On the Song Bow, a river near Quang Tri, just south of the line of demarcation separating North and South Vietnam, it was early morning on Easter Sunday, April 6, 1969. Young Army Chaplain William Brock Watson stood waist deep in water, thousands of miles away from home and a world away from churches and steeples, Easter lilies and choirs. Instead, he looked upon the bright faces of the three young soldiers standing with him in the murky river. The young men were there to be baptized.

&uot;It was a very dramatic time in my life and a very memorable Easter,&uot; said Watson, now pastor at Westminster Presbyterian Church in Natchez and a retired brigadier general who rose to be chief of chaplains for the Army National Guard. &uot;The battalion commander was Roman Catholic. I reported to him that I had three guys who wanted to be baptized in the river,&uot; Watson said, sitting in his study earlier this week and thumbing through a small diary he kept during the year he spent in Vietnam with the 101st Airborne Infantry Division. &uot;He said to me, ‘Do you know what is going to be required for you to do that? Why can’t you just pour it over their heads?’&uot;

What the service required was helicopter reconnaissance over the river to be sure the area was secure and a site chosen near a bridge that was considered safe &045; at least during the daylight hours. &uot;We owned the bridge in the daytime and the North Vietnamese in the night,&uot; Watson said.

The baptism was a joyful experience, he said. The soldiers, all about 20, had approached the chaplain’s assistant to make their request. Perhaps they had been sitting around talking about it and learned that Jesus had been baptized in a river, Watson said.

Attempts to get the soldiers to agree to baptism in a makeshift tank before Watson learned of their request went nowhere. &uot;And who was I to say you can be sprinkled instead of being baptized in the river? There was no doubt in my mind that if they wanted to be baptized in the river, we were going to do it.&uot;

Robert King was one of the three. He had a cast on his leg, but that did not deter his wading into the river. &uot;He was a stocky young guy, blond hair and blue eyes, a ruddy complexion,&uot; Watson said. &uot;He was going to join a Baptist Church in South Carolina when he went home.&uot;

King did not make it home. He was killed two weeks later, a casualty among many dozens during the weeks before and after that Easter Sunday. But his death perhaps was made more poignant to the chaplain who had shared the Sacrament of Baptism in the Song Bow with the soldier.

From Palm Sunday, March 30, to Easter Sunday, April 6, and during the week after Easter, fighting raged and casualties mounted. As chaplain, Watson was aboard the helicopters, amid the fighting and available even in the most dangerous, bloody combat. That’s what a chaplain does, he said.

&uot;We had a kind of combat theology. You do what you have to do to fortify and sustain,&uot; he said. &uot;There was not a lot of time for counseling. In those kinds of conditions, you do what is necessary to fortify the young men who are trying to stay alive and get back home.&uot;

In his diary, Watson recorded the dead, the wounded and the memorial services for the deceased leading from Palm Sunday to Good Friday. &uot;It was a difficult time,&uot; he said. He helped carry bodies from an ambush site in the Ashau Valley. A chaplain with whom he had gone to chaplain school and jump school had his foot blown off. Enemy rockets took two lives and wounded others as helicopters returned to the landing zone one night.

On Good Friday, Watson was with a company of soldiers on a mountainside. &uot;The sky opened, and it hailed. We were in a terrible predicament. It became almost an existential experience for me that I can’t describe. It almost blew me away,&uot; he said. &uot;The side of the mountain was covered in hail. It was like a crucifixion scene. I’ve never had a Good Friday so dramatic and so memorable. How could you be any closer to the cross?&uot;

Going from a week filled with death, carnage and life-changing drama to the baptisms in the river was not easy. But the joy of that Easter Sunday fortified him for the next week of more of the wartime death and destruction experienced the week before.

One of the most striking losses came with the death of a young lieutenant with whom he shared shelter on the night of April 12. &uot;We needed him. He was solid, educated, kind. He was a great soldier,&uot; Watson said, describing how on the day after the soldier had shared a picture of his wife and a vision of what he expected in his future, &uot;here he was with a hole in his chest. I wrapped him in his poncho. And I knew he was gone. To make sense of that, you have to believe. The seminaries can’t prepare you for that. Parents can’t prepare you. Education can’t prepare you. Not until you get well on the other side of it do you begin to deal with it.&uot;

The Easter story, the resurrection and the empty tomb, are what help you to make sense of such losses, Watson said. &uot;The resurrection is bigger than our reason. It’s bigger than common sense. That’s a very comforting thing to remember.&uot;

Baptizing the soldiers in the river on Easter Sunday was &uot;a little bit of sunshine and light during that time of so many deaths and memorial services. I hope there is a victory story in that. It was like a whole bunch of Good Fridays before and after Easter.&uot;

Watson thinks of the Vietnam experience every Easter. &uot;I think that I think of it every day of my life in some way,&uot; he said. &uot;It’s a tender time for me, Easter is.&uot;

And Easter is a time of struggle, as well. &uot;We can’t get our hands around that resurrection. Faith is a gift. And it’s by grace that we can believe. It’s a real struggle sometime to find a way of not falling into letting Good Friday be the dominant factor instead of Easter. But Easter always wins out. It doesn’t happen the same for all of us. By the grace of God, we find different ways for Easter to win out.&uot;