Reporting from Colorado Springs, Colo. — When Christy Goetz's husband, Dale, told her at the outset of the war in Iraq that he wanted to join the Army to become a chaplain, she rebelled.RTWT.
"I told him: 'You're not going over there and getting killed,' " Christy Goetz recalled. "I mean, he's my honey. I love him. I don't want anything to happen to him."
Dale Goetz, a Baptist minister, signed up anyway in January 2004. Before long he was Chaplain Goetz, ministering to troops in Iraq later that year and the next. He volunteered for a second combat tour last summer, in Afghanistan.
"I prayed on it and realized that this is what God wants him to do," Christy Goetz recalled. "Who am I to stand in God's way?"
She knew what every chaplain's wife knows: They may carry holy books instead of rifles, but they're still soldiers, and they still tread in harm's way.
On Aug. 30, a chaplain and another soldier knocked on the door of the tan split-level Dale and Christy bought here last year — the first house they had ever owned.
Capt. Dale Goetz was dead at 43, the first chaplain killed in combat since the Vietnam War.
He was on a trip that day to conduct services and counsel soldiers at several remote combat outposts in Kandahar province when a roadside bomb struck his vehicle. Goetz and four other soldiers were killed.
His soldiers say the chaplain died doing what he loved — talking to them, praying with them, helping counsel them through long days and nights of fear and dread. He had been carrying CDs for them to record personal messages to their families.
"He was committed to his soldiers — that was his gift," said Pastor Jason Parker of High Country Baptist Church in Colorado Springs, which Goetz and his family officially joined the day he left for Afghanistan.
I read this piece all the way through and was amazed at the absence of left-wing antiwar propaganda. I good piece of reporting. My prayers are for Christy Goetz, who's heckuva good woman.
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