[magician]

A chaplain named Paul Barkey helped me out when I really needed some help, back in 1987.

Chaplain Barkey was a Major, and assigned as the command chaplain at the Special Warfare Center on Ft. Bragg.

I was getting married and getting out of the Army on a ROTC scholarship at the time. I was confronting a number of personal dilemmas that Chaplain Barkey helped me navigate.

He was a good man. I have never forgotten him, or his reply when I asked him how I could ever repay his kindness to me. He told me, "just pay it forward. When someone else needs help, help them. That is the best way that you can repay me."

I have tried to follow this advice, and still do. When others ask me, today, how they can repay any favor that I do for them, I tell them what Chaplain Barkey told me: "pay it forward."

I also remember Chaplain Larry Mack very fondly. Chaplain Mack was the Battalion Chaplain at 2d Ranger Battalion in the early 1980's. When we deployed for war, he jumped in with the boys under fire, and he and his assistant, a guy named Flores, augmented the HHC medics in the Battalion Aid Station.

Another good man.