Another Purple Heart

What manner of hero is this? The EOD (Explosive Ordnance Disposal) team member is the single most injured or killed member of the US Military, by job description. I am blessed to work with them - Army, Marine, Air Force, Navy.

This is a group of people who are truly unique in both personality and calling. It takes someone special to fly jets or helicopters, someone special to jump out of airplanes into a firefight, someone special to jump into a rolling coffin (what we sometimes call "tanks" in combat aviation). But it really takes someone with unique personality traits - traits that aren't often conducive to regular church attendance, at times - to walk calmly up to an unexploded bomb (civilian for "IED" - if you don't know what that acronym is yet, Google it, then wake up and catch what your country is actually doing these days).

I am apparently the second combat EOD chaplain - my predecessor having been the first. I think they're getting used to me. Actually, my police sense of humor comes in good use here. I need not worry as much about my inner dialogue coming out among EOD folk. So, when our latest wounded hero was finally awake from surgery, having lost one of his legs, and with the EOD community at his bedside, I couldn't help but point out that, in the future, he would now be 50% less likely to step on a land mine. Okay, so YOU wouldn't have said it. That's just the community - and mine was one of the more tame jokes.

And what manner of hero the spouses of these men (and a few women thrown in there, too)? I spoke with this hero's wife, who was thanking God that her husband was (otherwise) fine. I even mentioned that his pretty face (eye of the beholder thing) was still perfectly in tact and she said, without hesitation, that she didn't care, as long as he was okay.

Pray for this hero and his family - and pray for his fellow unit members. They are a tight-knit bunch, this band of brothers and sisters. They care deeply for one another and hurt whenever one of theirs is down. It reminds me a lot of the law enforcement world. There are those who do evil and those who just want to live out their lives in peace. Then there are those who make it possible for the latter to do so. Those who hold the line for all of the rest of us deserve both our remembrance and our prayers.