Military Pagans

First off, a confession. Some months ago I started to work on profiles of pagan soldiers with the intention of it getting published over at Killing The Buddha (or if they didn’t want it I was going to shop it around to some other magazines I had contacts with). So I went to some sources on the internet and managed to round up a decent amount of contacts to get started.

I did a few rounds of communication with soldiers who are actually in or around Iraq and sent off the first set of interview questions and waited. After about a month I realised that I wasn’t getting a response from my contacts. Which I thought was strange since it seemed like my initial contacts were more than eager to tell their stories. I then started to question whether I had asked the wrong questions, did I offend them? I tried to stay politically neutral, though I did ask them to detail how they felt about the conflict before and after their involvement, I also asked a lot of in-depth questions about how they felt about their faith in relation to the Muslim country they were now in the process of liberating. Then I thought maybe the e-mail was being screened? Maybe they did respond and the answers weren’t something the government wanted us to see? I have no proof or verification either way.

But with the recent emphasis on the “long hard slog” in Iraq I am thinking about trying to round up more contacts and try again. I think that minority faiths in the military are often overlooked and that their perspective ignored. Plus I highly respect the commitment pagan soldiers have made and think their voices need to be heard now more than ever.

Military Pagan Links:

The Military Pagan Network

Mil-Pagan Mailing Lists

Lady Libery League Military Pagan Support

Tags: Neopaganism