For Gods and Country

Once chaplains are accepted into the military, they are paid, trained and deployed by the government. But they remain subservient to their endorsers, who can cancel their endorsements at any time.

That is what happened to Larsen, according to unclassified military e-mail messages obtained by The Washington Post.

When the Sacred Well Congregation applied on July 31 to become Larsen's new endorser, the Army initially cited a minor bureaucratic obstacle: It could not find a copy of his previous endorsement from the Chaplaincy of Full Gospel Churches, a Dallas-based association of Pentecostal churches.

The following day, a senior Army chaplain telephoned the Full Gospel Churches to ask for the form and, in the process, disclosed Larsen's plan to join Sacred Well.

Within hours, the Pentecostal group sent Larsen an urgent e-mail saying it had received a "strange call" from the Army Chief of Chaplains office. The caller "mentioned that a Donald M. Larsen . . . was requesting a change-over . . . to Wiccans," the e-mail said. "Please communicate with this office, as we do not believe it is you."

Larsen pleaded in his reply for the Full Gospel Churches not to cancel his endorsement until he could complete the switch. "Being here in Iraq has caused me to reflect on a great many things. However, as long as CFCG holds my endorsement, I teach and practice nothing contrary to your faith and practice," he wrote, adding: "It is all about the soldiers, please help me to continue to minister to them during this transition."

The Chaplaincy of Full Gospel Churches immediately severed its ties to Larsen. The Sacred Well Congregation could not renew his papers, because it was not yet an official endorser. Lacking an ecclesiastical endorsement, Larsen was ordered to cease functioning immediately as a chaplain, and the Pentagon quickly pulled him out of Iraq.

Dolinger, the Army Chief of Chaplains spokesman, denied that any discrimination was involved. "What you're really dealing with is more of a personal drama, what one person has been through and the choices he's made. Plus, the fact that the military does have Catch-22s," he said.

Jim Ammerman, a retired Army colonel who is president and founder of the Chaplaincy of Full Gospel Churches, acknowledges that there is a longstanding agreement among endorsers not to summarily pull the papers of a chaplain who wants to make a valid switch.

"But if it's not a valid thing, all bets are off," Ammerman says, adding that Wiccans "run around naked in the woods" and "draw blood with a dagger" in their ceremonies. "You can't do that in the military. It's against good order and discipline."

That description drew a laugh from Brig. Gen. Cecil Richardson, the Air Force's deputy chief of chaplains. "He's right, we can't have that in the military, but I don't think we've had any of that in the military," Richardson says.

Richardson says there are simply too few Wiccans in the military to justify a full-time chaplain.

According to Pentagon figures, however, some faiths with similarly small numbers in the ranks do have chaplains. Among the nearly 2,900 clergy on active duty are 41 Mormon chaplains for 17,513 Mormons in uniform, 22 rabbis for 4,038 Jews, 11 imams for 3,386 Muslims, six teachers for 636 Christian Scientists, and one Buddhist chaplain for 4,546 Buddhists.

Since returning from Iraq and visiting Texas, Larsen has gone home to Melba, Idaho. Divorced since 2004, he is living with his teenage children and serving as an artillery officer in the Idaho Army National Guard.

He said he knew from the start that converting to Wicca would raise questions but never expected the reaction to be so fierce.

"It's not my place as a little captain to challenge the decisions or policies or motives or actions of my superiors," he says. "I got to come home and resume my career in the Guard. I'm very thankful for that. Understand, it's all I've got left. . . . This was a big blunder. I barely survived it. I don't have another one in me."