KAHUKU, Hawaii - In a plastic chair in the back of the room, a young man of no more than seventeen sits. He is intensely watching the man in front of him speak. The speaker is dressed in the new airman's battle uniform talking about drugs and physical health.
The man in uniform is Capt. Paul Ferguson Jr., a chaplain in the Texas Air National Guard. The young man in the chair is a patient at the Bobby Benson Center, a residential drug treatment center here on Hawaii's North Shore.
The message is about the importance of staying off drugs and leading a "clean life."
For Ferguson, working with troubled kids and adults is not unfamiliar territory. The traditional guardsman is pastor of Our Savior Lutheran Church in Rockwall, Texas.
Outside the center, the pastor speaks about some of the experiences and troubles he sees day-to-day in his "normal" job: troubled marriages, challenges in raising children and other tests of faith.
"People are people regardless of geography," he said. "Most of us need help in some way. Every one of us has a story. Every one of us needs to be heard."
Ferguson is part of a 51-person medical team from the 149th Fighter Wing in San Antonio here to support the E Malama Kakou (To care for all) medical readiness mission.
The Medical Innovative Readiness Training program is a collaborative effort between the Air National Guard and Hawaii's state Health Department aimed at providing basic health screening to the medically underserved children populations in the area.
Ferguson was asked by the center's staff to speak to those in treatment. The patients at the center are recovering addicts. Most arrive at the center under a court order.
The Bobby Benson Center is a 13-acre facility, which gets its name from a 15-year old native islander, whose dance with drugs and the law cut the young boy's life short.
His father, a Honolulu policeman, was determined to equip others with the tools he and his son did not have. So, he created the center.
During the hour-long discussion, the patients test the pastor's credentials, "Have you ever done drugs?" asks one patient. "Have you ever stolen money from your mother's purse to buy drugs," asked another.
Ferguson acknowledged he had no idea what it was like to do any of these things, but that you didn't actually have to take drugs to understand their affects on people.
He also explained that the men and women of the military must act as a team. "If the mechanic turning a wrench on an airplane engine is on drugs and it causes him to miss a systems check or forget a part, the engine could malfunction or blow up on the ground or in the air. People could get hurt or even die as a result of that person's drug use."
Ferguson said a person's family is like a military unit and that a drug user's family is affected just as much if not more than the drug user himself.
As the time together passed, the patients warmed up to Ferguson. The conversation turned from drugs and their effects to military life.
Ferguson and Lt. Col. Craig Manifold, a flight surgeon from the unit, taught the patients some basic military customs and courtesies. The questions turned to laughter as the patients attempted their salutes.
"They formed a little flight just before we left, and all rendered a salute to us," said Manifold. "I was really honored by the gesture and that's a memory I'll never forget."
Ferguson said when you help people, you don't often see immediate results from your work. "We can only continue to work with them and pray that what we are saying and doing for them equips them to recover," he said.
A staff member told him that he may not know if they got his message, but "late at night when they are hanging out together or alone in their bed, they might think to themselves, "˜that was pretty cool,' and that just may make the difference for them."