As the Tet Offensive Raged on, Army Chaplain Jim Rentz was Forced to Confront Unimaginable Horrors that led to his Own Crisis of Faith
Note: This is part two of a three-part special series for The Woodruff Times, featuring recollections and stories as told by Jim Rentz, Captain, US Army retired, and presents his story, unedited, and in his own words. These stories feature difficult subject matter and contain depictions of death and violence that may not be suitable for all readers. Discretion is advised.
By: Garrett Mitchell, Staff Writer
garrett@thewoodrufftimes.com
You Won’t be Forgotten…
Jim Rentz had been in Vietnam long enough to understand the magnitude of horrors that surrounded him by the time he was summoned to the field morgue to help identify the bodies of dead soldiers.
This time, though, hit the Army chaplain with an agonizing gut punch.
“I was asked by the executive officer to go into the field morgue and open up the body bags and look for identification just in case the dog tags had been blown off,” Rentz emotionally but steadily recalled. “I remember this one soldier; we found his billfold, and I felt like we were invading his privacy. I knew he couldn’t hear me, but I said, ‘I’m sorry, I’m just making sure you’re not an unknown soldier.’
His eyes were open. Even 58 years later, Jim recalls the final, agonizing look frozen into the young soldier’s lifeless face in terrifyingly vivid detail. A young man who, just hours earlier, had been full of life. Back home was a family who did not yet know about their loved one’s death.
In the moment, it was too much, and it shook Rentz to the core.
“We got his billfold out and looked in there, and there was a picture of him, his wife, and three kids,” he continued. “I remember looking at his face, and his eyes were still open. He had blue eyes. Just abject horror on his face. I can’t put into words what that was like. I kept thinking, this family is going to be in a living hell in a few days when some military notification officer comes to their door. I knew that when I got back to the states, I might be one of those officers doing that. I was thinking, just a few hours ago this man was living and joking with his buddies. I can’t imagine what it was like.”
Who is God?…
Weeks turned into months, and the abject violence of war became a disturbing normalcy to Captain Rentz.
“As I begin to experience the horrors of war…I saw organs outside the body, the horrible look on the soldiers’ faces that had been killed,” he shakily recalled.
Jim was there to bring spiritual comfort to his men, but the toll being taken on himself grew with each act of brutality that he witnessed. He ministered to those who had survived or clung to life, prayed for those who had been killed, but all the while the evil nature of it all was quietly eroding his faith and resolve.
Rentz met a young squad leader after a particularly bloody battle, and that interaction shattered his last remaining vestige of faithful innocence into dust.
“I do remember one particular battle,” explained a tearful Rentz. “What I saw and experienced was so horrible. I remember coming out of the aid station where all of these people were wounded and dying. I remember this one soldier; he was a young buck sergeant who had gone out with his men for the first time as a squad leader. Every man was killed in his squad but him. He came in on the medivac helicopter. The medics went to some dead people but I went to him. I put my arm around him and was trying to comfort him.”
He continued, “I don’t remember exactly what I said but the word ‘God’ came out of my mouth. He just threw his weapon down, flak jacket, and helmet, looked at me and said ‘Who in the hell is God today?’”
The question, rhetorical or not, shook Rentz. For a man whose faith had always been rock solid, which had grounded him amid terror no human being should experience, in that moment, Jim saw the line between good and evil begin to blur.
How, he questioned, could the loving God he professed to serve, allow so much pain, death, and destruction to permeate the world? Where did it end? The crisis in Jim Rentz’s mind deepened.
Crisis of Faith…
For the first time in his life, Jim Rentz prayed an angry prayer.
“I prayed to Jesus and asked, ‘Why, Jesus, did you say you didn’t come to bring peace, but a sword?’ Why would you say that? I was so mad with God,” Rentz said through tears. “I was so mad I could spit. I said, ‘I don’t understand it, Lord, but if I get out of here alive, I’m going to go home and dedicate my life to bringing peace on Earth and goodwill between human beings.”
Except in South Vietnam in 1968, there was no peace. There was no goodwill. There were only misery, despair, carnage, and death as the Tet Offensive slowly ground onward. Rentz simply could not reconcile what his own faith taught, what the faith of the Vietnamese taught, with the evil he saw every waking hour and, in his dreams, when he would finally find fitful sleep.
Both sides were entrapped in a vicious cycle of violence that was impossible to make sense of.
“I couldn’t reconcile it, but I had to face it,” said Jim. “Evil despises good. The innocent Vietnamese were caught in the middle. The Viet Cong or NVA (North Vietnamese Army) would come into their villages, and they had to kowtow to them. The South Vietnamese would kowtow to us. I can’t imagine what it was like when, all of a sudden, a bullet flies through and kills your kid. I remember running through villages one end to the other and seeing people on the side of the road with bullet holes in them suggesting an execution just for helping us out.”
The blurred line through which Rentz could no longer see brought him to an awful realization; he no longer knew what was good and what was evil as he had understood it before his arrival in Vietnam.
“I went outside, and I was thinking, visualizing the North Vietnamese and our guys, and wondered, ‘What is evil? What is good?’,” questioned Rentz. “The whole damn thing is evil to me. Many of the Viet Cong were Buddhist. That is a religion of peace as I understand it, but yet their leaders are telling them it is ok to kill and maim us.”
Jim became angry and bitter towards God. His faith cracked with fissures through which seeped the pain he endured, both for himself and the men he had watched die or go home with scars that would last the rest of their lives.
Looking back, said Jim, he marvels at the grace God showed him during the darkest time of his life.
“I had a crisis of faith, and I was real angry with God,” he admitted. “I stayed angry for several years. I had trouble going to church and trouble praying. I prayed angry prayers, and it’s a wonder he didn’t strike me dead. I know he wants us to have free will, but he could say ‘No! Don’t do that.’”
Unknown to Jim, he would soon find the light at the end of that dark tunnel of inner turmoil. His crisis of faith would give way to a new purpose in the form of a life he could save.
