Seven Oaks Magazine.

The theme of this piece is “confessional” – in every sense of the word. Don’t tell Ralph Nader, but I have an admission to make: Despite having sent in a nasty, angry and ultimately ignored e-mail asking to cancel my e-subscription when the arrest of Saddam Hussein garnered a semi-triumphalist, “good can come from bad” mail-out, I still receive the Nation’s e-mail bulletins. And I still read them. That’s how I came across the recent “Editor’s Cut” weblog entry of Katrina vanden Heuvel – of the Tennessee sharecropping vanden Heuvels, I believe – dealing with the grotesque treatment of Muslim U.S. Army chaplain Captain James Yee.

Yee, as vanden Heuvel reminds us, was a victim of a powerful McCarthyite spasm on September 10, 2003, when he was “ accused of espionage, sedition, mutiny and aiding the enemy (crimes punishable by death).” She goes on to outline Yee’s further victimization: held in solitary confinement for nearly eighty days, and – once the allegations had been “dismissed” – prosecuted by the Army for adultery and downloading pornography. Vanden Heuvel conjectures that a possible explanation for Yee’s victimization was his criticism of the barbaric treatment of the Muslim prisoners held at Guantanamo, whose religious needs Yee was responsible for meeting. In a welcome departure from George Orwell’s near-monopoly on doom-saying political literary references, vanden Heuvel calls Yee’s trials and tribulations “Kafkaesque” (I must admit here that the K-word has been one of my favourite adjectives ever since the Shell Duvall character in Annie Hall told Alvy Singer that “Making love to you is a Kafkaesque experience. I mean that as a compliment.”).

And so, onto the other meaning of “Confessional” – in honour of Yee’s story, I bring you a classic video review of For God and Country, starring Ronald Reagan; a 1943 “War Department morale booster set during World War II.” In the picture, the evangelical Reagan stars in theological blackface as a Catholic chaplain, Michael O’Keefe. I was lucky enough to stumble across this gem in a Value Village in Halifax. I got For God and Country, the War Department’s story of a multi-denominational group of chaplains, on the same cassette as the sensitively-title Jap Zero, a “short Army information film decrib[ing] the difference between the American P-40 airplane and the Japanese Zero. Reagan stars as a youthful pilot who almost shoots down one of ours.” Oddly prophetic, given that Reagan didn’t announce his sympathy for the Waffen SS until 1985, outside Bitburg.

The relevance of For God and Country to Yee’s case is that the film marks an admittedly adorable foray into the world of multiculturalism. Besides the papist O’Keefe, there is a young Protestant named Manning, a former boxer who bunks alongside the young priest. Staying in the same room is a swarthy, Mediterranean character with thick eyebrows and pronouncedly ‘ethnic’ facial features. Could the War Department be so bold? Is he Greek Orthodox? No! He’s Arnold Miller, a Jew! And why not? After all, wasn’t saving the Jews what the American war against the Japanese to control the peoples, markets and resources of the South Pacific was all about? Over the course of the film, the director tries hard to include Judaica in the religious iconography emphasized in the picture, even going so far as to include a shot of a full synagogue in a montage about “the Sabbath” – though why the Jews are still at temple on Sunday is never explained.

But, as the case of James Yee testifies, the non-sectarian embrace of all God’s chaplains is an incomplete task. For God and Country depicts not one black or brown soldier; though one can pray that there exists a blaxploitation version in which a storefront preacher, a Garveyite and a Black Muslim chaplain engage in the same kind of camaraderie as O’Keefe and his pals.

The film’s chaplains are good ol’ boys, just three of the guys. Upon being assigned to a camp in Georgia, Manning discovers that “the easiest way to make friends is to be one.” He’s seen sparring with another young boxer, who asks the pastor to ease up a bit, as he laughs: “Easy, chaplain, easy – Wow. If your sermons carry the same wallop your punches do, we’ll all be in church on Sunday.” Father O’Keefe is similarly down-to-Earth, if a little stern with a soldier who takes the Lord’s name in vain as a bomb explodes over his shoulder:

Another young soldier marching through the jungles of New Guinea (which also stands for “No Guineas,” as the token Catholic is depicted as a palatable Irishman rather than, say, an olive-skinned Sicilian) tells O’Keefe that his “knees are trembling.”

“Mine were too,” the young priest explains, “Until I got down and prayed on them.”

Reagan also voices a Bushist “all-for-one-and-one-for-all”-ism to a surly young soldier who isn’t much of a team player: “These days, when a fella fights against his own team, it’s a break for the other side. Actually, he’s on the other side.” Then he gives the soldier a harmonica, and tells him that “Oh Susanna” is his “favourite tune.” Ah, the sweet sounds of crypto-fascistic Americana.

The film’s closing description of the nature of a chaplain’s role in the armed forces must ring especially ironic and painful for Captain Yee: “A soldier unarmed – yet not unarmed. For what better weapons may a man carry with him into battle than those of courage, of unswerving devotion to his faith, and to his fellow man?” Whoa, careful buddy. These days, that kind of talk will get you locked down in solitary.