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He turns 59 next month and last week enlisted in the U.S. Navy for a third time. He was 17 years old the first time around and needed a signed note from his parents.

Rev. Bill Dorwart, C.S.C., director of campus ministry at the University of Portland, is returning to the military because he believes that is where he is most needed.

“I can’t think of a more important place to be, especially at wartime,” Dorwart said. “That’s what draws me back now. If we weren’t at war in Iraq and Afghanistan, I’d be happy to stay at the University of Portland.”

Dorwart first joined the U.S. Navy as a high school graduate who grew up in Sidney, Nebraska, population 6,000 – about the same as that of an aircraft carrier where he would eventually be stationed.

The year was 1967, and the United States was mired in combat in Viet Nam. Dorwart needed signed approval from his parents then because he was under the age of 18.

He joined the Navy, in part, as an alternative to being drafted by the U.S. Army. He had been exposed as a young man to Air Force bases near Sidney, and he was intrigued by the “adventure of it.”

“I’d never seen the ocean before,” he added.

Dorwart’s first stint in the Navy was as an aviation electronics technician on an aircraft carrier. His first assignment was in the Mediterranean and he served in the Navy for four years before getting an honorable discharge.

It was during that first military assignment that he learned to appreciate the work of chaplains. That led him to the University of Notre Dame, where he enrolled in the seminary program and graduated in 1976.

He then spent a year in Bangladesh, returned to Notre Dame for graduate school and was ordained a Catholic priest in 1980.

Next came several years as a parish priest, and in 1985 he re-entered the Navy and served as a Chaplain with the Marines in Okinawa because “I wanted to be where the need was.”

Later, he served on the U.S.S. Midway, home-ported in Japan, and from there sailed to the Persian Gulf as part of the Desert Shield and Desert Storm military engagements. This was the first aircraft carrier to travel into the Gulf waters, he noted, “and we were the only one not to lose a plane” in Desert Storm.

Dorwart left the Navy in April 1991 after six years and with a second honorable discharge, eventually making his way to the University of Portland in August 2004. He was appointed director of campus ministry in 2006.

A gentle and soft-spoken man, Dorwart is passionate about serving young people and the importance of faith. He once wrote about tending to the spiritual needs of young men and women after a horrific `fire aboard a ship that lasted 18 hours and claimed the lives of six sailors – including two young Catholic men, whose charred bodies were found locked together.

“They were clinging to life with each other during their last breath,” he said.

It’s these types of experiences—and the fact that nearly 30 percent of the Navy and Marine Corps are currently Catholic with only about seven percent of the Chaplain Corps being Catholic—that draws Dorwart back.

“I love working with young people at the University of Portland,” he says, “and it will be hard to leave.”

On Sept. 24, Dorwart learned that his first assignment will be for 12 months on the island of Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean. It is a British and U.S. military base on a 13-square-mile island that supports military activities in that part of the world. The only residents of the island are largely Navy and Air Force personnel who are assisting those in the Indian Ocean, the Arabian Sea and the Persian Gulf.

After that tour of duty, Dorwart will be assigned to the USS Ronald Reagan, an aircraft carrier home-based out of San Diego.

Dorwart stresses that the work in the Navy is similar in that he is working with the same age group.

Dorwart will preside over Mass on campus on Oct. 5. The following day he leaves for his new military assignment.

“Here at the University our mission is wrapped around young people and their development,” he says. “Out there, the mission is more focused on national defense.”

“I know what those people are going through, and I want to be there for them.”