By Elizabeth Barhydt
My great-grandfather, Charles Henry Webb, was a military chaplain. I still have his field Book of Common Prayer. It is a treasure.
I cannot imagine trying to keep faith in the presence of brutality. Yet military chaplains often did.
There is beauty in that. In the depths of woe… grace.
As our nation approaches its 250th anniversary, we remember the men and women who kept it: those who defended it in battle, steadied it in sorrow, bound its wounds, buried its dead, and carried its highest ideals into the darkest places.
For this chapter in that continuing tribute, we salute a chaplain first brought to my attention by Reverge Anselmo–24th MAU: Vincent Capodanno, the Grunt Padre.”
Lt. Vincent R. Capodanno was born on Staten Island on Feb. 13, 1929, the tenth child of Italian immigrants Vincent Robert Capodanno Sr. and Rachel Basile Capodanno. His father died on Vincent’s 10th birthday. Three older brothers served in World War II. Before Vietnam, before the Medal of Honor, before anyone called him the Grunt Padre, his life had already been formed by obligation, prayer, and service. At Curtis High School and later during his undergraduate years at Fordham, he attended daily Mass; in 1949 he entered Maryknoll, the Catholic Foreign Mission Society of America. He was ordained in 1958 by Francis Cardinal Spellman and sent to Taiwan, where he ministered to Hakka-Chinese communities, taught native catechists, distributed food and medicine. Then he requested service with Marines in Vietnam. Maryknoll records note his Taiwan mission and his request to become a Navy chaplain; the Archdiocese for the Military records that he reported to the 7th Marines in 1966 and became a companion to the “Grunts,” living, eating, and sleeping as they did.
He went where they went.
Into mud. Into heat. Into fear. Into the loneliness of nineteen-year-olds at war. Vietnam supplied many hardships and few consolations. The Grunt Padre offered consolation anyway. He established libraries, gathered and distributed gifts, organized outreach programs for villagers, reassured exhausted men, consoled the grieving, heard confessions, instructed converts and handed out St. Christopher medals.
The Marines called him the “Grunt Padre,” which may be the highest theological degree war can confer. He did not minister from a distance. He made hardship sacramental by sharing it.
On Sept. 4, 1967, in the valley below Khe Sahn, Operation Swift began in calamity. A Marine Corps battlefield account describes Mike Company, 3rd Battalion, 5th Marines, engaging an estimated 2,500 North Vietnamese troops with roughly 165 U.S. Marines present; the same account remembers the battle as producing extraordinary valor, including that of Capodanno and Sgt. Lawrence D. Peters.
Capodanno was posthumously awarded the Medal of Honor on Jan. 7, 1969, presented at the Washington Navy Yard to his family. He is buried in Staten Island.
The Medal of Honor citation records the act in the formal language of military honor. Capodanno left the relative safety of the command post and ran through open ground swept by fire to reach M Company’s 2nd Platoon. He administered last rites, gave medical aid, encouraged the Marines around him and refused treatment after a mortar round wounded his arms and legs and severed part of his right hand. Then he saw a wounded corpsman in the line of fire of an enemy machine gunner about 15 yards away. He moved toward him and was killed inches from the man he was trying to save.
The wounded corpsman had a name.
He was Armando Garza Leal Jr., a Navy corpsman from San Antonio, 20 years old. According to his Navy Cross citation, Leal had run through fire to reach exposed casualties, treated wounded Marines for two hours between friendly and enemy lines, refused evacuation after being wounded, and continued his work after he was wounded again. When a Marine tried to pull him to cover and was shot in the hand, Leal pushed him away from the assaulting enemy. Then the machine gun fired from close range.
Capodanno saw him.
The priest, already wounded, moved toward the corpsman. The corpsman, already dying, had been moving toward the Marines. Their last acts met in the same narrow field of fire: one man carrying medicine, the other carrying absolution, both refusing the human instinct to save themselves first.
That is worth pausing over. Before Capodanno became the man running toward Leal, Leal had been the man running toward everyone else. The Grunt Padre’s final act was not only an act of sacrifice. It was an answer to sacrifice.
He was unarmed. He could not seize ground. He could not call off the war. He could not make the dead live again. But he could cross the distance between abandonment and mercy.
So he crossed it.
Capodanno’s memory did not end at the citation ceremony. The first chapel bearing his name was dedicated on Hill 51 in the Que Son Valley soon after his death. He had helped build it. Other memorials followed, including the Capodanno Memorial Chapel at the Navy Chaplains School in Newport, a chapel at Fort Wadsworth on Staten Island, and the USS Capodanno. The Catholic Church opened his cause for canonization in 2006, and the Capodanno Guild says he remains in the first stage of that process: Servant of God.
Capodanno belongs to a small company: the Congressional Medal of Honor Society lists nine chaplains among more than 3,500 Medal of Honor recipients.
His last act of faith on this earth was to run through enemy fire toward a wounded man. His congregation was the dying. His altar was Vietnam’s torn earth.
And his message endures: sometimes faith is a man, already broken, moving forward anyway.
