Roy Ludlow was in the seminary in New Jersey when he received a letter that spurred him to travel halfway around the world.
A young Marine recounted a horrific night in Vietnam when bullets started raining down on him as he crawled out of his pup tent.
The Marine came out of the attack unscathed, but the story was seared into Ludlow’s mind and left him pondering his own ministry in the United Methodist Church.
“That guy needs to have a chaplain somewhere around,” Ludlow said to himself after reading the letter. “He’s facing life and death.”
Ludlow inquired about enlisting, but was told he was too old, despite the fact that chaplain requirements fall under a different rubric than regular soldiers.
He went on to finish the seminary and serve a small congregation in Oregon, but the war in Vietnam reared its head again.
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Nearly all the church’s congregation was female, and as the war grew, he started holding services for soldiers killed in action.
“I thought, ‘If I’m going to have a ministry with men, I need to be where the men are,’” he said.
He successfully signed up for the Army and served in Vietnam in fall 1971 and spring 1972. One of his main duties was to hold memorial services for soldiers.
“I didn’t have any enemy casualties at that point, but I had a lot of self-inflicted wounds and deaths from suicides and otherwise. Those were tough,” he said, adding that many of the self-inflicted wounds were the result of drug abuse.
Another of his duties was to hold services for soldiers as they protected bridges along a perilous stretch of road.
After a while, his commander said it wasn’t safe for Ludlow to be on the road anymore, and he was assigned to a facility in Da Nang, where he dealt with men who were “having emotional issues with their time in Vietnam.”
In one case, a Cobra helicopter pilot told Ludlow he couldn’t stop seeing the red lines created by the tracer bullets fired by the helicopter’s guns.
“He said, ‘You know, chaplain. I’m having trouble sleeping at night.
“I keep thinking of all those rounds I shot down there and wondering who was down there, who I took out who shouldn’t have been taken out,’” Ludlow said.
For Ludlow, those conversations confirmed that joining the Army as a chaplain was “a ministry I felt I was called to do.”
After being sent back to the United States, Ludlow worked with a battalion at Fort Lewis in Washington state, often bumping along rough tank trails in his Plymouth Valiant to get to remote training sites.
He went on to serve in Germany, Alaska and Fort Huachuca, where he retired from the Army in 1988 as a major.
His dedication to soldiers continued as he worked as an employment counselor for veterans.
Local veteran Thomas Owens said Ludlow has a long tenure promoting veteran causes in Tucson, in addition to attending every meeting of the Reserve Officers Association and the Military Officers Association of America.
Ludlow also continued his ministry after retiring from the Army by working as a prison chaplain in Tucson.
“To me, the two tied together,” he said. “It was a ministry to men.”
He now works as a contract provider of chaplain services at Tucson Medical Center and offers pastoral counseling at Desert Skies United Methodist Church.
