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Family Weeps as Chaplain Redeployed to Baghdad
CHICAGO, IL (September 13, 2006) - Ordained Evangelical Covenant Church minister and U.S. Army Chaplain Capt. John Grauer wept when he called his family to inform them that he will not be coming home from Iraq as planned, but will be redeployed to Baghdad.
Grauer’s nine-year-old daughter Morriah started crying when she heard the news. “That’s when I put the sunglasses on” so others would not see the chaplain doing the same, he told Michael Hastings, who wrote an article in the current issue of Newsweek magazine about the sudden change of plans for the brigade in which the chaplain serves.
The military recently decided to move the 172nd Stryker Brigade to the most violent neighborhoods of Baghdad rather than allowing soldiers, who already had served a year in combat, to redeploy home. The soldiers were informed of the decision less than a week before their scheduled return.
Grauer tells the magazine that when the orders were announced, “There was a rush of soldiers trying to get to the phone to call home. Some literally threw up when they heard the news. Some were extremely angry . . . some went to sleep for a couple of days, hoping maybe it was all a bad dream.”
Troops in the brigade often travel in Stryker vehicles, armored carriers designed to withstand blasts that would kill troops in humvees. Grauer has been hit by shrapnel from improvised explosive devices (IEDs) seven times. For a story on one of the incidents, published in an earlier story in this online news report, please see Chaplain Escapes Unharmed. The Newsweek article with a picture of Grauer and his family can be found on the magazine’s website at Newsweek.
Copyright © 2008 The Evangelical Covenant Church. |
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