By Michelle Martin
Staff writer

Father Ken Carlson loved the military life.

Carlson also loves being a priest.

The 32-year-old associate pastor at Our Lady of the Ridge Parish in Chicago Ridge served three years in the Air Force before returning home to care for his ailing mother. After she died, he entered the seminary.

Now he can combine his two loves as a U.S. Navy chaplain.

He decided to pursue a military chaplaincy after reading “The Grunt Padre: The Service and Sacrifice of Father Vincent Robert Capodanno, Vietnam 1966-1967,” by Father Daniel Mode (CMJ Marian Publishers). The book tells the story of Capodanno, a Maryknoll missionary who served with the Marines in Vietnam and was killed in action. He was awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor after his death.

“When I left the military and went into the seminary, it was a time of discernment as to whether I wanted to be a military chaplain,” Carlson said. “Once I got ordained, it was still in my mind.”

The thought stayed in his mind until one Friday last year, when he happened to be in church on his day off. He picked up a Maryknoll magazine with an article about “The Grunt Padre,” and immediately started looking for the book.

He found it on Amazon.com and received it a few days later.

“I read the whole book that night,” Carlson said.

The next day, he got up and wrote to Cardinal George, asking permission to become a military chaplain.

Shortly thereafter, in October 2000, the cardinal visited Our Lady of the Ridge to dedicate the new church. Carlson got 10 minutes with him in the sacristy before the Mass. By the end of the conversation, Carlson said, Cardinal George told him his paperwork would be in the mail the next day.

“From there on out, everything went extremely smoothly,” he said. “My recruiter said he had never seen it go so smoothly.”

Carlson was commissioned as a Navy chaplain with the rank of lieutenant junior grade in March, and reports for Officer Indoctrination School for chaplains in Providence, Rhode Island, in June.

For Mode, dramatic stories about the book’s effect have become common.

Mode started his research on Capodanno as a seminarian 12 years ago.

A Navy chaplain and priest of the Diocese of Arlington, Va., Mode first became interested in Capodanno when he was in chaplain school in Rhode Island.

There, the new chaplains jogged on a road named for Capodanno, worshipped in a chapel named for Capodanno, and ran into his name nearly everywhere they turned.

“I thought it would be quite an easy paper to do, he was so well known,” Mode said. “I very quickly discovered there had only been one small paper done about him.”

Thus began Mode’s mission to learn about and tell the story of Father Vincent Capodanno, the youngest son of a Staten Island family who went to Vietnam by way of serving as a Maryknoll missionary in Taiwan.

Mode spent three hours a day for years working on his 275-page thesis, spending time with Capodanno’s family and fellow servicemen.

Finding the Vietnam veterans—the souls Capodanno shepherded in his life and his death—proved the biggest challenge.

“Vietnam vets as a rule don’t like to talk about their experiences,” Mode said.

For many who did contact him, it was the first time they had talked about what happened to them.

More than 400 copies of the thesis were printed in 1992. But Mode’s involvement didn’t end. He kept hearing from Vietnam veterans and others who were touched by Capodanno’s life. Eventually, he decided to turn the thesis into a book.

As he worked, he heard from more and more men who had served with Capodanno. He had touched their lives profoundly then; for many, talking about him helped them begin to heal the wounds inflicted by the war decades earlier.

One of the men who got in touch with Mode, Ray Harton, had a particularly difficult story to tell. He saw Capodanno die, he said.

It was only after several contacts over a number of months that Harton told the whole story to Mode. He and two others were sent to attack a machine gun nest. The other two were killed; he was wounded. A medic came to help him; the medic was killed. When Capodanno came to minister to him, he was shot 27 times in the back.

“He’d felt tremendous guilt for 32 years,” Mode said. “He’d never told his wife what happened.”

But when he began talking about Capodanno, he also began turning to the church and began healing. Harton now serves as a director of the Reverend Vincent Robert Capodanno Foundation, which was started to spread the message of Christ as it was exemplified by Capodanno.

Capodanno, Mode believes, was so effective a shepherd and missionary because he did not start out as anyone extraordinary.

“His story is so normal,” Mode said. “In a sense, there was nothing really special about him, but he worked at slowly converting his life to more and more like Christ, trying to become holy and do good.”

His country awarded Capodanno the Bronze Star, although he never actually showed up to receive it, and the Medal of Honor. Mode has hopes the church will one day recognize him as a saint.

Many Vietnam vets already believe he is one.

“Most of the saints, they seem so untouchable,” Mode said. “He is somebody really real, and he touches them. … This is the first positive thing they’ve heard about Vietnam. A missionary’s work is never done, not even after death.”

Carlson wants to continue Capodanno’s missionary work in a concrete way. He will serve—for free—as a part-time Navy chaplain at Great Lakes Naval Training Center in North Chicago until he finishes his assignment at Our Lady of the Ridge in about 2 &Mac222; years. Then he will join the chaplain corps full-time, he hopes with the Marines, as Capodanno did.

“God has called me to this for a very particular reason,” Carlson said. “I remember the great, great impact my chaplain had on me when I was in the Air Force. I look at this as an opportunity to be able to spread the Gospel to people who are away from home for the first time, and are sort of looking.

“The book really inspired me to carry on that same mission that Father Capodanno died for.”



For more information about Father Capodanno or the Reverend Vincent Robert Capodanno Foundation, visit:
www.father-capodanno.org.