Mineola Marine Sends Easter Wishes Back Home

Like many other Christians, David Kim will be found in chapel on Easter Sunday – albeit one on the grounds of Camp Pendleton in San Diego – though his home of Mineola will not be far from thought.

“This morning I’ll be saying ‘Christ is risen’ and my four or five marines there will be responding ‘He has risen, indeed’ and that’ll connect us with our families back at home, it will connect us with other churches, other brothers in Christ. It’s a reminder to us that we’re all in one family.”

A Navy chaplain, Lt. Kim faces a “different” challenge than your typical person in the armed services.

“I don’t know if you can say it’s more but it’s definitely an honor as well to know that these guys are going through some pretty tough times but to be there present for it, to be available to help them, it’s really an honor,” he said Saturday on a telephone conversation. “I have a tremendous amount of satisfaction in my work knowing that I can make a difference in these usually young men’s lives and then kind of get them ready not on just for their mission but also for what’s waiting for them after as a citizen when they leave the Marine Corps or when they leave the Navy.”

When veterans return home from deployment, many suffer from post-traumatic stress syndrome or a host of other psychological ailments which may be compounded if they suffered physical harm as well.

“I think the hardest thing for a lot of them to overcome... (is) to actually ask for help,” Lt. Kim said. “Part of that is just being an example for them and showing them that ‘hey, my marriage is solid but after a deployment my wife and I go through counseling because we’ve been away for 7 months and it just would be helpful to talk through things with and to show that I can go get help just as much as they can. Sometimes being religious, being spiritual, it can actually be a hindrance because some people see that getting help from medical or getting help from other sources besides just battling it out between you and God is a sign of a lack of faith.”

Kim, a graduate of the Wheatley School, didn’t always want a religious life of service, completing degrees from the University of Pennsylvania and the Wharton Business school before spending 5 years as a consultant for a Boston firm.

“My dad’s a pastor, my grandfather’s a pastor so I kind of rebelled for a little bit, didn’t want to go into ministry but when I was in college, kind of found my own way, found my faith on my own out there,” he said. “There was a point that I realized that this isn’t what I want to do long-term and I kind of knew that offhand but it was an itch I had to scratch.”

Kim’s father is a pastor with the Korean Evangelical Church in Westbury and still lives off of Glen Cove Road on the Mineola-Westbury border.

In order to become a Navy chaplain, one first needs to be ordained, attend seminary, have a masters degree as required by the Navy along with a number of years of full-time ministry before being commissioned and being brought on board as a staff officer. Kim enrolled in a full theological seminary school in Pasadena in 2004 just prior to Operation: Iraqi Freedom, eventually being ordained in the Evangelical Covenant Church in America.

“In our seminary we had a pretty lively debate as to the ethical implications of warfare and whether or not we as a nation should be involved in this particular conflict and a challenge was put out in our school newspaper saying that ‘there are a lot of people who say ‘I support the troops but I don’t support the war,’ and the challenge was put out to say that those can be pretty empty words unless you’re actually putting some action into what it means to support the troops,” he said. “Whether you support the war or not as ministers in training you can at least serve as a chaplain and support the men and women while they’re deployed overseas.”

Coincidentally – or as Kim puts it, “Providentially” – a Navy recruiter was on campus the following week. He completed his seminary work in 2005 and was commissioned at the beginning of 2007.

Kim met his wife, a former fashion designer, through mutual friends and has been married for the past 3 years. He is just completing his second tour of duty with the Naval Mobile Construction Battalion 11 in Gulf Port, Mississippi. The group has traveled to Kuwait with attachments in Afghanistan, the Horn of Africa and Europe. He has been at Pendleton with the 1st Battalion Fifth Marines since late 2009. 

“I definitely want to wish them a Happy Easter,” he said to his family.

While separation during Christmas and New Year’s is seen as more difficult, Kim was one of the few who was able to return home this past holiday season on leave.

“My wife is from North Arlington, NJ so we kind of split time between home and spent Christmas Day with family in Mineola,” he said. “Definitely Easter is the most important holiday in the christian calendar even though societally or culturally everyone  always loves Christmas – commercially, obviously it’s their favorite holiday – but I think the separation isn’t as much of an issue because through the service and through the sacrament, through what we’re celebrating we are, it kind of unites us together.”

It is that sense of unity that Lt. Kim tries to bring to his services on the Marine base.

“It’s a little bit less so for the Protestant denominations but one thing that I truly admire about the Catholic Church – and it’s something that I tell all of our guys that are Protestants about how much we can learn from the Catholic Church – is that on that day every Catholic church is supposed to be going through the same exact order of services, same exact liturgy, same exact mass and it’s something that every Sunday unites the church but especially on those high holy days, those holidays,” he said. “And for me knowing that I’m going to be celebrating Easter with a very small group of Marines here, celebrating the Resurrection of Christ, but I know that 3 hours earlier or whatever, my dad was doing the same thing with his Korean-American congregation in Westbury... because we’re all celebrating the miracle of the Resurrection and the victory of Christ over death.”