CT: You are a committed Christian. What initially inspired you to join the Armed Forces?
PE: I wouldn't have said I was a Christian at the time, but one of the things I had been told when I was quite young was that service in the Forces and Christianity are not incompatible. And since I've become a Christian, one of the stories I take great heart from is when Jesus meets Cornelius, the Roman centurion, and praises him for his great faith. It seems to me that it's not incompatible and I've never had any particular issues with it since I became a Christian.
CT: Did you ever find yourself in a position where you felt you were being asked to do something at odds with your Christian beliefs?
PE: No. Actually what I found is that it is a tremendous help on operations because it gives you courage and hope and allows you to look at things with a higher perspective. A young soldier at the Forces Day of Prayer on Thursday said that, when things were looking bad - they had lost their leader and the enemy was closing in and he could see the fear in his comrade's eyes - he had been hugely reassured by a text he had read just that morning from the Bible that just spoke right into that situation and he was able to deal with it and lead the other chap out of it.
CT: It's quite an unusual context to apply your faith in.
PE: It is, but of course there are more mundane areas that are still very important. I've been faced with difficult situations in terms of budgets and people suggesting, when there's a problem, that we should cover up what's gone wrong to show ourselves in a better light. And I said, "No, we're not going to do that, we're going to say that we made a mistake, we got it wrong and we're going to do something to put it right."
CT: Did that sit well with other people who were not Christian?
PE: If you're the boss and it's your budget, you've got to take responsibility for your decisions, and for me it's important to make the right decision and tell the truth and they seemed to accept that because they know, well actually, he's going to have to be accountable for it and he's clearly not worried about that. So I have found my faith hugely helpful in dealing with some of those difficult issues where there is perhaps a moral dimension.
CT: When you are on operations, presumably it's difficult to go to a Sunday service and you might not have the structures of faith that you might usually have at home. Is it easy to find that time to just be with God?
PE: I think it depends on how important your faith is to you. If your faith is important to you, you will find the time. On operations, one of the things that the Forces are good at is that they do provide spiritual support, so in most of the places you are deployed to you will have access to a padre. It may not be every day but there will be a padre, a chaplain assigned to your unit, who is there to provide support and can supply you with any of the material you need. For example, the Forces have camouflaged Bibles available and there are field prayer books.
And there are services held on operations. When I was in Bosnia there were services. We weren't on the frontline but there were services every Sunday. And they were just held wherever they could be held, sometimes in a room somewhere or even in the open air. Chaplains are very good at doing that, at meeting the spiritual needs of people in the most difficult of places, particularly on operations. And it comes down to how important is your faith to you.
