Sean C. Morgan
Of The New Era
The route Mark Gilderhus has taken to reach Fir Lawn Lutheran where he has pastored for the past few months is a little different than usual.
Gilderhus brings a heavy military background with him, having served as an Air Force medic from 1972 to 1976, during the Vietnam era. He has 15 years experience as a parish pastor, and he went back into the military in 1996 as a reserve Air Force chaplain.
In 1998, he became an active Army chaplain, and then he served in the war in Iraq at a military hospital in Kuwait. Now, he is a chaplain in the Oregon National Guard, 1249th Engineering Battalion, Salem.
“I went through three basic trainings,” said Gilderhus, 54. “You’d think I’d catch on.”
Military chaplains face a diversity of faiths, he said. “As an Army Chaplain you have to be flexible.”
When a chaplain can’t perform a service because of his own church beliefs, he must find a chaplain who can, Gilderhus said.
“For the most part, you work together – much different than maybe a civilian situation.”
Initially, Gilderhus served as a chaplain in a core support battalion based at Ft. Lewis, Wash. He then went to Korea and later returned for training as a hospital chaplain with an emphasis in combat theater.
Serving with the 47th Combat Support Hospital, he was sent to Camp Wolf in Kuwait several months prior to the beginning of the war in Iraq. The camp had 1,000 personnel and 300 beds. It was set up in seven or eight days.
“The first two months it was very hard, very stressful,” Gilderhus said. Twenty-four, seven, it was work, sleep and eat. Every third day, staff members got clean uniforms.
While in Kuwait, his hospital had 28 alerts where personnel would don gas masks and head for bunkers.
He was there from March to November 2003.
Everyone was busy all the time on shifts, but when mass casualties came in, then it really got busy, Gilderhus said. “The medical side of the house did miracles.
“Our job as chaplains was to try to see each person that was in the hospital.”
Many of the patients were coming out of surgery “maybe minus an arm or a leg,” Gilderhus said. It was a triage situation, where medical people would prioritize patients, dealing with the most serious first. The chaplains would move among the patients comforting them.
In the Air Force, a chaplain’s denomination mattered, he said. In the Army, it didn’t matter.
“(Soldiers are) used to having a chaplain, and the religious denomination isn’t as important to them,” Gilderhus said. “They want to know there’s a chaplain there. They look at their chaplain as someone they can talk to.”
He held patients’ hands many times, he said, and over and over these patients just wanted to get back with their fellow soldiers.
The chaplains also worked with the doctors and nurses, and they also had to deal with themselves.
The hospital had two chaplains, and a third, a colonel, “had a lot of wisdom, and he made sure we got together once a week to process,” Gilderhus said. “I heard all the stories, how they were wounded, how their buddies were killed, how civilians were killed. As chaplains, we tried to support each other.”
The same thing goes for chaplains in the National Guard. Chaplains are dispatched with a senior officer or a non-commissioned officer when someone dies to inform the family. Counseling services are available for them too.
“The best counselors are those who receive counseling,” Gilderhus said.
Gilderhus grew up in North Dakota, Washington and Minnesota. He attended high school in Minnesota and Washington, graduating in 1970. He took two years of college at Lutheran Bible Institute (Now Trinity Lutheran College) in Issaqua, Wash., and then completed his bachelor’s degree at George Fox University in 1978. He earned his master of divinity degree at Wartburg Theological Seminary in Dubuque, Iowa.
As a youngster in confirmation, “I thought I wanted to be a pastor,” he said. “I saw what our pastor did. I don’t know how you can know at 12 or 13 what you want to do with the rest of your life.”
But he did, and he was ordained in 1982 and ended up at a Lutheran church in Eugene.
While serving there in the 1990s, he received a call from the national church organization, which was looking for chaplains. He had prior military service, so they looked to him.
He thought he had said goodbye to the military, and his initial response was “absolutely not,” he said. But “I was asking God what’s the next step, and then this thing came out of the blue.”
He applied and went to the Air Force for two years and then to active duty in the Army and “probably the best years of my life in the ministry.”
Like many, he wondered whether he was trained enough to handle the high stress of combat. He was nervous about it, whether he would be able to make a difference.
“After five years of training, when our boats hit the ground in Kuwait, I said, ‘This feels familiar.'”
The hospital in Kuwait was closed, and the doctors and staff returned to Ft. Lewis. There, he suffered a heart attack, and a nurse told him, “Chaplain, you took care of us for nine months. Now let us take care of you.”
He left active duty following the heart attack and joined the Oregon National Guard. He answered a call to pastor Fir Lawn Lutheran Church part-time.
He told his bishop he wanted to stay in the Guard and would need to take a church that would be flexible enough to allow him to follow his Guard schedule.
His wife, Judy Adair, works in Eugene, so he continues to reside there.
He and Adair each have two children ranging in age from 23 to 31. They have no grandchildren.
He said he enjoys the friendly, small-town atmosphere in Sweet Home.
“I really like (Sweet Home),” he said. “I think it would really be nice to live here.”
“It’s really a new chapter in my life, and I’m really appreciative of the people here,” Gilderhus said.
His his favorite Scripture is Isaiah 43:1-3, in which God tells the people of Israel they are His, that He has chosen them, Gilderhus said. He tells them that when, not if, they pass through water and fire, when lives may come to an end, He is with them.