Persecuted to Love: A Soldier's Story

By II Dr. Gary Mason

Persecuted to Love is one soldier's story of resilience and dependence on God. The persecution directed at Lieutenant Mason began when he reported what he thought was an isolated racist attack he endured at his cavalry unit in Iraq. When matters were not addressed, he uncovered an abusive culture in the Army that some would murder to cover up. M

• Language: English
• Publisher: Palmetto Publishing
• Release date: May 5, 2022
• ISBN: 9781638375814

II Dr. Gary Mason

Gary Mason, II, was born in Washington, DC and graduated from DeMatha Catholic High School. Before entering the US Army in 2000, he received a BA in communications from Howard University. While serving in the US Army, he earned an MA in Film Production from American University and an MA in Practical Theology from Regent University. After his forced retirement, he then earned a Doctorate in Military Ministry from Regent University. Dr. Mason is also an aspiring filmmaker who co-wrote the screenplay, PVT William Cathay - Slave to Buffalo Soldier, with his wife. He is also an expert communicator in military affairs, media planning, and military ministry.

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U.S. Army Veteran Shares

Painful Experiences of

Military Racism, Part 1

THE FARTHEST THING FROM MY MIND

by Sharon Rondeau

(Apr. 21, 2018) — Shortly after learning of the case of an injured U.S. Army soldier whose family said he was held in a psychiatric ward at Walter Reed National Medical Military Center against his will, The Post & Email was introduced to the soldier's spiritual adviser, Gary Mason, also a former Army soldier who saw combat in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Mason enlisted in 2000 after his wife learned she was expecting their first child. She herself had served a four-year term in the Army as a counterintelligence agent and Russian linguist, then spent another four years as a ready reservist, as is customary.

In January 2015, Mason was discharged from the Army as disabled after 14 years’ service for what he believes was retaliation for his reports of institutional racism within certain Army units and an alleged assault by a fellow soldier who never faced discipline.

A native of Maryland, Mason's story has been broadcast on Maryland Public Television and received support from the Prince George's County NAACP. He has spoken to a number of groups and associations on the topics of racism, Christianity and toxic leadership in the U.S. military.

A clip of a May 21, 2015, interview with Mason and Washington, DC's WOL 1450 Newstalk Radio can be heard below.

His story as told to The Post & Email begins below, with the remainder to be told in a number of future articles.

* * *

I joined the Army in 2000 as an enlisted soldier in the infantry, and that's where I learned that I had a bit of naiveté in what I thought the Army was. My wife and I were married in 1997. She was already prior service: four years on active duty and four years in the individual ready reserve. Your mandatory contract time is for whatever you enlist; once you finish out that actual time served, the military has what they call ready reserve where they can call you back up in case it's a time of war or something else happens.

We were familiar with her service and some of the things she went through as an African American female, but that was never relevant. My wife and I met at Howard University, and my goal was to pursue a career in the television and film-making business. We got married in 1999, and I told her, We’re going to set up a company and do documentary and film. Money was a bit tight; the company was picking up small jobs, but then my wife became pregnant. That's when I realized, Hey, sweetheart, we don’t have health insurance; we have a small business. I was trying to come up with an idea as to how I was going to cover the cost of getting her to a hospital with no health insurance.

One day I was driving down Georgia Avenue in Washington, DC and crossed the Maryland line into Silver Spring, and I saw a recruiting office with a sign advertising a $20,000 signing bonus. So, I went in, looked at some of the benefits, and thought if I could do a tour of duty, it might be a good place to start.

I talked to the recruiter, who realized I had a degree. And he said, There are two ways you can do this; if you come in as an officer, you’re not going to get that $20,000 bonus because that's not for officers, but for enlisted personnel. And I said, Well, what's the benefit of my coming in enlisted vs. coming in as an officer? because I didn’t have a clue. So, he said, If you come in enlisted with a degree, you can start as an E-4. The ranking system is E1 to E9 or you can come in as an officer from O-1 to O-9, lieutenant to colonel and then the four general officers.

So, if I came in as an officer with my degree, I wouldn’t be able to receive the $20,000? I asked, and he said, No, but if you come in as enlisted, not only will we give you $20,000, but you also have to join the infantry. If you want an additional $10,000, you go to Airborne school, meaning that you jump out of planes. So that's $30,000, and I was thinking in my mind, This might not be bad. I was athletic in high school and played football.

So, I said, What are some of the other things the infantry does? and he said, You’re obviously a front-line fighter; you do a lot of training, and you travel a lot.

So, I went home and talked with my wife and said, Shahnaaz, what do you think about my joining the Army? and she said, Well, Gary, it's a good idea, but you want to negotiate to make sure that you get the job that you want. You shouldn’t go in unless you’ve talked to some folk who have been in and know what to do.

I went back down there, ended up joining and came back home, and she said, What did you do? and I said, I joined the infantry. And she said, "What?? Why did you do that? and I said, I got the biggest bonus I could, student loan repayment; I figured if I joined and served my country, I might as well do it all the way. I said, It kind-of reminds me of the history of the Buffalo Soldiers, and I thought it would be an honorable thing to do.

I wanted to do the best thing for my family with a newborn on the way. I already had two sons for whom I was paying child support, and it was a financial hardship while I was pursuing the film-making company. I didn’t want Shahnaaz going to some clinic because we didn’t have insurance.

When I got to Basic Training at Ft. Benning, GA, it was a shock getting off the bus and seeing the drill sergeant screaming and yelling. At 27, I was an older enlistee. The average age of coming into the military, oftentimes, is 17, 18, 19 years old.

I remember the drill sergeant saying to me — we were in our barracks, standing in front of our bunks — and he was coming down the line, calling out our names and ranks, and he came to me and said, You’re an E4, Specialist Mason? Why are you here as an E4? and I looked at him and said, I have a degree. And he shook his head and said, You’re a dumb***.

He said, You got a degree, and you joined the infantry? and he looked at me and said, "You will learn." And then he turned around and walked away.

I didn’t understand what he meant at the time, but did I find out? Yes, I did. I realized that what he was saying is, You came to the lowest of the low, the bottom of the barrel. You are a grunt. And he basically said, You’re a ****, a Dedicated Infantry Combat Killer. In other words, he was saying, You don’t join the infantry if you have a degree.

He was out-of-line, but he was being prophetic. Drill sergeants aren’t there to hold your hand; they’re there to whip you up to reality and prepare you to die. In other words, You’re going to die for your country.

Gary Mason at Basic Training in 2000 at Ft. Benning, GA

In the back of my mind, being that it was the year 2000 in August, I never, ever considered the idea of racism. It was the farthest thing from my mind, and I think that was the most naïve thing that I thought. This was the biggest lesson I learned. I believed that we were living in a post-racial era, and soon I was going to get a quick lesson as to what was really going on in the military.

U.S. Army Veteran Shares Painful Experiences of Military Racism, Part 2

KEEP YOUR MOUTH CLOSED

by Sharon Rondeau

Mason during a live fire exercise

(Apr. 27, 2018) — An article published on Monday introduced the story of former Army Captain Gary Mason, who entered the military in 2000 at the age of 27 after acquiring a degree from Howard University in Communications.

Mason's father is a retired Washington, DC police officer. The family lived in the capital city until Mason was five, when they moved to Prince George's County, Maryland.

Mason enlisted in the Army after he and his wife, Shahnaaz, discovered they were going to have their first child. A small business owner without health insurance, Mason was concerned that his wife would not receive proper care, and the $20,000 bonus offered to enlisting soldiers was an added incentive for him to join.

Shahnaaz supported his idea to join the military as she had served four years in Army Intelligence and knew the benefits. What she was deeply concerned about was his choice to serve in the Infantry Branch, a decision that proved to be life changing.

For Part 1 of this series, Mason recalled his first close encounter with a drill sergeant, who, upon learning that Mason had joined the infantry as a college graduate, incredulously exclaimed, You got a degree and you joined the infantry? punctuated with "You will learn."

Mason said that at the time, the existence of racism within the Army's ranks had not occurred to him, as he believed that the military was pretty progressive and ahead of the rest of the population. In some ways, yes, but in other ways we were still backwards and outdated, he told us. There was a culture in the U.S. Army — and I can’t speak for the other branches, but I would imagine it's the same — that they were still backwards in their thinking when it came to toxic leadership. In other words, there were still people in the Army who believed that white men should be leaders and they should be in charge, and African-Americans and Latinos should be the workers and the ones who would be our collateral damage in combat.

He continued, referring to the possibility of racism:

I wasn’t even thinking that; that was not my thought at all. In fact, before I went into the military, my thought was, How do I choose which branch? I remember my wife telling me, There are more people in the Army and there's better career progression for African-Americans, and the most promotions are happening in the Army. That was based on her experience.

The Marines are a small branch that falls under the Department of the Navy, and the Air Force is kind-of an elitist thing where everything is based on test-taking versus performance.

I ran track in high school and had been a boxer. The hardest thing for me was running long distances. But I was very assertive, a hard-charging, go-getter athlete type, so when I got to Ft. Benning [for Basic Training], very soon I was made the person who oversaw my platoon and my bay; in other words, I was to tell everybody to keep this place clean and how to do everything right.

One evening, a large young white male came to me and said, I’m not going to have a black man telling me to do anything, because where I’m from, black people don’t tell me what to do, so I’m not doing a thing that you say.

I was shocked, and I said, Look, I don’t care where you’re from. You’re going to get over there and get that mop and you’re gonna mop. And he said, I’m not doing a thing for you.

So finally, I reported it to my drill sergeant, and the drill sergeant did the right thing: he brought him in to his office, and he said, Let me tell you something. There will not be any racism here; you will do what this young man tells you to do.

[Editor's Note: Mason said that the drill sergeant who handled the situation was the same one who told him, "You will learn" upon Mason's arrival at Ft. Benning.]

What I realized was, OK, I’m going to come across racist people, but if I report it properly, the chain of command is going to fix it. So, I said, OK, well, he's different; he's from the back woods of West Virginia and he just hasn’t spent much time around African-Americans. Now this guy suffered; he broke out into tears. It was as if his whole world came apart.

I kept working with him, and on a long, long rough march, he fell out — that means he fell way behind. I turned around and went back and got him and helped him make the rough march with us.

After bending over backwards to help him, he then became my biggest advocate. As a matter of fact, he showed me pictures of his family who were skinning pigs on the farm; they were poor. He apologized, and after that, we didn’t have any problems.

The Post & Email then said, So he learned something and something good came of it.

Yes, exactly. So that was my story of Basic Training.

When I was about six weeks into Basic Training, my wife had the baby. I received a Red Cross message that was disturbing; it said that Your wife and child are in the delivery room and your wife is having complications; we’re probably going to lose one or the other. I was shocked. My wife, being the loving wife and mother, said, If anybody is going to live, I want the child to live. Of course, I was upset. So, they brought me to the commander's office, and I sat there. They couldn’t get me out that same day; I had to wait until after the surgery.

Come to find out, both made it. The baby was a preemie. I flew into Pittsburgh to be with her and then I flew back to Ft. Benning to finish Basic Training.

My first assignment after that was at Ft. Lewis, Washington, and my wife and son joined me. This was just before 9/11 broke out. Ft. Lewis is now Joint Base Lewis McChord as the result of a merger between the Army base and the Air Force base.

This was my first significant thing. There was a battalion commander by the name of Lt. Col. Todd McCaffrey. I was at a small company, and I think for the first time that's when I noticed that racism existed. When I got there, in my platoon, there might have been only three or four African Americans out of about 40-45 soldiers. It was quite common that the word n***** was used. At that point, it wasn’t directly addressed to me, but it was a common usage in conversations as to how they referred to black men.

Every now and then there would be racial slurs written on walls. We had rocks outside of our barracks which represented the unit rock, where we would write down our motto. Sometimes we’d see things like Hate the n***** or Kill the n****. Of course, we’d never know who did it, but the whole company would suffer. The leadership didn’t like to see things like that, but that's what went on.

At that point, I began to realize, OK, this is happening, but it's ignorant, and I’m going to rise above it. So, I didn’t make a big deal about it.

No one really picked on me too often because I was kind-of a big guy and lifted weights; I loved fighting. The whole idea of going into the sand pits and practicing hand-to-hand combat appealed to me. As a boy, I became a champion in the daily neighborhood fights. I grew up in an apartment complex, and it was very territorial. So, there were little gangs formed, and the bottom line was that you better be able to handle yourself and defend yourself. So, I made a name for myself that I was very good with my fists.

My first run-in in the Army was when I started seeing the younger, weaker African American men coming in – high school graduates – being taken advantage of. They would be the ones to clean the latrines, to buff and mop the floor. A lot of times it was just an initiation process, but I noticed that the African Americans were always the ones on the menial tasks.

When it was time for a promotion from a Private to a Private First Class up to Specialist, I noticed immediately that in my company, they would never give us (the African Americans) promotion ceremonies. Normally for a promotion, you bring the person in front of the company; we would all be standing in formation, and the leadership would read off a set of promotion orders and the person promoted would get pinned in front of the whole company. We always had our own little private ceremony, and we would pin each other, because they would never read off our promotion orders. Sometimes our pay would just quietly change.

Mason with Battle Buddy

I was always the one who would bring it to the attention of the leadership, and of course, I would always get persecuted for it. Oh, come on, Mason, you’re a specialist; you’re different from them. Stop worrying about these privates and wearing your feelings on your sleeve. This doesn’t pertain to you; you’re older than they are; we must turn these guys into men. Stop complaining about it. Soldier on, soldier up, and don’t fuss about it. I would hear these types of things.

Were any of the men in the upper echelons black? The Post & Email asked.

Yes, the first sergeant; he was like the daddy of the company. You had a captain and a first sergeant who were normally on company level together. At the time, the company commander was a white male, and there was a black sergeant, the senior enlisted guy. He was quiet; I think if he had seen some of the things that were happening, he would have quietly made changes. I began to learn that a lot of the African-Americans who had rank, around E-5, which is a sergeant, or E-6, which is a staff sergeant, were quiet: I have my rank; I don’t want anyone to mess with my rank; let's just reach my 20 years and I’m not going to get involved in all that pettiness. Yes, I went through the racism also, but I want to make my 20 years and then get out with my retirement.

A lot of them learned the game. For those who didn’t, they never made E-5, E-6, and they ended up having some type of disciplinary situation and being put out because that wasn’t the kind of African American or Latino that they wanted. They wanted someone who is going to come in and be a yes-man; Yes, sir; no, sir; stand at attention and be a robot. Don’t ever, ever go against your chain of command.

Did the company commander ever call the unit together to say that racism would not be tolerated there?

Yes. We called them sensing sessions. Normally we would break into platoons, with about 40 members per platoon. Each platoon had its own leadership guided by a second lieutenant or a staff sergeant or sergeant first class. We would have meetings, and the staff sergeant or second lieutenant would be like squad leaders who would report all the incidents that had happened. They would have a private meeting and determine whether they needed to tell the company commander. So, they would try to get the pulse of what was going on in our individual platoons. Every now and then, if the situation got worse, then we would have a larger meeting where the commander or the first sergeant would officiate.

The first sergeant would try to mitigate the problem before it got to the commanders. In other words, Let's see if we can stop this on the lowest level. In the case of the infantry, there's a lot of drinking, a lot of chasing the girls on post, fighting in the bars and in the gym. Infantrymen were known to get into brawls and fights. So, every now and then, when something racial would happen, they would try to eliminate the problem from the lowest levels. They never wanted to get it up the chain of command to the battalion commander, who was the overseer of about four or five different companies. He was the next tier above the company commander, who was normally a captain.

So, if these incidents came up, they would isolate them. They never wanted to say that racism was an epidemic, so that's how they would break it down. They would avoid it. Every now and then, there would be someone who would try to pull that individual aside and talk to him, which was like putting a band-aid on an oozing chest wound.

Occasionally, if you were a bad alcoholic, they would send you to an AA class. This was well before President Barack Obama got into office; between 2001 and 2003 when I was at Ft. Lewis. At the enlisted level, what I saw was, You’re in the infantry, so whatever you’re told to do, you just do it. You don’t question anybody in the chain of command or any officer. That is where you learn the culture: Keep your mouth shut; do what you’re supposed to do; and don’t let your name come up before the commander. If you can do that, you’ll probably move forward in your career. Keep your mouth closed.

U.S. Army Veteran Shares Painful Experiences of Military Racism, Part 3

FROM SPECIALIST TO LIEUTENANT, BUT NOT WITHOUT INSULT

by Sharon Rondeau

Gary Mason at Ft. Lewis, WA

(Apr. 30, 2018) — In Part 1 and Part 2 of this series, Captain Gary Mason (retired) related his experience in the U.S. Army Infantry, which surprisingly included unexpected racism.

In 2000, Mason had already graduated from college with a degree in Communications when he decided to enter the service with a wife and child on the way. An Army veteran herself, Mason's wife Shahnaaz was shocked when he returned from the recruiter's office having enrolled in the infantry, which serves as the offensive front line in times of war.

He began his military career at Ft. Benning, GA and after Basic Training was transferred to Ft. Lewis, WA, now Joint Base Lewis-McChord following a merger with an Air Force base.

Mason recalled being completely unprepared for any racism in the service and that in the event complaints arose, they generally did not reach the company commanders, but were dealt with, to a greater or lesser degree, by a lieutenant or sergeant in charge of individual platoons.

During Basic Training, Mason was designated a unit leader and related in Part 1 how he formed a close friendship with a white soldier who had originally refused to take orders from him. Ironically, the drill sergeant who greeted him harshly upon his arrival at Ft. Benning enforced Mason's authority, mandating to the recalcitrant soldier that racism would not be tolerated in the unit.

When he entered the Army, Mason's intent had been to complete a four-year tour of duty and in the immediate, secure medical coverage for his pregnant wife. The Iraq and Afghanistan wars were not foreseeable, although Mason ultimately deployed to both countries following the 9-11 attacks.

While at Ft. Lewis, Mason said that as an enlistee who was older than most of the new arrivals, he started becoming like a Robin Hood. I started intervening personally, because I was older and a little bit more mature, so I would try to break up the fights and guide some of the guys in the right direction, he told The Post & Email. Then finally, my platoon leader said, ‘Gary, you’re always trying to rescue people. You’re rubbing people the wrong way because every time something happens, you’re always trying to correct the matter. Have you ever thought about becoming a chaplain? You seem to be Christian but you’re in this infantry environment. They have a direct commissioning program to become a chaplain. Why don’t you just go ahead and become an officer; you’ve done your enlisted time. You’ll be more effective if you are in a position to counsel soldiers and make changes as a leader.

He continued:

At first, I took it as an insult, kind-of like, Oh, I can’t be a good infantry leader and you want me to get out and go be a chaplain. A lot of times, the infantry didn’t have much respect for chaplains because they’re not war fighters. They were a bit older and were not always respected because many were out of shape and had not spent time doing traditional grunt work.

At that point, I shared with my wife what some of the leadership was saying, and then I met a black chaplain over at a gospel service at the chapel. He said, You have a degree? Then we could use you as a chaplain; it would be a direct commission to a captain. Why are you wasting your time with this enlisted stuff?

In the beginning, I wasn’t thinking about a career in the Army. But my wife said, Gary, it might not be a bad idea if you consider becoming a chaplain because you can help correct some of the wrongs you see in the Army. You can do things for the right reason, and that would be your job.

So, after consideration, I decided, This is exactly what I think I should do. This might be my calling. Lo and behold, I went back and took my ASVAB again to increase my GT (general technical) and scored high. I applied to get into the Chaplain Corps, and I was accepted. I became a direct-commission second lieutenant in the U.S. Army.

It was funny, because my commander didn’t really know about it when we were in the field one night doing some training. This was just about the time 9-11 broke out, so I remember it was about 11:00 p.m. and we were out doing a live-fire exercise. I had not received my orders to transfer, but I was promoted, and it came down from the Pentagon.

I was sleeping in the back of a truck because I was guarding the ammo. I remember hearing a fight break out on the side of the truck. They were talking about Specialist Mason is now Lieutenant Mason, and someone said, I don’t care; I’m not ever saluting that n*****. I heard them outside the truck and a fight broke out. So, when I jumped out of the truck, a lot of them stopped, and we broke up the fight. Then I was called into the firing range field house, and all the officers from all the platoons were there. They were all white men, and there was me. The captain walked in and said, Mason, we have some news for you, and I said, What's that? and he said, We got a call from the Pentagon today. I said, OK. What's this about? So finally, he said, Specialist Mason, you’re no longer ‘Specialist Mason’; you’ve been promoted to Lieutenant.

Suddenly, I saw some of the other men in the room saying, How did this happen? They were shocked. Then a platoon leader jumped up and said, You need to stay the f**** away from me; I don’t f****** deal with chaplains. You’re getting out of the infantry to become a d*** chaplain? Don’t say s**** to me! and he got up and stormed out.

And I said, Hold up, Sarge, were you addressing me? You stand at ease. And suddenly, everybody got quiet. Then he kind-of looked and broke out laughing. I said, Yeah, I’m a lieutenant now; you better shut up and stand at ease.

That must have shocked you, The Post & Email commented.

Oh, yes, it did. I played it well. I thought, I already know how you guys feel about African-Americans, so I’m not even going to allow that to bother me.

Soon after that, I was still waiting for orders to come down, and they kind-of felt like, We’re getting ready to go to war and Mason is now turning his back on us. The way they saw it was, This n***** got some rank, and now he's an officer. The second definition was, He's going to become a chaplain, so he's taking the easy way out.

And I was thinking, no, this was a way for me to stay in the Army and better my career. I figured I would keep serving my country and do what I do best, which is to help solve some of the problems.

Gary Mason and son Josh at Ft. Lewis, 2002

The first thing I wanted to do was stop all the racism going on. I never knew how big of a fight I was getting ready to get myself into because my thought was, Christ does not tolerate racism. So, I thought I would do the Christian thing; I’m going to put together programs; I’m going to do all the things that the command here is not doing. I’m going to start having cultural awareness, doing suicide prevention; I’m going to cut back on some of these sexual assaults. I had a big, grandiose plan of how I as a chaplain was going to implement change in the Army. Little did I know I was getting ready to go down the road that I ended up going, which is where I am today without a job.

U.S. Army Veteran Shares Painful Experiences of Military Racism, Part 4

DOING GOD'S WILL

by Sharon Rondeau

Gary Mason (second from left) with three other chaplain candidates at Ft. Jackson, 2006

(May 11, 2018) — In Part 3 of this series, former Army Captain Gary Mason detailed his time in the Infantry at Ft. Lewis, WA between 2000 and 2003 and his subsequent acceptance into the Army Chaplaincy Corps.

Parts 1 and 2 of Mason's story can be read here and here, respectively.

Mason's decision to apply for the Army chaplaincy program was initiated by a role he assumed early on of attempting to resolve conflict among members of his platoon. He also observed racism, sexism, and physical fights between soldiers which he felt he could address more meaningfully by doing God's will.

Already possessing a college degree when he entered the Infantry, Mason's platoon leader suggested he would find more satisfaction in becoming an Army chaplain. Not having expected initially to make the military a career, Mason applied and was accepted to the Chaplain Officer Basic Course (CHOBC) and promoted to the rank of lieutenant.

With the future looking bright, Mason never forgot his ties to the Infantry and took advantage of military practicums during the summer months consisting of Airborne and Air Assault training to broaden his opportunities once he graduated from the chaplain program. He never imagined that some years later, disaster was to strike following his deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan as an Army Infantry officer chaplain.

Having first been an enlisted soldier, Mason was able to anticipate some of the physical exigencies for which he could be called to minister as a chaplain, although he said most chaplain candidates did not typically possess that background.

A painful experience for him, Mason said, was that the Chaplain Corps made sure I was only to become a Gospel Service Chaplain because I was black.

He was surprised to find that CHOBC involved the concept of pluralism, or an all-inclusive approach toward ministering in the military. He also said that his expectation of simply preaching the Word of God was quickly dispelled. The Chaplain Corps was more subtle, he said. They had a goal, and that was, ‘We want only a particular religious subject-matter expert. We don’t want an evangelistic, Holy-Ghost-filled, Bible-thumping, Jesus-saving pastor. We just want a counselor/subject-matter expert, but at the same time, we want you to have almost like a Ph.D. in order to do your job.’

Mason said that upon graduation, each chaplain becomes part of a commander's group. In other words, you work for the commander. On a company level, you work with the captain; on a battalion level, which is the next step up, you’re working with a lieutenant colonel. If you’re working on the brigade level, you’re working for a full-bird colonel. If you’re working on the brigade level and you have a full-bird colonel, he's going to call in every company commander, and that means that all the senior officers will come in and they will talk with them and their oversight of all their personnel staff and enlisted soldiers. Then you’ll have the inspector general, the EO people, the chaplain, and the brigade surgeon. It's like the president calling in his cabinet, he recalled.

Of the chaplain's main function within a brigade, Mason said, The chaplain is there because he's supposed to keep the pulse. He's supposed to get down to the lowest level with all of the service members and make sure soldiers and their families are thriving.

As chaplains advance in rank, Mason said, there is less interaction with the soldiers and more with company commanders along with overseeing newer chaplains and continuing one's education. When you become a Major as a chaplain, you’re working more so on a brigade level where you’re overseeing the younger captains. So, you might not be in the gospel service where you’re preaching or teaching a Sunday service. When you go to Major, they send you to the Major's course, which is a yearlong, where they teach you to be more of a planner. In other words, you’re going to oversee the curriculum for the younger chaplains as they are teaching services involved in family readiness when they deploy. They’ll normally cycle you to four designated areas. For instance, when you become a Major, they want to make you a subject-matter expert in the field of resource management, and with the money that comes from all the chapel services, they’ll send you into Ethics, which you can teach at a military war college. You’ll go into clinical pastoral education where you will be a Major working in a hospital doing CPE or you’ll be doing family counseling where you have a family counseling office. So, you’re more geared toward a subject matter as opposed to the younger chaplain, a captain, who is teaching and preaching with the service members, he said.

He further described a chaplain's training and ascendancy within the military hierarchy:

When you become a lieutenant colonel, they’re dressing you up to possibly be around as senior leadership. Now you’re spending time with full-bird colonels and generals. You’re the garrison commander's partner. In other words, you’re now spending more time planning what the whole post activity should be. Now you’re looking at things from a broader viewpoint and talking to the general.

For instance, if you’re having DUIs on the post or suicides or marital situations that could be impacting the commander specifically, the chaplain comes in and says, This is what needs to happen, and then he deciphers the information from the senior command officer and pushes the policy down to the younger chaplains to disseminate it all the way down to the lowest levels. So that's how that works.

When I came in and first went to the chaplain officer basic course, there were three parts. The first part was coming in and learning the duties of a chaplain. The second portion was more specific detail as to how to give services, how to do death notifications, how to do field ceremonies, how to handle marriages and counseling. and then the third part was more of a capstone where you went out into the field and did training, acting as if you’re doing real-world stuff, but it's in a training environment.

All the while, you’re a chaplain candidate. During that time, you’re supposed to finish a 72-hour graduate-level degree, which is normally a Master of Divinity. They put you on a National Guard or reserve status. During that time, you have the opportunity to do what they call practicums, where you can choose a list of Army bases you want to go to, and you serve as a chaplain candidate while you’re going to school during the summer months if they have openings.

When I left Ft. Lewis, I went to Ft. Jackson, which is where the Chaplain Officer Basic Course is held, the headquarters for all branches. It's separated out by individual. The Army has its own Chaplain Officer Basic Course, so that's where I went. I had not even started my first semester, but they knew I was accepted into the graduate program, so they said, We want you to do at least your first portion of the chaplain course. They asked me if I wanted to do all three, but technically you shouldn’t do all three until you’re graduating. The last semester, you finish out and get assigned. When I was working, the chaplains’ office was in Crystal City, VA, across the street from the Pentagon. The senior position of a chaplain can only be a two-star general, normally a Major General. At the time I switched over, it happened to be an African American chaplain by the name of Chaplain Hicks. He was retiring as I was graduating from the Chaplain Basic Course.

I went into this with my heart set on doing God's will. I didn’t come in understanding what the Chaplain Corps taught, which was to be pluralistic in our approach. There was a whole course given on pluralism, which means that we cannot be biased or come in with the belief that our faith is "the" faith. We must be all-inclusive. We cannot be exclusive with our ministry calling.

When I came in, I thought I would have a service at 12:00 noon and be teaching and preaching the Word of God. I didn’t even know what pluralism was. Soon, I began to understand what the pluralistic approach was, which meant that I needed to take classes on sensitivity. At the time, Don’t ask, don’t tell was still in place, so there wasn’t a new set of Army regulations saying we had to do same-sex marriages. That wasn’t a consideration then. We were just being taught the basic necessary functions of what our roles and duties were.

The basic requirement is you must have 72 hours of graduate-school training, the majority being in theology or religion or church administration. Then you must have at least two years of practical experience pastoring or performing so many weddings or funerals. You also had to have an ecclesiastical endorsement, which means a governing body recognized by faith-based groups must sponsor you. It must be an accredited institution that can provide an endorsement which allowed candidates to come in as a full-service chaplain, whether it be in the National Guard, Reserve, or active duty.

I got to the training center in Ft. Jackson, SC in 2003 after I took a direct commission. When I got there, it was a schoolhouse environment. We still had to be in uniform; we still had to do PT; we still had to show up at the chow hall. We had mandatory meetings. It was like going back to college. There were 250-300 chaplain candidates who would break up into smaller groups. I think there were about 30 in my platoon. We were staying at a place called Dozier Hall, which is kind-of like a small hotel, like a barracks, but nicer and more upscale for officers.

This was my first opportunity to wear what they call Butter Bars. We were second lieutenants and had a shiny gold bar on our uniforms. They used to call me a mustang because I was enlisted first. Not only was I enlisted, but I was in the Infantry. A lot of chaplain candidates coming in never had any military experience, and they were trying to teach the enlisted soldiers the military way of life. I was already a grunt, so I had already fired weapons. A chaplain is non-combatant; they don’t hold weapons. They’re supposed to be there as the peace-bearers, for medical support, to help after a bomb goes off, when you need to get to that ER because they’re going to need prayer or last rites.

They also taught ecumenically, which means that we must be fair with other faith-based groups. The Baptists have ways of doing things; then you have the Methodists, the Lutherans, the Episcopalians, Catholics. There were imams there, although I didn’t meet any in my class. There were perhaps two Buddhists. The ecumenical environment said, We’re all one; we all work together as chaplains, which was incorporating pluralism as well. Even the Wiccans wanted a chaplain.

We had templates for serving people who were gay and lesbian; we had one geared more toward the spiritual, Christian-based counseling and one that was more general. If someone was giving a funeral or chapel service, we had one that was more Christian and another that was more of a generic ceremony with no real religious preference.

I got very involved in doing all my practicums during the summer months. I went to Airborne school at Ft. Benning; I went to Air Assault school in Ft. Campbell, KY. There I got my designation to rappel out of helicopters; of course, airborne is jumping out of planes. The more schools you have, the more opportunities you have to work in different places. I was already an infantryman, and I knew there was no way I was going to be denied any type of job opportunity in the U.S. Army. In other words, I wanted to make sure I had everything necessary to broaden my horizons in any type of unit out there.

U.S. Army Veteran Shares Painful Experiences of Military Racism, Part 5

THIS IS NOT WHAT I SIGNED UP FOR

by Sharon Rondeau

Gary Mason, wife Shahnaaz and son Josh at Mason's graduation from Airborne School, Ft. Benning, GA, 2005,