Chaplains Salute Fallen Soldiers as U.S. Toll Passes Milestone

Sivret presided at a memorial for the two, breaking down outside before he spoke.

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(Photo: AP Images / Dusan Vranic)

A US soldiers plays a trumpet during an Easter sunrise service at Camp Victory, in Baghdad, Iraq, Sunday, March 23, 2008.

He remained in Iraq a few more months, constantly encouraging the soldiers, telling them they were doing good. "I was trying to give them perspective and hope," he says. "You have to build them up because they have to go back out there again."

Sivret, now 52, returned to being the parish priest at St. Anne's Episcopal Church in Calais, Maine, where Guard soldiers occasionally visit.

Sivret's hearing has returned and his ribs have healed, but the war remains part of his life.

In December, he accompanied a master sergeant to notify a family of a soldier's death. Seeing the father's pained face, knowing the death occurred in Mosul — the city where Sivret was injured — brought back a flood of memories.

"It stays with me," Sivret says. "You change. You're never the same."

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Chaplain Irvine Bryer faced death before, 40 years ago in another war — in Vietnam.

The skinny kid who survived the jungles returned to a desert battlefield as a grandfather — and Army Reserve chaplain for the 3rd Medical Command.

In Iraq, Bryer dodged mortars, rockets and shots fired at his helicopter.

Still, he says, "Never did I feel there was anything to fear. There is a season for everything under the sun. That's what Ecclesiastes says. ...I take that now and have a for long time as an important part of who I am."

The lieutenant colonel and Baptist minister was based at Camp Victory, the main U.S. military headquarters. He flew more than 11,000 miles in helicopters, frequently visiting hospitals, chatting and praying with the wounded, bringing calm to the chaos.

One day he went to the morgue to pray for a soldier but had been given the wrong name. When a soldier there cursed him and said he should have gotten the identification right, Bryer agreed, and asked him to get the correct information.

Later, the soldier apologized but still admonished him: "Get it right next time."

Bryer wore a Vietnam patch on his right shoulder that didn't go unnoticed in Iraq. Once, he says, a soldier said to him: "You've done this before. You think it makes a difference?"

"I hope so," he replied.

Despite all the tragedy he saw, Bryer had joyful moments — his favorite involving a little boy.

While visiting a health clinic, he says, a little Iraqi boy pointed to the chaplain's shaved head. His mother said her son wanted to touch it.

"He rubbed it like it was a ball," Bryer says.

The chaplain pulled a Snicker's bar from his pocket, broke it in two and gave half to the boy. "We pushed it together, toasting like we're ready to have champagne. I bit in and was making all kinds of sounds like mmmmm," Bryer says. "He was just sitting and laughing."

For Bryer, now 62, this fleeting moment of friendship offers promise for the future.

"I hope that when we're finished," he says, "this is what it's all about."

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In February, Capt. Wainwright stood in a brick chapel at Fort Hood to honor fallen soldiers.

This was not a day to mourn 4,000 lost, but the eight men from his battalion who did not come home.

"There's not a day that goes by that I don't think of those guys and feel some hurt in my heart," he says.

Wainwright spoke in a chapel with stained glass windows that depict cavalry soldiers. The names of those who've died in other wars are engraved on plaques.

Wainwright remembered each of the eight killed in Iraq by name, quoted from Psalm 20 and told mourners that these soldiers are "beckoning from the grave, demanding us to be the men they were ... good and honorable men."

The chaplain wears a memory bracelet with the name of one of them, Phillip Neel, who is buried in the West Point cemetery next to the Old Cadet chapel, where Wainwright used to worship.

"Every time I go back, even when I'm a decrepit old man," the chaplain says, "I'm going to go to the cemetery and look at the headstone, think and remember him, who he was, what he stood for."

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