Afghan war?s end quiets chaplain's litany of funeral prayers

This is the place he found his calling.“This,” the minister says, “is holy ground.”The end of the war is sobering for those who have tended to the battle’s dead, who unzipped their body bags, dressed them in uniform one last time and clutched their bereft families.Virtually all of the Afghan war’s dead arrived back on American soil here at Dover Air Force Base. “My heart has been torn out so many times,” the 74-year-old says, “I can hardly count.”Dover Air Force Base has housed a mortuary since 1955, when airmen first received the dead in a pair of Quonset huts. “They put their life on the line for this country.”Sparks arrived on base in 1980 as a chaplain in the Air Force Reserves and largely was tasked with the spiritual needs of the 436th Airlift Wing, organizing Sunday school and seminars, talking through servicemembers’ problems at home, attending events, and otherwise becoming a familiar face while juggling his full-time job as pastor of a small Nazarene church.By the time he’d been at it for 21 years, he’d risen to lieutenant colonel and was starting to think about his military retirement. The military calls the movement of remains, from planes onto grey Ford cargo vans with the silhouette of saluting servicemembers painted on the back, “dignified transfers.” Aside from the quiet commands of seven-member honor guards who carry the boxes, the short prayers of the chaplain typically are the only words spoken during the ritual, and feeling the weight of such a responsibility, Sparks wrote a new one for each of the more than 400 times he was called to that duty.(AP Video)He saves them in Word files named for something defining about the day. And when I discover that I don’t really like it,” he says.At the start of the war, Sparks’ attention was almost exclusively on the mortuary staff. A handful of times over the years, a mortuary staffer has died by suicide or suffered through an attempt.“You can’t focus on the horror,” he says.