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I think that an American service-member, to the greatest extent possible, should lose absolutely none of his/her rights while in the military. That includes the right to worship, as you have done, whenever and whereever they want. Obviously, there are military situations that will make it impossible. When you’re in the middle of a firefight, your commander can tell you to go take hill 971, and while you might have wanted to go the mess tent and have a prayer meeting, you just can’t...because you have to obey orders.

It the same with chaplains. They have to obey the orders of the commanders appointed over them. They tell us to go here, then we go here. They tell us to go there, and we go there.

The difference with chaplains is that we are the military’s effort to protect the right of soldiers to FULLY worship in the denomination of their choice in any setting anywhere in the world.

The military must PLAN to have us along. It doesn’t have to plan to have you, your independent preacher friends, or you missionary friends go along for the ride. By Law, to preserve the religious rights of soldiers to worship, it has to take us along.

I’m not saying that we are better than your independent preacher friends or worse than them. What we are is part of the system that deploys to war zones and remote areas to MAKE SURE that religious services take place.

We MAKE SURE that independent preachers get a place and a chance to preach in remote areas and on installations. We do a lot of the preaching ourselves. And, yes, there are independent chaplains, too. And there are other benefits, too: your chaplains are trained, degreed counselors, financial advisors, biblical scholars and much more.

We do not want to give up the legal requirement that the military MUST make allowance for the religious needs of the troops. It must preserve those basic religious rights.

After having been an intended victim of the use of the Air Force chaplaincy to attempt me to modify my moral behavior for the worse, I simply do not believe any assertion that chaplains are there to protect any one's rights to worship.

You stated that chaplains are "degreed" which can be as much a negative as a positive.

Chaplains are Bible scholars? When I was a three month old Christian I was acquainted with more buck sergeants who were Bible scholars than there were chaplains on Homestead AFB at that time.