Thomas Merton once said that a saint is more ordinary than the most ordinary of persons. In his ordinariness, the saint embodies a holy anonymity, eclipsed by the image of Christ shining from his entire being. The life of Vincent Robert Capodanno, MM, is a story of great ordinariness: He was a military chaplain who died while offering aid and comfort to a corpsmen who had been pinned down by enemy fire. The chaplain positioned himself between his young charge and the enemy, who opened fire despite the presence of an unarmed priest. Both men died, counted now among the too many casualties in a century characterized by too much bloodshed. But when this priest shed his own blood without hesitation, it was for the love of another and in the name of Christ. His seemingly anonymous act of charity firmly opposes the evils of war.
Chaplain Capodanno is hardly anonymous to anyone familiar with the Vietnam War. People who heard me speak about him on a recent television appearance contacted me just for the opportunity to share stories of how Fr. Capodanno had touched—or saved—their lives. He was so self-effacing, veiling his own spirituality, that he neglected to inform his own family of his many citations for valor, among them the Vietnamese Cross of Gallantry with Silver Star and the Navy Bronze Star. His family learned of these and other awards when they posthumously received his Congressional Medal of Honor—the highest award the military can bestow. Fr. Capodanno was one of only seven chaplains among the 3,410 persons in U.S. history to receive the medal.
However, it was also after his death that Fr. Capodanno’s family began to realize their brother’s most valued accolade: how he was beloved by his comrades in the Vietnam War as the “Grunt Padre.” In this era with too few heroes, Fr. Capodanno’s story demonstrates how Christ fashions the most humble among us into beacons of His Presence, asking us to gather others to Him through tireless acts of faith, hope, and charity.
Discerning the Call to Serve
Capodanno’s father, Vincent Sr., first set foot in the New World on Ellis Island in 1901, having emigrated from a small seaport town on the coast of Italy. In 1909, he married Rachel Basile, also of Italian descent, and they settled on Staten Island, New York, which was very rural then. Vincent, Sr., plied his trade as ship caulker in the largest and busiest shipyards in the world around New York City. Rachel managed the small family vegetable stand near home.
Ten children were born to this family, of which Vincent was last and the namesake of his father. On Vincent’s tenth birthday, his father died while working. Reeling from the sudden loss of their devoted father, Rachel relied on their vegetable store to support the family. With the guidance of their mother’s steadfast faith, when the children weren’t toiling at school or enjoying sports and club activities, they unselfishly took turns helping at the store. As the Great Depression ravaged the country, the family found itself without its patriarch but not without his inspiration. Scarce money and lack of comforts were hardly missed in a family rich with loyalty and animated with its Catholic faith. With tenacious purpose, the Capodanno family thrived.
The unfolding crisis of World War II captured young Vincent’s imagination just as it marshaled the hopes and energies of the nation. His life was animated by profound patriotism and active faith, both of which were the norm and not the exception in that era. General Douglas MacArthur was Vincent’s hero and the “Star Spangled Banner” his favorite song. After his high school graduation, Vincent sought to continue the education his parents valued, enrolling in night courses at Fordham University so that he could clerk by day on Wall Street and help his siblings relieve the financial burden of supporting the family. He attended daily Mass.
By 1949, the misery of the Great Depression and the ensuing theaters of war were becoming a memory, if not still vivid and with lingering impact. The Marshall Plan was heralded as a bulwark against the advance of a new and puzzling enemy—communism. But, for the most part, people were enjoying the relief and hope of an era marked by revived economic opportunity and a victory over the specter of world evil.
Vincent, however, was always on the lookout for challenges. While attending a spiritual retreat in 1949 with a close friend from Fordham, he confided for the first time that he had long felt drawn to become a priest. He admitted having dismissed the call, but the longing refused to subside. The friend was surprised. Vincent had never even hinted at these reflections during their long talks returning to Staten Island from night classes at Fordham. Over time, Vincent’s burning desire intensified, but he was greatly torn. Magnetized by a call to service, he was drawn to the service of Christ, yet he was also pulled by his other pressing, selfless responsibilities, particularly providing for his mother. Vincent delayed taking any action for as long as he could, and it would not be the last time Vincent’s call to serve created great tensions in his life.
Road to the Priesthood
Vincent, like many other young Catholic men of his generation, read The Field Afar, a magazine published by the Catholic Foreign Mission Society of America, better known as the Maryknolls. The Field Afar portrayed adventures in exotic settings and cultures that most people had never before read about or dreamed of. For centuries the uncharted expanses of the globe had captured the minds and hearts of lion-hearted men, but the Maryknoll invitation, typified by the stories of its priest-adventurers, required more than the most demanding challenges of exploration. It was an invitation to explore the uncharted waters of one’s own faith in Christ.
In foreign service with the Maryknolls, all comforting reference points would be lost, and so would the self—in complete imitation of the sacrificial life of Christ. The ultimate poverty in this missionary work would be an utter reliance on God’s grace and on faith in Christ for facing the unknown—physically and spiritually. As a rich return for living close to that mysterious boundary line running between the darkness of disbelief or ignorance and the light of grace and conversion, the Maryknolls were fueled by a life-affirming resonance with their newly ignited faithful.
The Maryknolls quickly proved to be highly effective in their evangelizing role. They were inspirations in their sometimes isolationist homelands. Almost immediately as well, they began to suffer great martyrdoms with their converts. In far-flung areas of the world, the Maryknolls reported incidents of murder, torture, rape, and displacement. The persecution and repression of Christians were on the increase, particularly under communist regimes. By 1949 when Vincent applied to the Maryknolls, no doubt could exist that the order was preparing martyrs as they guided priests through years of rigorous formation.
Training for the priesthood has traditionally been a highly demanding and long-term prospect, but a Maryknoll’s training included, alongside studies of the Summa Theologiae by St. Thomas Aquinas, courses on emergency medical care, basic sanitation, agrarian and irrigation methods, and survival tactics. Evangelization was grounded in practical know-how.
In 1958, Fr. Capodanno completed his course of seminary study and was ordained by Francis Cardinal Spellman. Between commencing Maryknoll studies and his ordination, Fr. Capodanno would have seen the beginning and the end of the Korean War—ignited with the surge of a Chinese-backed invasion of the southern peninsula and resolved with a dangerously high-voltage line of demarcation straining along the 38th parallel. To anyone reading the news during those years, the world appeared more dangerous than ever, and those dangers were striking closer to home. Casualties from the Korean War wounded many communities throughout the country, including the New York City and Staten Island area.
In a solemn tradition on the night after graduation, to the sonorous tolling of the mission bell, Maryknoll missionaries received their assignments. Fr. Capodanno learned he had been assigned to the sleepy island of Formosa. Like all his classmates, he could assume this assignment established a lifelong home in a far-off land. But unlike his classmates, Fr. Capodanno’s ministry would not follow a normal course of service. However, at the outset, he faced the same challenges any new missionary did.
In 1959, Fr. Capodanno arrived in Formosa, and he spent many of his early days laboring over exhausting and repetitious language lessons that the young missionary found difficult to master. A naturally warm conversationalist with a tendency toward humor, Fr. Capodanno was greatly frustrated because he could not understand or be understood by those he sought to serve. His limited verbal interactions must have fallen far short of the impact the young and enthusiastic missionary must have dreamt. Despite the difficulties, he doubtless had some lingering effect. For years after his death, the community remembered him and recently built a chapel in his honor.
A Passion for His Ministry
Many new missionaries find that the most inconsequential personality traits stateside can become the most difficult crosses to bear in a different land. Humid and damp, with only intermittently running water, Formosa did not easily accommodate a spit-and-shine outward appearance. For the young Vincent, who had tended toward perfectionism in his early life, adapting to the conditions proved difficult. A happy recipient of the doting oversight of five sisters in his upbringing, he was a meticulous dresser. A man who had fully shared all his life in the chores of a very busy household, orderliness and cleanliness were long-standing and second-nature habits for the young priest. In the Formosa of the late 1950s, cleanliness was a luxury, and sanitation was the first step many small villages had yet to take in the 20th century. For Fr. Capodanno, the adjustment involved a daily effort to surrender the habits of a past self for the Maryknoll habit in its fullest sense.
Additionally, the disciplined routine of the seminary gave way to the chaos of parish work among refugees, who continued to flood the tiny island, escaping from mainland China. Resources were strained. Adults and children arrived in dire need of medical attention, telling tales of oppression and persecution the world was not ready to hear. Fr. Capodanno’s struggles led him slowly to be able to listen well and hear their plight and to serve them in keeping with his calling. As his old habits were broken, he grew more open to those he struggled to serve.
Two years after his arrival in Formosa, Fr. Capodanno was reassigned to teach and counsel young men preparing for Formosa’s national college exam. Now experienced in the culture and increasingly facile with the language, Vincent was not only responsible for the academic training of these students. He also counseled the boys when the intense competition led to widespread depression and temptations of suicide. With tactful depth and perception, the soft- spoken priest offered guidance to young boys who would eventually carry the burden of leadership in a country thriving in a precariously singular adversity with communist China. From the burdens of his own cross, including his own drive and perfectionism, he extended a gentle empathy that won the trust of many youths. Counseling them in their duress was only a steppingstone to counseling other young men, in a few years, in the midst of the horrors of war.
After a few short assignments, Fr. Capodanno traveled home on his first furlough. His family had not seen him in six years. His spirit and good humor had changed little, and he slipped back into family life with ease. But clearly he was drawn to return to his ministry. Parting at the end of this visit bore an additional agony.
While returning to Formosa from his first furlough home, Fr. Capodanno learned the startling news that his assignment there was not, after all, to be his lifelong work. Suddenly, he had been transferred to Hong Kong. He would be able to keep up his personal appearance in this setting, but the missionary had already forsaken his meticulous ways in favor of serving Christ with true abandon. Fr. Capodanno viewed Hong Kong, a tiny colony flaunting a hugely successful capitalism in the face of its formidable northern neighbor, as too luxurious. But his superiors remained unwavering in their choice to send him to Hong Kong, despite the missionary’s repeated appeals. In his struggle to obey orders, Fr. Capodanno was faced with the daunting certainty that he was being called for a ministry more challenging than this comfort¬able assignment offered. Driven by this discomfort and the discernment process that followed over the ensuing weeks, a new direction emerged, leading the priest to the culmination of his life’s work.
Once he realized that he would not be able to return to Formosa, Fr. Capodanno switched his appeals to his superiors with the facility of one determined neither to disobey nor to fail to respond fully to a clear if troubling spiritual call. He found an avenue that accommodated both imperatives. His next letter to Maryknoll requested permission to join the Navy Chaplain Corps and to serve the growing number of Marine troops in Vietnam. His superiors, after a period of reflection, approved this request.
Fellow missioners recount harboring some doubt at that time about how such a meticulous and clean young man, whom they remembered from seminary, could adapt to the filth and madness in the trenches of warfare, but the years of spiritual surrender had already changed the man. His choice was an invitation welcoming God to take even greater control of his life. A rift in perception was developing between what others understood about Fr. Capodanno and what Fr. Capodanno was beginning to understand about those he served. And what he knew now was transforming him radically into a minister not readily understood by those who knew him before. Regardless of how different people may have judged his involvement in a controversial conflict, his tireless charity knew no politics. The grunts whom he was about to serve would soon revere the name of this chaplain up and down the line of conflict in Vietnam. They would have Christ’s presence radiating among them, and he would not abandon them.
In this way, Fr. Capodanno’s estrangement from some of his Maryknoll brotherhood was gently becoming manifest. By the time he returned to the United States on his third and last furlough, the anti-war movement would reject him for his ministry. A few of his fellow Maryknolls, who objected to the war, may have eschewed Fr. Capodanno’s company. He would be noticeably aged, and life’s circumstances would require him to sacrifice even the camaraderie of his fellow missionaries without ever intending to offend them or the world around them. His missionary’s fate had already been sealed in the steadfast love he had for his boys, for his grunts.
Service Among Grunts
In 1966, after eight months of training, Chaplain Capodanno arrived in Da Nang, Vietnam. Holy Week was beginning. All around him, a relentless tropical heat and humidity assaulted the body. Political unrest grew daily in intensity. Without a doubt, the missionary had landed in a live war zone, where the living and working conditions were primitive, and the need for spiritual guidance among courageous young men bordered on desperate. The missionary had changed, too. His impatience to serve was fueled by an energy reserved for those who have become single-minded in their certainty of having found God’s will for them. Within a day of arriving, when most officers would have sought respite to acclimate to the weather and circumstances, Fr. Capodanno and a fellow chaplain were lobbying with a sense of urgency to expedite transport to their assignments.
Just a few months after his dramatic arrival during Easter week, Fr. Capodanno was asked by a reporter why he had chosen to become a chaplain to grunts in the far-removed fields of Vietnam. His response was characteristically understated and issued the challenge implicit in Christ’s call to discipleship: “I joined the Chaplain Corps when the Vietnam War broke out because I think I’m needed here as are many more chaplains. I’m glad to help in the way I can.” Much help was needed. The number of troops deployed in Vietnam had increased significantly. Fighting was intensifying, and casualties in some conflicts were very high. One fact added to the pressure: In the Vietnam War there was an historic paucity of chaplains.
Along with all the impossibilities of facing war in its day- to-day reality, the troops needed additional spiritual sustenance as news of the anti-war movement at home reached the battlefields. The hunger and thirst for reassurance and charity were greater than ever. Here, the mundane actions and daily work of Fr. Capodanno and his fellow chaplains assumed even greater meaning. No one would have argued that it was not Christ’s desire to reach every one of the frightened and the dying who found themselves longing for God in a war zone. No one could deny that these brave chaplains were serving a cause of charity blind to ideology, eyes only on the call to service.
From the beginning with his first military assignment, Fr. Capodanno earned the reputation that would electrify the troops in Vietnam—here he came to be called, as a term of honor, the “Grunt Padre.” Who were the “grunts” who comprised his far-flung parish?
“Grunt” was a term used to specify an enlisted infantry Marine who was usually no older than 18 or 19 years, just out of high school. A grunt’s 13-month tour of duty typically consisted of days on edge guarding a post or fighting on high adrenaline. The battle scenes and piques of terror were interrupted by hours of boredom and haunted by sleepless nights. Known for a remarkable courage and tenacity, the grunts could hardly be prepared for the horrible realities of the war they routinely saw each day—deaths, brutal woundings, endless loneliness and depression, temptation to despair. To combat the darkness of the combatant, the light of Christ needed to be lit and carried. Such was the job of the Christian chaplain in a war zone.
The U.S. Marine Corps motto, “Semper Fidelis—Always Faithful,” was embodied by Fr. Capodanno for his charges. Assigned first to a battalion in battle and then to a medical unit, Fr. Capodanno chose to be more than just a priest assigned to minister to the tragedies of war. He became a spiritual comrade by removing all distinctions and obstacles between his grunts and himself in the way he had learned in his Maryknoll training and ministry. He lived, ate, and slept as the men did. He knew how the grunts thought and felt because he was with them wherever they were and in a way few chaplains, even good and devoted ones, sought to be.
Grunts recall in vivid detail their padre keeping company with them through an entire night, isolated in distant and dangerous jungle outposts. Others recall the Grunt Padre leaping out of a helicopter in the midst of battle, blessing the troops, serving Eucharist to the Catholics, and then leaping into a chopper heading off to another corner of active conflict. Fr. Capodanno’s night hours, after long days, were frequently sleepless. The light in his tent was ever burning, waiting for someone to drop in for comfort and guidance. In any spare hour, he could be found writing letters of personal condolence to parents of wounded and dead Marines.
He remained at the side of the dying, present until the end, rather than let any man die alone, and he then sought to offer solid grounding and hope to the buddies who grieved the loss of friends. He established a library and readily shared his rations and cigarettes with anyone in need. Often when time and circumstances allowed, he mobilized volunteers to help local villagers with repairs and health care. For Christmas, he ran a relentless campaign to gather gifts from friends and organizations all over the world; he wanted no grunt in his care to suffer being forgotten. He spent his own money buying his grunts items they needed but could not afford. He heard confessions for hours on end, instructed converts, and visited outlying company bases and hospitals to offer prayer for those soldiers whom he had joined in combat.
This level of engagement in active battle is not expected of military chaplains, but during the first eight months of his Vietnam missionary work, due to scenes like these, Fr. Capodanno quickly became the most recognizable chaplain serving the Marine Corps. An official citation recommending Fr. Capodanno for the Bronze Star captures the snapshot well:
Invariably, he sought out that unit which was most likely to encounter the heaviest contact. He would then go with that unit and continually circulated along the route of march. During breaks, never resting, he moved among the men. His bravery, his humor, his right word at the right time contributed to the success of the unit.
An astounding portrait of Fr. Capodanno emerges as the stories of these heroic episodes accumulate in tapes and transcripts on my desk. Many veterans who served in Vietnam carry these memories like a salve, along with the St. Christopher medals the missionary distributed generously, close to the pain in their hearts.
Faithful to the End
While working for his second assignment with a medical battalion, Fr. Capodanno’s tour of duty was drawing to a close. He requested an extension, and it was granted. Responding to the inquiry from a Maryknoll classmate who wanted to know why he chose to stay, Fr. Capodanno could say only that his work “energized him,” and one is reminded of how, in the tradition of the missionaries who had gone before him, he was fed by the intense hunger and developing faith of the men whom he served.
As his short extension drew to a close in 1967, Fr. Capodanno worked tirelessly in his new duty assignment among the 5th Marines, who were now in a constant state of battle alert due to an ominous development—growing strength and numbers of the North Vietnamese Army in the immediate vicinity. Rather than abandon the 5th Marines as the holidays drew near, Fr. Capodanno requested another extension to stay with his men through the end of the year. It was again granted, and it was understood no further extension was likely. These would be his last weeks in Vietnam.
On September 4, 1967, Company M of the 3rd Battalion, 5th Marines, encountered an ambush by the North Vietnamese Army in what was to have been a routine mission. Outnumbered 5-to-1 by 2,500 North Vietnamese troops, the Marines were encircled by gunfire with little protection, and they scrambled to defend themselves. Buddies made heroic efforts to retrieve the wounded from the field of fire. Fr. Capodanno had already suffered wounds that almost shattered his right hand and shredded his right arm, but he refused to be medivacked. The men in battle that day who survived recall rallying at the sight of the tall, lanky chaplain caring for the wounded and anointing the dying. The radio report that the Grunt Padre had been sighted traveling down the line praying for their comrades was like a ray of hope for the tortured communications audience.
After hours in the fighting, the battle-seasoned chaplain spied a wounded corpsman who had been knocked down by the burst of an automatic weapon and was unable to move. Sprinting to his side, Fr. Capodanno began to administer medical attention. The Viet Cong machine gunner ignored the presence of an unarmed minister and opened fire again with his automatic weapon. The corpsman, like so many other dying men Fr. Capodanno had served before, did not die alone. The Grunt Padre took 27 bullet wounds in his spine, neck, and head. Veterans recall a leaden silence descending on the troops throughout the country as they heard the news: The Grunt Padre had fallen in battle.
A seed must die before its life work can flourish; Christ’s work cannot be stopped by death. Fr. Capodanno’s ministry continues even as his life ended so abruptly. His memory lingers among veterans of Vietnam and other service persons who have heard of the unique heroism of this priest. Abandoned by many others in the protests of the ’60s and ’70s and buried in the haste to forget what could not be changed, these veterans and their families still have a missionary tending their needs through his intercession even now. The healing is not yet complete. The missionary’s work is not yet done.
Fr. Capodanno’s enduring memory deserves a home so that his ministry to his beloved grunts who fought in Vietnam may continue. The families of our Vietnam veterans and the families of the many casualties of war need to be entrusted to the care he would have others of us take up. The Grunt Padre, the life story of Fr. Capodanno will be published by CMJ Marian Publishers. All proceeds from its sale will go to the Vincent Robert Capodanno Foundation, a nonprofit foundation established to memorialize this holy and courageous priest and to continue his ministry of outreach to his beloved grunts.