Of the hundreds of patrols U.S. Marine Capt. Michael Ogden engaged in during his two tours of duty in Iraq, one in November 2004 is noteworthy if only because Ogden considers it “pretty minor.”
A soldier rests his head on his Bible during a Sunday service in Tikrit, Iraq.
The patrol, in the violent western province of Anbar, began routinely enough. Ogden and four Marines planned to work for 16 to 18 hours, looking for fugitives and clearing the roadways of homemade bombs. They also planned to drink lots of hot coffee and ice water, the latter particularly important in the 100-degree heat. Ogden, as always, carried in his pockets his black Knights of Columbus rosary beads.
Yet the patrol’s plans soon crumbled. In a town north of Bwana, the Humvee carrying the five Marines drove over a land mine. The ensuing explosion tossed Ogden from a backseat of the vehicle, whose rims were bent into the shape of a large taco, but amazingly left him and his men without so much as a scratch.
“We got lucky,” said Ogden, 31, of Col. Walter Parsons Council 3205 in College Station, Texas. “Over there, a lot of young Marines would ask why [do some people die], and I’d say there’s only one person who can answer that question, and that was the Man Upstairs.” Ogden’s close brush with a bomb might be unusual for many Knights who have served in either Iraq or Afghanistan during the last three years. But based on interviews with a handful of them, his spiritual viewpoint is not. Knights described their bodies and brains during wartime as weary, but their Christian souls and moral compasses as alert.
U.S. Army Sgt. 1st Class Lane Prochnow, 41, of Msgr. Loyola O’Daugherty Council 5544 in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, chuckled ruefully about how he views the prospect of death. “If it’s going to happen, it’s going to happen,” he said. “There’s nothing you can do about it. Basically, we were too tired to worry about it. I just figured, ‘If I’m not going home, I’m not going home.’”
None of the Knights interviewed said he abandoned his Catholicism. Nor did any say his religion became individualistic. The universality of the Church and the far-reaching fraternity of the Knights kept them connected to the faith even without a priest or weekly Mass. By contrast, American troops as a whole often lack institutional support and a common outlook, according to the 2005 bestseller, The Faith of the American Soldier by Stephen Mansfield (Tarcher). “Soldiers are left to their own religious choices to frame their moral perspectives on war, on killing, and the possibility of death,” the author wrote.
