The perils of military life, both physical and spiritual, are terrifying. Ask any mother who has feared for her child in uniform — or ask Servant of God Father Vincent Capodanno.
He experienced the worst of what American troops face in war. As a Navy chaplain killed by enemy fire in the Vietnam War, Father Vincent Capodanno died heroically in an act that won the Medal of Honor. But he lived heroically, also, ministering to the Marine Corps infantry on the front lines, bringing the sacraments and the presence of Christ into their lives.
Father Vincent was exactly the chaplain mothers like St. Elizabeth Ann Seton hope for. She spoke for all mothers of military-minded sons and daughters when she pleaded to God for her own son who joined the Navy: “Oh my God! The sea and battle! Preserve him from temptations and bring him home a fervent Catholic.”
The making of a hero.
Vincent Capodanno Jr. was born into an immigrant Staten Island community in 1932. His large Italian family — he was the youngest of 10 siblings — provided him with both his faith and his comfortability with chaos.
He was a daily communicant throughout his high school years, then began studies at Fordham University. He supported himself with work in an insurance company office — but a call to the priesthood cut college short. After his second year of college, he entered the Maryknoll Missionary Seminary in New York in 1949 and was ordained by Cardinal Francis Spellman in 1958.
He was immediately sent to Taiwan — but as a Maryknoll Missioner with the motto “Go and Teach All Nations,” not as a Military Chaplain. He learned the Hakka-Chinese language and provided the sacraments and catechized his flock.
He already had a reputation for holiness, and whenever Father Vincent visited the United States, he was welcomed with excitement and admiration by his parish and family, his niece remembers. It was on one of those trips that he volunteered to be a military chaplain as conflicts were escalating in Vietnam.
He served the Marines on the front lines and became known as the heroic “Grunt Padre.”
After a year of training in the Navy’s Officer Candidate School, Father Vincent deployed with the Marines in South Vietnam during Holy Week of 1966.
He first served the “grunts” — the newly enlisted Marines — then worked alongside a medical unit. As he had done as a missionary, he immersed himself in the lives of his men, sharing their food and their sleeping barracks. He listened to their stories, absolved their sins, joked with them and prayed with them. He also passed out St. Christopher medals to remind his men of their faith on the frontlines. When his deployment was set to end, he applied for a six-month extension, and got it.
Those extra six months brought him straight to the front lines.
During Operation Swift, the Labor Day escalation of fighting in the Que Son Valley in 1967, Father Vincent saw the heavy casualties Marines were suffering, and headed into the field to help. He went man to wounded man, offering comfort or confession and extreme unction.
He was wounded by shrapnel as he ministered to the troops, but refused medical evacuation. The final act of sacrifice in his life was when he spotted and rushed to give medical and spiritual attention to a wounded Marine. He was killed by enemy machine gun fire on Sept. 4, 1967. When his body was recovered it was riddled with 27 bullet wounds.
His niece, Linda Sargent, remembered the outpouring of love his family received.
“When he died, there were so many Marines and their families who wrote and came to his funeral,” she told the National Catholic Register. “Thousands of people wrote about what he meant to them in their lives and their sons’ lives at the time in Vietnam, and what comfort he brought to them and how he shared God with them in very difficult times.”
In other words, he was exactly the kind of chaplain the families of servicemen and women pray for.
St. Elizabeth Ann Seton knew that firsthand.
Mother Seton’s life as a foundress of a religious congregation was complicated by the fact that she was also a widow and mother of five. She had to constantly balance worries about her biological children with her concerns for her spiritual children.
She wrote to her faith mentor Antonio Filicchi about one concern in particular: her son, William, wanted to join the Navy in 1814 — a path his younger brother Richard would follow, also.
“He has had a strong inclination to go to the Army or Navy and in sending him to either there is the greatest risk of his Salvation and loss of Faith,” she said. She enlisted Filicchi’s help in her effort to “preserve my poor Boy from loss of our only treasure, which we obtained through you, an invaluable and blessed friend!”
Father Vincent Capodanno understood her worry. It was his own, too. When a reporter commented on how unusual it was for a chaplain to wear camouflage as he did, Father Vincent explained his approach.
“It’s protective coloration so I blend in with the men,” he said. “I understand their trials better if I accept the same burdens they do.”
Then, he added: “I want to be available in the event anything serious occurs; to learn firsthand the problems of the men, and to give them moral support, to comfort them with my presence. In addition, I feel I must personally witness how they react under fire — and experience it myself — to understand the fear they feel.”
His dedication is now widely celebrated.
FedEx founder Frederick K. Smith, who died in June, served with Father Vincent in Vietnam. “Words can’t adequately describe my feelings about Father Capodanno,” he once said. “He was a great man and a lot of people owe their lives to him. I loved Father Capodanno.”
Smith, an Episcopalian, called Father Vincent “a model for anything good and religious. … He was one great guy and I think about him a lot. … They didn’t have any medals big or ornate enough for his brand of man.”
Father Vincent began receiving honors almost immediately. The first chapel bearing his name was dedicated shortly after his death on Hill 51 in Que Son Valley, Vietnam, built of bamboo and thatched palms. The next year, the chapel at the Navy Chaplains School in Newport, R.I., was named for him, the first of several worldwide.
The U.S. Navy has named a ship, a clinic, an officers’ quarters, and other facilities after the Medal of Honor winner. Streets now bear his name, and his final heroic act of sacrifice has been immortalized in paintings and sculpture.
But the memorial the Grunt Padre would likely cherish most is his name etched into the Vietnam Memorial on the National Mall in Washington D.C.—no larger, no bolder than the names of the men he served and died beside, and for whom he sacrificed his life.
TOM HOOPES, author most recently of The Rosary of Saint John Paul II, is writer in residence at Benedictine College in Kansas, where he teaches. He hosts The Extraordinary Story podcast about the life of Christ. His book What Pope Francis Really Said is now available on Audible. A former reporter in the Washington, D.C., area, he served as press secretary for the U.S. House Ways & Means Committee Chairman and spent 10 years as editor of the National Catholic Register newspaper and Faith & Family magazine. His work frequently appears in the Register, Aleteia, and Catholic Digest. He lives in Atchison, Kansas, with his wife, April, and has nine children.
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