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Chaplain Captain James Covey is up earlier than he cares to be, fighting 6:30 A.M. traffic through Fort Hood's main gate with a hundred soldiers late to calisthenics. At 6:45 he's leading what he calls "your standard Army prayer breakfast" at Darnall Army Community Hospital.

It's also Covey's turn to carry the funeral bag. It contains a cell phone that rings when a veteran dies and wishes to have a funeral with military honors. Other times it rings for a soldier who dies in Iraq. As funeral duty chaplain, Covey helps bear the news to the soldier's next of kin.

Covey, 37, creeps through the three-lane queue in his aged Suburban with his Bible, his grandfather's cheapo guitar, and three empty car seats for his three little girls. He shows a gatekeeper his Army photo ID: a quarter-inch horseshoe of hair fringing a slick dome, striking Greek features, goofball grin.

Covey answered God's call to the chaplaincy while serving as a senior pastor in a Tyler, Texas, Southern Baptist church. As he waits to see if he'll be subject to a random vehicle search, he mulls what he can tell a clutch of doctors, nurses, medics, and soldiers in a 10-minute sermon on being deployed.

Elsewhere on the base, about a mile from the main gate, Chaplain Major Greg Walker, 39, is one of 12,000 Fourth Infantry Division troops doing pushups and sit-ups and running in formation. After 11 years in the chaplaincy, it's routine. In 2002 the Army shipped Walker, his wife, Roxanne, and their two sons to Fort Hood, the largest active-duty armored post in the United States. In this small city in the heart of Texas, some 90 chaplains representing the gamut of Christian denominations, plus a couple of imams and rabbis, shape the souls of more than 40,000 troops and their families on 339 square miles, 70 miles north of Austin, the state capital. No longer jumping out of airplanes with Special Forces, Walker's tame new post-Iraq role is deputy chaplain, keeping ministry rolling for the Fourth Infantry's 29 chaplains.

Covey, Walker, and four other chaplains formed a band of brethren who together earned their right-shoulder combat patches serving the Fourth Infantry's Second Brigade in Iraq. The military is their wide-open mission field, a public institution that respects faith in ways many civilians would find surprising. Chaplains are preachers, teachers, and counselors, counted as vital players who quietly help hold the military together. In garrison, they offer counsel and spiritual support to soldiers and their families. Deployed to battlefields such as Iraq and Afghanistan, they're missionaries bringing God's love to men and women who are unusually open to matters of faith, giving soldiers and their families the ability to integrate faith and their fearsome work.

Chaplain garrison duties range from the heartbreaking—helping deliver death news to a soldier's loved ones—to the borderline ludicrous: blessing a bowling alley's new snack bar.

At a Fourth Infantry chaplains' meeting, a chaplain major updates the group on the priest who in May became the war's first wounded chaplain, losing an eye to an Iraqi roadside bomb. As expected, some soldiers are having hard adjustments. Returning husband-and-wife soldiers died in a murder-suicide at Fort Hood in July. Walker's new boss, Chaplain Lieutenant Colonel Tommy Preston, tackles what's on everybody's mind, though all know the answer: "Are we going to redeploy? Yeah. I think that's pretty certain," he says. No one sighs or grumbles. "The question is just where and when. Probably to Iraq." The Fourth Infantry likely won't spend a full year in garrison before heading back out.

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December 2004, Vol. 48, No. 12