Baghdad — The story so far: Four soldiers in a sister battalion have burned alive in their Bradley. Now Chaplain Darren Turner, who knows all too well what it means to memorialize so many lives lost at once, must comfort a fellow chaplain who faces what Turner did last summer.

CURTIS COMPTON/ccomption@ajc.com (ENLARGE)

With the base under steady fire, troops must wear full gear when not inside a 'hard' building. Here, they hunker down in a 9-inch-thick concrete bunker.

CURTIS COMPTON/ccomption@ajc.com (ENLARGE)

Darren Turner (right) prays with fellow chaplain Jeff Sheets after four of Sheets' men burned alive in their Bradley on Easter Sunday.

CURTIS COMPTON/ccomption@ajc.com (ENLARGE)

Turner (center), Sgt. Daniel Woods (left) and Spc. Steven Goodwin head to the chapel at Forward Operating Base Falcon for a memorial ceremony for a solider killed on the base.

CHAPLAIN TURNER'S WAR Chapter 1: Comfort in toughest of places Chapter 2: The invisible war Chapter 3: Summer of death Chapter 4: Formidable enemy Chapter 5: Nightmare revisited Chapter 6: Easter baptisms Chapter 7: Tragedies test the armor of God Chapter 8: A dangerous mission, a devastating night Series home page About the series: In January, reporter Moni Basu and photographer Curtis Compton began documenting life at war with Darren Turner, chaplain for the 1st Battalion, 30th Infantry Regiment, part of the 3rd Infantry Division at Fort Stewart. They traveled with him to Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington while he was home on leave, then caught up with him in Iraq, where they spent five weeks reporting this story. They shadowed the chaplain as he counseled soldiers, baptized them and dealt with war's hardships. They also went on foot patrol with a platoon that lost six men last summer. Every soldier in this story gave the journalists permission to document their interactions with the chaplain. All except one of the scenes were witnessed firsthand. The one reconstructed scene — the events of last summer — appears in Chapter 3 and was pieced together through interviews with soldiers who were there.

"Incoming! Incoming!"

The sirens sound.

Again.

And again.

Rockets whiz through the air.

Mortars land with a thundering boom.

Just two days after Easter, Forward Operating Base Falcon is under steady attack.

One soldier has been killed.

The troops scurry to 9-inch-thick concrete bunkers randomly placed around tents and buildings. They huddle in darkness, their faces illuminated by the strike of a match and the glow of Marlboro after Marlboro.

"At least I'm closer to God," jokes a soldier after spotting Chaplain Darren Turner at one end of a jam-packed bunker. It's Turner's second time in the bunker on this day. The medics he baptized on Easter are on full alert. While everyone else runs for safety, they grab their medical bags and sprint to the first-aid station, prepared to treat casualties.

"All clear. All clear," blares an announcement over the loudspeakers. The bunkers empty out.

Turner joins the medics, Sgt. Daniel Woods and Spc. Steven Goodwin, who are waiting for him to lead Bible study.

Under fire, the ancient Scriptures take on immediacy.

He pulls up a chair to complete a circle of soldiers gathered in an examination room. They open their camouflage-covered New Testaments. Woods is eager to read a passage from Matthew.

"Hold on a second, Woods," Turner says, straining to hear the radio. Could be another warning of incoming rounds.

Boom!

"That's outgoing," Woods says. Maybe a howitzer.

They begin reading.

Boom!

"Outgoing," Woods reassures them again.

It's Turner's turn to read: "Are not two sparrows sold for a penny? Yet not one will fall to the ground apart from the will of your Father. And even the very hairs on your head are all numbered. So do not be afraid ..."

Turner threads together the language of God and guns.

"What does that mean for us getting shot at every day at Falcon?"

Do not be paralyzed by fear, he tells the soldiers, because God is in control of a believer's life. He knows when a sparrow falls to the ground, when a soldier is under attack.

Woods clings to those beliefs. The 24-year-old from Dallas is on his second tour of Iraq and lost his roommate to a sniper in the slums of Sadr City. He wonders how anyone can live through war without faith.

"That dude King David was awesome," he says. "He mastered that whole fear thing."

He asks if anyone has seen the episode of the HBO series "Band of Brothers" in which the chaplain sits among the dead and dying, blessing them while bullets fly all around.

"It's gotta be a true story," he says. He thinks it was amazing that the chaplain was protected.

"Ever see Chaplain Turner do that?" Goodwin asks.

"You probably won't," Turner chuckles. "I'll be in the bunker with the rest of you."

In war, every soldier — those with faith and those without — seeks protection. Sometimes, it comes in the form of a bunker. Other times, it's knowing that the guy next to you would give his life to save yours.

Turner offers his soldiers God's promise of protection, stronger, he says, than a chunk of concrete, more reliable than a battle buddy. The security is not physical but spiritual. Regardless of what happens externally, Turner believes, internal peace alleviates the fear and hopelessness that can prevail in a place of war.

That's the peace Turner held onto as his Humvee came under a hail of AK-47 fire on July 4th last year. The Army prohibits chaplains from carrying guns, though Turner thinks it's an outdated policy in a war in which the enemy no longer respects a red cross painted on a helicopter or the chaplain's cross Velcroed on Turner's uniform.

Faith is Turner's sole protection. It frees him from constant fear even as Falcon gets pounded.

"I think it requires bullet-proof faith to realize that your fate is ultimately in God's hands," he says.

Psalm 27 inspired Turner to become an Army chaplain. He reads it now, substituting the word bunker for shelter.

"The Lord is my light and my salvation, whom shall I fear? ... For in the day of my trouble, he will keep me safe ... in the bunker of his tabernacle ..."

He tells them he wanted nothing more than to lift the word of God in a place of war.

"Man, did I find that place ..."

Goodwin finishes his sentence: "Yeah, at FOB Falcon."

War strengthens a soldier's faith — or destroys it. Turner's faith remains unshakable, though Iraq has tested him in other ways.

"It sounded cool four years ago in my bedroom," he says, "with the AC turned down, with the popcorn popping in the microwave, with my wife queuing up a movie."

It was going to be such an adventure.

I love you," Turner says, looking into the lens of his digital camera.

He's shooting a 15-second video to e-mail to his daughter Elie and son Sam. His wife, Heather, will play it for them at a joint celebration of their seventh and fifth birthdays.

"I'm so sorry I'm going to miss your party this weekend," he says, ending with a noisy kiss.

Four months remain before Turner's battalion returns to Fort Stewart.

He had hoped for uneventful days after Easter, but as April looms, a lull in Iraq's violence has been shattered by a fresh round of attacks incited by radical cleric Muqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi Army.

Georgia seems so distant, life's ordinary moments so precious.

Turner hits the send button on his computer and closes his e-mail. The screen turns blank, his connection to home severed. Now for the business of war.

He walks across Falcon to visit his friend, Jeff Sheets, chaplain for a sister battalion that lost four soldiers on Easter Sunday. They burned alive in their Bradley after rolling over a powerful bomb.

Turner knows a chaplain's most demanding moment can also be the loneliest.

"How you doing?" he asks, stepping into Sheets' office.

Hunched over a plate of mess hall food that has turned stone-cold, Sheets looks spent. He has inspected the scene of the grisly incident, when the Bradley's steel was still hot, the smell fresh.

"Whew," Turner says. "Did you see anything? Or smell anything?"

It was an oven in the Bradley, Sheets says. Not much was left in the way of remains.

At Fort Stewart, it was Sheets' job to knock on doors and inform families when 3rd Infantry soldiers were killed. He couldn't answer difficult questions about the circumstances of war deaths. Now he understands.

Here his role will be to memorialize the soldiers.

"You did all five guys together?" Sheets asks about the Bravo Company ceremony Turner conducted last August.

"We did," Turner replies. "It's tough, man. I don't envy you this week. How many of those guys were married?"

"Two of the four," Sheets says.

One has a younger brother who will arrive for a tour of duty next week. Another brother is serving in Afghanistan.

"Imagine mom and dad," Turner says. "Three sons at war. One is already dead."

Top military brass, including Gen. David Petraeus, are scheduled to attend the ceremony. Sheets is under a lot of pressure.

Turner says a prayer with him, then heads back to his tent, thinking about his own tasks at hand.

He's already had to memorialize 13 battalion soldiers himself. (He was on leave when the 14th died in January and Chaplain Johnnie Elder led the ceremony.) Now Turner is trying to shift gears, to prepare for combat stress problems that may haunt his men when they are back at Fort Stewart.

Before they leave Iraq in July, he will begin discussing what it will be like to be just a regular American guy again. The Army calls it "reintegration." Turner calls it TLC for soldiers whose homefront issues can slide under the radar.

Don't go home and beat up your wife, he will tell them. Don't act like you're the boss again when she has been in charge for 15 months. Don't abuse alcohol. Or drugs. Get help if you are having nightmares.

Turner fancies himself caring more about a soldier's heart than his warrior skills. But here, concern for the living is repeatedly interrupted by war's defining character: dying.

Turner discovers that like his friend, Chaplain Sheets, he will have to plan a memorial service.

Spc. Charles Jankowski, 24, was hunting for makeshift bombs hidden along the roads when one ripped through his Husky mine-detection vehicle. His death is the 15th for the 1st Battalion, 30th Infantry Regiment. Turner despises this moment for all the obvious reasons, and for one that is not so obvious.

Why should he know of a young man's death before those who loved him most? A mother has lost her son, and she does not know what will surely be the most devastating news of her life.

Turner dislikes being privy to "sacred" information.

He may never meet Jankowski's family. But he must tend to the men who loved him here in Iraq.

He marches down to the motor pool to see the damaged vehicle. He lifts the tarp, gazes at the pock-marked steel; the flattened tire; the shattered glass. He tries to imagine.

To see it, touch it, smell it — the experience will help him when he speaks with his soldiers.

A shepherd needs to smell like his sheep.

Coming tomorrow: A dangerous mission for his soldiers pushes the chaplain to an emotional edge.