In this first of three interviews, Chaplain (Major) Merrell D. Knight Jr. talks about his experiences as the chaplain for 1st Battalion, 505th Parachute Infantry Regiment in Afghanistan from July 2002 to February 2003 in support of Operation Enduring Freedom. Following notification of the unit's deployment, Knight's preparations included conducting a number of marriages, gathering appropriate devotional materials, working with the family readiness group, and providing the medics some rudimentary critical event stress management training, but he states that more time should have been made so that the individual soldiers could spend more time with their families. Once deployed to Afghanistan, the battalion was scattered over a huge area, with many of the soldiers stationed in platoon-sized forward operating bases (FOBs) in remote locations. Knight's primary challenge became providing religious ministry to a very dispersed unit and he made it a goal that none of the battalion's paratroopers would go more than two weeks without seeing a chaplain, even if it was not their chaplain. To reach this goal, Knight found himself spending much of his time hitching rides on resupply helicopters from FOB to FOB to reach all his soldiers. He says that it was remarkably easy to work with the aviation brigade in finagling a seat for himself and his assistant without any priority. He notes that there was one particular event in which five of a 50-man detachment became casualties and he conducted the critical event debrief even though he was also suffering from some degree of combat stress. He tried to ensure that there was at least one extraordinary minister of the Eucharist in each company to overcome the limited availability of Catholic chaplains, and for the high holy days, "We were able to once again jump through a lot of hoops to get the two or three Jewish soldiers from maybe a very forward-deployed-FOB location back to one of the centers where the Jewish rabbi was." Knight states that, in Afghanistan, the fight is very decentralized, and if a chaplain wants to provide his men with the religious ministry they deserve, they have to be willing to do a great deal of traveling. He closes his interview by recommending that the Army dedicate some aviation assets to unit ministry coverage because of the travel requirements currently placed on chaplains and the importance of providing that coverage to the soldiers.

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