After seeing how faith had helped him and other soldiers at war, he knew he wanted to become a chaplain.
The intensity of his first deployment in 2003, he said, forced him to seek direction and community in his Christian faith. He deployed to Iraq while his first child was still in the hospital. He began as a grunt private who enlisted in 2002, when he and his wife had a baby on the way and Congress was voting to approve the use of force in Iraq. The brigade chaplain didn’t start out as a chaplain.
