How Chaplains, even good ones, can get brain-washed by the Military Zeitgeist

TO A FRIEND WHO POSTED A NOTE ON THE ANNIVERSARY OF OUR BOMBING OF HIROSHIMA AND NAGASAKI, QUOTING THE CHAPLAIN WHO 'REPENTED" OF HIS BLESSING OF THE ENOLA GAY CREW, AND CLARIFIED HIS LATER UNDERSTANDING OF THE BLIND ANTI-GOSPEL PRACTICE OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH ENDORSING WAR.

I was a Navy Chaplain (reserve) during the Vietnam War (rank Lt. Comdr). I saw first hand how the military brainwashed the chaplains so that the ambitious ones became more military than the military. Future Cardinal O'Connor (New York) gave a talk on Vietnam in the late 60s in Philadelphia to a small group of citizens, as a Navy Chaplain in Vietnam at the time. He came dressed in his combat fatigues and unbeliievalbly was very pro-war. My BREATH-TAKING, STUNNING insight was the way to make it up the ranks of the military chaplaincy was to become more military than the military.
O'CONNOR, who predictably became Chief of Chaplains--highest ranking officer in the Navy Chaplains Corps even wrote and published a very pro-war book on Vietnam, that he later said he was ashamed of.

It was a small part of the disillusionment that for me took me, first out of the Navy Chaplaincy, then out of the Navy reserve (I had been re-commissioned as a psycholgist in the Medical Service Corps, Reserve), and eventually out of the Roman Catholic structure.

Organized religion, Christian faith is more about Turf, membership and money than about following Jesus. He never said "Go to Church,: and never gave any indication that church membership or submission to a clerical or priestly caste was an essential or necessary part of following him. Love God totally and your neighbor as yourself. Whatsoever you do to the least of my brethren you do to me. This is the essence of Jesus message, which I also find summed in Mary's response to the angel, the verses in Luke 1, called the Magnificat.

Jesus came and preached the gospel, but the Church came and preached Jesus. Huge difference. He never intended, IMO, to found a church that would assume to supercede his own Hebrew faith and persecute his people for 2000 years.