The Scales of Warriorhood, by Kevin Wells

Kevin Wells is a former Major League Baseball writer, Catholic speaker, and author of Priest and Beggar: The Heroic Life of Venerable Aloysius Schwartz (Ignatius Press). His best-selling book The Priests We Need to Save the Church was published by Sophia Institute Press in 2019.

World Villages for Children (WVC) is a non-profit organization that financially supports the Sisters of Mary as they help children break free from a life of poverty and lead them to Christ. WVC provides food, shelter, clothing, medical expenses, Catholic education, and vocational training to more than 20,000 children in Boystowns and Girlstowns in six different countries around the world. To donate to World Villages for Children, please go to https://www.worldvillages.org/poverty/.

 

American combat veterans encountered more than they bargained for when they met the teenage boys in Boystown.

While observing the expanding war, I’ve been thinking about the detonation of bombs into childhoods.

In the deep interior of Mexico last week, at Villa de los Niños in Guadalajara, I walked paths with and fell into new friendships with three American combat veterans. We ate meals together, prayed shoulder-to-shoulder, told jokes, and attended Mass together.

They told me stories around the lunch table, where they occasionally had to stop mid-sentence to gather themselves. One had raced to free a trapped tank man under heavy artillery fire in Iraq. Eight days later, he pulled a dying soldier from a flipped Humvee under heavy mortar rounds. His heroism earned him a Silver Star. “It means very little to me,” Javier Camacho, a former Army sergeant, told me. “I just did for those soldiers what I hoped they would do for me. …

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