{"id":16840,"date":"2012-03-16T01:15:28","date_gmt":"2012-03-16T04:15:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/christianfighterpilot.com\/blog\/?p=16840"},"modified":"2015-06-27T19:14:01","modified_gmt":"2015-06-27T22:14:01","slug":"chapel-basic-training-doughnuts-and-lemonade","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/christianfighterpilot.com\/blog\/2012\/03\/16\/chapel-basic-training-doughnuts-and-lemonade\/","title":{"rendered":"Chapel, Basic Training, Doughnuts and Lemonade"},"content":{"rendered":"

“I never attended services in the civilian world. But all that changed when I joined the Army.”<\/em><\/p>\n

Jake Kohlman thought religious services during basic training would be a good excuse to get away from the military training instructors.\u00a0 He was right.\u00a0 But he was also renewed in his faith.\u00a0 As it turns out, many trainees may have gone just for the doughnuts:<\/p>\n

After the service we filed into the parking lot, where some kind, older veterans had set up picnic tables with lemonade and doughnuts. Now I understood why the service was so popular…The doughnut I had that day was the best I\u2019d ever had.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Turns out some other trainees caught on:<\/p>\n

Eventually, word leaked out to the rest of the company about the doughnuts and lemonade, and by the end of Basic, 65 soldiers from my company alone were marching to services on Sunday…’<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Chris Rodda of Michael Weinstein’s MRFF has previously said Christian organizations tempted people in with pizza and ice cream (and then apparently hypnotized them over to the dark side).\u00a0 She even dubbed it “conversion by temptation<\/a>,” but she failed to acknowledge the “practice” is not unique to Christianity.<\/p>\n

After all, the 65 soldiers attending religious services for doughnuts and lemonade weren’t attending a Christian service.<\/p>\n

It was Jewish.<\/p>\n

Regardless, the impact of the spiritual support provided by the Jewish service during basic training was not only extremely beneficial to his training, it has given him a spiritual support continuing through the rest of his career:<\/p>\n

I still have the Torah the chaplain gave me that first Sunday. I kept it with me through every bit of training I did after Basic: Officer Candidate School, Infantry Basic Officer Leadership Course, Ranger School, and finally Airborne School. It\u2019s always there when I need it. It\u2019s seen better days\u2014the cover is battered, some of the pages are dog-eared\u2014but all in all, it\u2019s held up remarkably well through patrols, battle drills, and marches.
\n\u00a0
\nLast week, I deployed to Afghanistan, with my Torah safely packed in my assault pack. My Forward Operating Base has Jewish services at 1830 hours, every Friday. I don\u2019t know if they\u2019ll serve lemonade and doughnuts this time, but either way, I\u2019ll be there.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The US military does an admirable job of supporting the religious freedom of its troops — even in basic training.\u00a0 Protecting that free exercise in basic can have a lasting impact on troops’ entire military careers.<\/p>\n

Lt Jake Kohlman’s full article<\/a> is well worth the read.<\/p>\n

Via Jews in Green<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

“I never attended services in the civilian world. But all that changed when I joined the Army.” Jake Kohlman thought religious services during basic training would be a good excuse to get away from the military training instructors.\u00a0 He was right.\u00a0 But he was also renewed in his faith.\u00a0 As it turns out, many trainees may have gone just for […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[58,88,38,5284,175,96,3076,70,3075,39,3077,85,2,5218,7,10,171,122],"class_list":["post-16840","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-government-and-religion","tag-afghanistan","tag-army","tag-chapel","tag-chaplain","tag-chris-rodda","tag-christian","tag-doughnuts","tag-evangelism","tag-jake-kohlman","tag-jewish","tag-lemonade","tag-mikey-weinstein","tag-military","tag-military-religious-freedom-foundation","tag-mrff","tag-religion","tag-religious-freedom","tag-torah"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/christianfighterpilot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16840","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/christianfighterpilot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/christianfighterpilot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/christianfighterpilot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/christianfighterpilot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=16840"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/christianfighterpilot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16840\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/christianfighterpilot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16840"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/christianfighterpilot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16840"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/christianfighterpilot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16840"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}