JERSEY CITY - On a recent sunny afternoon at St. George & St. Shenouda Coptic Orthodox Church, priests wearing black hats and robes sat beside city police and West Point cadets in gray uniforms.
They shared a mix of American and Middle-Eastern dishes - salad, pasta, farick, koshary and falafel - as they discussed an earlier lecture on the Coptic faith.
For three days, the 30 cadets would replace their regular barrack beds for the carpeted floor of a local mosque, their professors for area ethnic and religious leaders and daily chow for more worldly dishes with unfamiliar names.
The cadets traveled last week to the ethnically diverse, second-largest city in the New Jersey as a cultural and religious immersion for the academy’s course called Winning the Peace.
Maj. Rebecca Patterson, who teaches the class, said war these days is a lot more than shooting a gun.
“If you don’t understand the social, religious background you’re facing, you’re not nearly as effective,” she said.
“I think the military gets it, we need to be more culturally aware, and I think we’re getting there. We’re just a big organization.”
Most of West Point’s 4,400 cadets will likely deploy after graduation to Iraq or Afghanistan. And in those conflicts, Patterson said the Army’s future leaders will need to focus on both security and community needs, at times becoming impromptu small-town mayors or needing to work with other agencies to repair utilities.
Soldiering the reconstruction effort is not something new, said Maj. Tania Chacho, West Point’s director of comparative politics. “But unfortunately we haven’t always prepared for it terribly well,” she said. “So this is an attempt to try to prepare for that phase of our operations.”
Starting early April 3, the cadets sat through a long series of lectures and Q&A sessions, from talks on the misunderstandings of Islam to the community works of a local black Baptist church.
At St. George & St. Shenouda, Father David Bebawy, a gray-bearded man in a flowing black robe wearing a large cross on a long metal chain, showed the cadets two videos about the Egyptian church.
After the videos, the cadets then asked him questions about his branch of Christianity: Are priests celibate or can they marry? Why do Coptic Christians come to America? Does your religion face problems with the government or radical groups in Egypt?
“We have problems, but really they are trying to solve the problems,” Bebawy responded. “From time to time, some fanatics try to do something, but the government tries to keep it under control.”
Not every issue discussed was a heavy topic. At one point, he showed the group the musical instruments used at a Coptic service and sang a hymn while playing a pair of cymbals.
At lunch, Bebawy said he was happy to have the cadets come visit and learn about Coptic Orthodoxy, so if they do go to the Middle East, his faith will not be misjudged.
“So, it’s important to welcome them and answer their questions,” Bebawy said.
For one stop, the group ventured away from the city outskirts made up of row houses and narrow streets into the downtown.
They walked along the Hudson River shoreline across from New York City to view a 9/11 memorial site right across from where the World Trade Center once stood. The site consisted of a few twisted, rusty steel beams from the destroyed building and a black stone tablet. Before going back, one cadet counted the names on the tablet of those Jersey City residents killed in the attack (there were 38), then left for the van.
They went on to the Islamic Center of Jersey City for meetings and discussions that would last well into the night.
Justin Astroth, a 26-year-old senior studying law, was in the Army for two years and went to combat terrorism in Horn of Africa before coming to West Point.
While he said he did very little community outreach or work to transition the African region from war to peace, he saw how important those aspects were and wanted to take the class to better prepare for his next deployment.
“We’re not just there to fight,” Astroth said about the class. “It is trying to teach us how we win hearts and minds.”
The Jersey City trip could in one light be viewed only as a college class trip, as by later in the day a few cadets could be seen nodding off during lectures.
Yet, the consensus from both cadets and the people they met was a yearning for greater understanding. And some from both the Muslim community and West Point said they needed something like the trip to improve their image with each other and the public.
Ibrahim Hooper, spokesman of the Washington-based Council on American-Islamic Relations, said post-war planning in Iraq was severely mismanaged and resulted in today’s bloodletting.
“Given the ongoing violence in the nation and the region, these kind of efforts can be seen as a drop in the bucket,” Hooper said about the course. “But that doesn’t mean that they aren’t worthy efforts.”
Patterson said the class, in its fourth year, represents the military’s broader trend toward greater cultural sensitivity and training tailored for the current conflicts.
Along with a stronger focus on languages and counterinsurgency classes, live battle training exercises in the summer now include scenarios with translators, people speaking different languages and the media.
Wearing a green robe and head scarf, Suzanne Loutfy, of the Islamic Center, said she had her doubts about the program at first, thinking it was just a public relations exercise after Abu Ghraib. But, she said it grew into something where real change was possible.
“It’s a beginning. ... Any small step is a positive thing, because any small step won’t stay small forever,” she said after a dinner at the center with cadets.
At about 9:30 p.m., the cadets went to the upstairs prayer room at the Islamic Center to observe nighttime prayers, in which a row of men gathered along a thin green line on the carpet to pray toward Mecca.
After a bit of confusion, the cadets separated by gender, and the female cadets were asked to put on white head scarves.
After one last lecture, the cadets ended their day, some pulling out their cell phones to make a call, others removing their gray jackets revealing their necks, reddened from having to wear high collars all day.
As the lights went out in the prayer room, just about everyone went to bed in sleeping bags, except for one cadet and one man from the mosque, who sat down at a table at 11:30 at night to talk.
Reach Ben Rubin at bfrubin@lohud.com or 845-578-2420.