WASHINGTON, U.S., June 2, 2011 (Stripes.com): As a child in New Delhi and other cities of India’s northern Plains, Pratima Dharm moved easily through a kaleidoscopic swirl of religions and cultures. “My close friends in school represented all the different faith groups, and it never occurred to me then that we were different or there was anything strange about it.”
She feels the same decades later. The U.S. Army, where she holds the rank of captain, and the United States itself, where she immigrated just months before the 9/11 attacks, were founded on the idea that people can be united while worshipping differently, she said.
Dharm, 40, has been named the first Hindu chaplain to serve the Department of Defense. Hinduism, with nearly a billion adherents worldwide — but fewer than 1,000 active service members, according to Pentagon statistics — was the largest of the world faiths not represented by a chaplain.
Dharm, a chaplain on the medical staff at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, has started getting emails from Hindu service members around the world. “I’m already on the job,” she said. “There’s this tremendous sense of hope and relief that there is someone who understands their story at a deeper level, coming from the background I do.”
She’s now sponsored by Chinmaya Mission West, a Hindu religious organization that operates in the United States. The Air Force officer who led the Pentagon action group that established Chinmaya West as a chaplain endorsing agency said Dharm’s story is testimony to American pluralism and democracy.
“I get emotional when I talk about it,” said Lt. Col. Ravi Chaudhary, a cargo plane pilot and acquisitions officer. “When you consider Pentagon bureaucracy … when people here saw that in a fundamental way this is an expression of American values, people moved so quickly to accomplish this.”
Dharm spent a year at a forward operating base near Mosul, Iraq, in 2007 and 2008. She received a Bronze Star and an ArmyCommendation Medal, among other awards, but the most important thing she came home with was a deeper understanding of what Army chaplains are there for. It isn’t to advocate for their own faiths, but to bind up the wounded spirits soldiers of any background receive in the brutality of battle.