Late one warm spring evening, I stood inside a hulking military transport plane in the Kuwaiti desert.
It was 2005. The Iraq War raged. The transport plane’s cargo ramp had been lowered to the tarmac. A row of six-and-a-half-foot-long containers waited to be rolled up the ramp and onto the plane. Each flag-draped container held the remains of a fallen soldier.
I have served as a military chaplain for more than three decades. That year, I was deployed to Kuwait with a logistics unit of the Tennessee National Guard. One of my unit’s responsibilities was to provide support to a Mortuary Affairs unit.
Almost every night, there were flag-draped containers. Chaplains at the airport’s military installation took turns saying a blessing
