Mass

There's a lot of religion in a war zone, but not a whole lot of church. Yes, it's available on base every Sunday, but I work every Sunday, and so does everybody else. This week, however, was Ash Wednesday for Catholics, so I got my boss to give me a precious hour and a half off to go to church.

I walked over to mass with our senior enlisted person on our shift, Staff Sgt. M., who is originally from Columbia and speaks English perfectly, but had to resort to Spanish throughout the mass because she couldn't remember the English mass without a book.

The building is actually one of the free-standing "real" buildings on the palace grounds, not a tent or trailer. Not sure what it once was, but you cross a quaint (for concrete) bridge across the canal to get there. Kind of like Venice, only there are no boats going beneath it.

The chaplain, an older guy wearing combat boots that stuck out from under his vestment, gave a good sermon on contradictions, starting off with quotes from Genesis and other bible bits. How contradictory, he said, that we were here to use force to promote peace. But that, he said, was in the nature of the world.

He had a point, I guess. I realized it after communion. I took the bread, and then a sip of wine - probably the only alcohol allowed on the entire base - and then headed back to my seat. As I made my way through the aisle, I carefully stepped over all of the M-16s laid down across the path. Church, I thought to myself, was never like this back home.