KANDAHAR, Afghanistan — Spc. Michael Raymond, assigned to the 19th Engineer Battalion, has a calling, he returned to the Army to help Soldiers.

After a 12-year hiatus following his first enlistment from 1990 to 1994, Raymond re-entered the Army September 2007 with the chaplain assistant military occupation specialty. He is currently on a 12-month deployment to Kandahar, Afghanistan.

"I felt called back to the service," said Raymond. "Soldiers are married with families and are completing multiple deployments; specifically I really wanted to help Soldiers with the problems that come from those two areas."

According to Raymond, the job of a chaplain assistant is to provide security for the chaplain, support the transportation of the chaplain and keep track of inventory.

"We are his gun," according to Raymond. "We try to maintain 360 degrees of security around the chaplain. We keep his head down and lay down fire if necessary."

Besides protecting and providing administrative support to the chaplain, Raymond also counsels Soldiers.

"While all chaplains are trained and educated to do counseling, all chaplain assistants are not. It also depends on the chaplain whether he wants the chaplain assistant to counsel or not," according to Raymond. "I have done counseling, mostly pre-counseling and assessments. I can tell the chaplain how I feel a Soldier is doing which gives him a head start on the Soldier and lets him take care of the Soldier a little faster."

Soldiers come to Raymond with problems such as combat stress, depression and a wide variety of personal frustrations and problems.

"We have plumbers [in our unit] but there is no need for plumbing in most of the work we do. The Soldier feels like his qualifications are wasted because he wants to do his plumbing work while he is pounding nails or augmenting something else he is not trained to do," said Raymond. "Things like that make Soldiers frustrated especially in the deployed environment, so we try to help them get through it."

To be a successful chaplain assistant Raymond has to be flexible, tolerant and a hard worker. He and his chaplain are a two-soldier team. Where one lacks in ability, the other steps in to supplement strengths and weaknesses and provides Soldiers the necessary support.

"It can be easy to be a lazy chaplain assistant and get away with not doing much," said Raymond, "but successful is the one who gets in there and gets their hands dirty with the Soldiers and makes sure their chaplain is successful before they are."

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Date	Action	Time Elapsed (h:m:s)
10/17/2009 15:13	Asset Received	00:00:00
10/17/2009 15:13	Asset Published	00:00:00

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