A Day in the Life

On the second day of training, Peter discovered that he didn’t much care for sitting in class, especially when the day unfolding outside promised to be exciting, as the warming air carried the smell of spring and the sound of fire trucks rumbling by into the stuffy classroom. This particular Tuesday found the classroom, which couldn’t have been more than 50 feet by 30 (as it was all of 26 ceiling tiles long), stuffed full of officers and chief petty officers from Peter’s battalion. In preparation for their annual mini-field exercise, wherein the officers and chiefs pretended to be junior troops so as to gain a better appreciation of their ability to slack off when not supervised, they had gathered for a week of classroom training on such important topics like “Defense Fundamentals” and “Rear Security.”

One can understand then, why Peter, team-player that he is, found himself longing for the very freedom that he’d signed up to protect for others. After all, the rumbling of fire trucks, even though their sirens were not blaring, did portend that something unusual was going on in his neck of the woods. Coupled with the police SUVs scattered about the battalion’s parking lot, he knew that something was up and that he, the battalion chaplain, should be in the midst of it, providing ministry as appropriate and prayer where needed. Moreover, if one were to corner Peter on one of his honest days (usually Sunday, and sometimes Thursdays), he’d probably confess to being a mite curious about why the firemen (there were no firewomen that day) were so interested in the thoughts of a Nigerian lad.

Alas, the hours of classroom training were not alone in preventing the honest chaplain from scratching his curious itch. As the hour drew near to relieve grumbling stomachs, Peter’s executive officer delayed his parting so that they could sit and consider the deeper meaning behind the impenetrable texts so dear to a engineer officer’s heart. That is to say, that whereas Peter usually supped with Bible in hand as do all good chaplains, today he pored over a different text—called metrics by those who love them. In these metrics slides was locked the secret wisdom of the ancients. By tracking various points of data, the XO hoped to one day understand why young men and the occasional woman with money to burn and not enough work to do find themselves in trouble—getting pulled over after a night of drinking, or stumbling into bar fights, or taking one too many hit off of the crack pipe, or wrecking their motorcycle or spraining a wrist and a knee on a snowboard and a skateboard.

Though Peter speedily dispatched the XO with his confident analysis of such mysterious texts, a phalanx of corpsmen and women soon chased him down during the lunching hour with long glistening needles bursting full of useful liquids. Like the penitent Seabees that sometimes lined up outside his office door seeking counsel, the needles quickly found relief upon the good chaplain’s patient shoulder. All the while he wondered how a little package from Africa could gainfully employ so many firemen and police officers. A mad dash home for a bite of a peanut butter and jelly sandwich (using a grown-up sugared spread like blackberry or boysenberry as befitting his position as an contributing member of adult society) and it was back to the grind of the classroom with the mystery still unsolved.

When the instructor finally secured training as the sun began its decent into the Pacific Ocean, Peter trudged back into the office where his computer waited patiently for him. Playing the keyboard like a true virtuoso, he soon completed the updates to the wellness brief he’d presented to the XO earlier and sent it upstairs for his approval. Closing the window which he’d opened to appreciate the now-cooling air and locking the door behind him, the earnest minister to the military minions headed off to hand over the duty phone which he had so faithfully carried for the past week.

And so the weary chaplain found himself at last at home surrounded by the family he so dearly loved. Whilst eating dinner on the couch, he absent-mindedly reached down to scratch the ears of his puppy-dog in between bites of chicken pesto and garlic bread. Ruminating on his salad, he idly wondered if his dog ought to be suspected of the sin of pulicosity—a word that coincidentally happened to be the word-of-the-day on his forgotten English calendar. After all, it had been a while since the puppy-dog had enjoyed the flea-treatments so loving provided by Melissa, the sturdy chaplain’s beloved wife.

Upon further consideration of the events of his day, it dawned on the benevolent chaplain that maybe the poor lad in Nigeria also had a flea problem and was writing to the battalion in search of a solution. Yes, that must be it, pondered Peter, for surely the desperate youth hotly pursued by biting midges and blood-sucking mosquitoes had no intention of causing such a scare with his note. (It most certainly wasn’t his fault that the battalion postal clerk though the package suspicious and in need of careful analysis.)

After all, Seabees sometimes found their way to Africa while on deployment. Maybe one of them had impressed the Nigerian native with his amazingly flea-free clothes and hair and had inspired the young man to send a package across the pond asking for help from the Americans, who really are quite generous with their aid to other countries. Or it could have been that he was simply interested in joining the US Navy, which really is a fine institution even though it sometimes makes its chaplains waste their days in training…