The military career of Cmdr. Laura Bender, regimental chaplain for the Wounded Warrior Regiment aboard Quantico, started with a practical joke.

She had served as a United Methodist minister in her native New York City for about 13 years when, in 1999, a chaplain sent a letter to area churches, seeking interest in the military chaplaincy. She discarded the note, but her mother, who was a secretary at another church, wrote Bender’s name on one of the reply cards and sent it back.

“She thought it would be funny,” Bender said. “She doesn’t think it’s funny now.”

The recruiter’s phone pitch appealed to her sense of adventure, the same inclination that has left her with a wealth of stories to tell.

“She’s got a vast breadth of experience that she brings to the table,” said Lt. Col. Mike Corrado, executive officer of the Wounded Warrior Regiment, adding that this has helped Bender to be a more effective chaplain. One of her strengths, he said, is her ability to understand and communicate with families dealing with complex concerns. “She can communicate on numerous levels based on her various backgrounds.”

Bender’s hope for adventure with the military was not disappointed.

“It’s like having a front-row seat for some of the biggest things that have happened with the country,” she said.

Her first duty station was Guantanamo Bay, where she worked with sailors, Marines, Coast Guardsmen, evacuees, refugees, migrants and, eventually, detainees. She was there when the detention center was set up. For half a year, she had a Haitian congregation, and she also worked with Cuban exiles living on the base.

Her next tour was at Marine Corps Base Camp Lejeune, N.C., from which she deployed with the Bravo Surgical Company for the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

Eventually, though, after teaching at the Naval Chaplaincy School and earning her postgraduate degree in Boston, she ended up back in New York City, where she served three years aboard the USS New York. An 11th-generation New Yorker, she said, she watched the ship pull to shore for its commissioning from the same spot where an ancestor had run his ferry business 350 years prior.

As the coordinator for the commissioning, Bender became a liaison with the city, a position that put her on friendly terms with Mayor Michael Bloomberg. “He got so used to seeing me at these things, he punched me in the arm once,” she said, referring to one of several times she gave the invocation at the mayor’s Memorial Day Ceremony. She said she and the crew of the New York once made a “beach assault” on Brooklyn to bring Bloomberg out on the ship for ice cream and a Yankees game.

“The people of New York did a really nice job of providing interesting activities for the crew of the New York,” she said. These included an actual breakfast at Tiffany’s, a standing ovation during the halftime of a Nicks game, front row seats at a Bon Jovi concert and a fire scenario at the New York Fire Academy. “That was very cool,” she said of the scenario, which included a “flashover,” in which flames roared up one wall, across the ceiling and down the far wall. “I like fire.”

Bender is, in fact, a trained fire eater, a skill that she occasionally employs as a party trick, for example at Christmas parties or at retirement ceremonies.

As a civilian minister, she belonged to a performing arts group that led her to teach tightrope walking, puppetry and storytelling, as well as performing fire-eating tricks, as part of her youth ministry. “You had to do things that were a little odd to get teenagers interested in your church,” she explained.

Corrado said Bender is still “very energetic when it comes to community relations and outreach,” but he had only recently learned of her “pyrogastronomic” skills. “It was a surprise in that it’s not something you routinely come across, but with Chaplain Bender, anything is possible,” he said.

In another unusual turn, Bender served as an advisor to the actress Jaime Ray Newman for her role as a military chaplain in a few 2011 episodes of the television drama “NCIS.” The show’s producers had contacted Quantico’s Naval Criminal Investigative Service unit who directed them to Bender. “I rewrote a few lines, and they used them,” she said.

After about a year and a half with the Wounded Warrior Regiment, where she remotely supervises three religious ministries, she said she wishes her work was more hands-on but enjoys the fact that the unit’s primary focus is not combat support, but caring for Marines and their families. “I like that in many ways this is the missionary arm of the Marine Corps,” she said. “Here, everybody on the staff is focused on taking care of the Marines. That is our mission.”

Now in her second stint working with Marines, she said she’s found that they’re more likely than sailors to have need of the tissues in her office. For Marines, “There’s a sense of challenge, accomplishment and adherence to core values, and sometimes they experience harm done to the things that undergird them,” she said. “Marines join because they want to be Marines. They’re more intentional. They get the noble purpose.”

Of her decision to turn her mother’s joke into a career, Bender said she has no regrets. “Everywhere I go, I always learn something new. It’s fun,” she said. “It has not ceased to be interesting.”

— Writer: mdicicco@quanticosentryonline.com