602"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}