Chaplains hear call to serve God while serving country

Growing up in Kuwait, Asif Balbale thought he wanted to become a chemical engineer. He never imagined enlisting in the U.S. Navy, much less becoming an imam.

Balbale got his engineering degree after immigrating to the U.S. at age 21. With jobs hard to come by, he tried to enlist in the Army, but didn’t weigh enough. Instead, he met the Navy’s minimum requirements.

Loading...

Comments

• Weigh In
• Corrections?

Personal Post

He was sworn in as a U.S. citizen in 2005 while deployed aboard the USS Boxer. Intending to apply for an officer program, Balbale, 31, mistakenly emailed a recruiter for the chaplain corps.

“God, I think, had better plans for me,” Balbale said, looking back.

And so it is for a number of military chaplains who, by twists of fate or perhaps divine Providence, found their calling to become chaplains while on active duty.

Now assigned to Camp Pendleton in California, Balbale is among more than 800 chaplains in the Navy and one of only a handful of Muslim chaplains. More than 3,000 chaplains — the vast majority non-Catholic Christians — serve across all branches of the armed forces.

Balbale received his master’s degree in spiritual theology from the Claremont School of Theology and was endorsed as an imam by the American Muslim Armed Forces Veterans Affairs Council. For the most part, the people to whom he ministers are not of his faith.

“My duty is to show care and concern, have a listening ear for them and seek ways to help” them according to their own faith, he said. Also important, he said, he gives Marines a better understanding of Islam.

Although many chaplains enter military service straight from seminary, Balbale is not alone in finding his religious calling while serving regular military duty.

Joseph Odell was in high school when he received a mailing from the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. “It looked really cool,” the captain said. “Little did I know what I was getting myself into.”

Although he grew up nominally Christian, it wasn’t until he was 21 that he “became a Jesus follower.” Wherever his Army deployments took him, he would attend Sunday services and assist the chaplain. He soon realized that the “gifts God had given me for leadership would allow me to lead spiritually.”

In 2005, he enrolled at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, returning to Army duty in 2009. Stationed at Fort Campbell in Kentucky, Odell, 38, said more than half of the soldiers he sees don’t share his religion.

“I’m just meeting them where they are and trying to help them get where they need to be,” he said.

As a student at the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, Md., Aaron Kleinman was the “Jew who did Jewish stuff.” Although he served two years as president of the academy’s Jewish Midshipmen Club, becoming a rabbi had never really entered his mind. If he hadn’t experienced deployments on two carrier ships that didn’t have onboard Jewish chaplains, it might have remained that way.

Kleinman, 38, had grown up in a Conservative Jewish home. When he was stationed in St. Augustine, Fla., he and his wife gradually grew comfortable with an Orthodox lifestyle.