This week I celebrate my 28th year of employment with the international Christian relief organization Samaritan’s Purse.  Over the course of these almost three decades, I have had many interesting experiences, most stemming from traveling the globe, and I am sometimes asked what my most memorable trips have been.  There are a few that stand out, but I would have to say my brief stint in Iraq is at the top of the list.  Almost eight years ago, in January 2017, I traveled there in support of the Emergency Field Hospital (EFH) that Samaritan’s Purse established on the Plains of Nineveh, eleven miles from the front lines where coalition forces and ISIS were fighting for control of the city of Mosul.

I actually never saw much of Iraq other than the few days on either end of my service that I spent at our primary field office in the Kurdish city of Erbil and the bus ride between Erbil and the EFH.  Once at the hospital, all I saw was the EFH compound itself.  Our movement was very limited, and we were not allowed to venture beyond our blast walls for security reasons.  I had never worked in a hospital setting, let alone a war zone, but oddly enough, neither seemed to intimidate or alarm me. There were moments when our staff took shelter in bunkers due to drones flying overhead or when we could hear gunfire or blasts in the distance.  There was even a nighttime briefing in the barracks I shared with other men, including the hospital administrator, who was being told by our security manager about intercepted information warning that someone planned to storm our gates with a vehicle – perhaps a car and/or suicide bomber.  Yet, throughout all these new-to-me experiences, I never felt afraid…only the peace of God.  (The picture accompanying this post is the word "hope" painted on one of the EFH's blast walls.)

Although I was sent to the EFH to serve in a human resources-related capacity, helping bring structure to the hospital’s staffing and to handle such things as payroll for our national Iraqi employees, I had many opportunities to walk daily through the various wards of the EFH, including a separate and secure one for patients suspected of being part of ISIS.  I seem to recall that ward had a sign labeled “Enemy Combatants” or something to that effect.

It was at the EFH that I witnessed my first surgery (shrapnel being removed from a boy’s foot) and that I observed the triage of victims, who had been attacked and injured by ISIS. It was also there that I sat by the bedside of an unconscious young man with a traumatic brain injury and prayed for his miraculous healing.  He was eventually transferred to another facility, so I never knew the ultimate outcome of his circumstances.

But one thing that particularly stands out – something that I have rarely shared – is when I carried the body of a deceased girl from inside the EFH to the morgue area just outside the blast walls.  Staff were technically not supposed to go into that area – I think because of the threat of snipers – but I, alongside a colleague, volunteered to assist in this way.  I had actually never seen or even considered that we had a morgue area, which was somewhat naïve on my part since I was fully aware that not all of our patients survived.  I had just never thought about what was done with their bodies, and when I entered the area, I was a bit taken aback by the sight of other sheet-draped bodies.  And this was what this young girl was to me – a sheet-draped body.  I never saw her face or any part of her, but what I recall the most, as she was placed into my arms, was the warmth of her body.  She had died only moments before, without any time for her body to become cold.  

I had been in the presence of death twice before and a decade earlier – at my father’s bedside in 2006 and at my maternal grandmother’s in 2007, both having died in hospital beds on the very same spot in my parents’ den.  Moments after my father’s passing, I recall touching his body and still feeling the warmth of it.  After the hospice nurse arrived and fulfilled a few of her responsibilities, she asked me to help dress him in some pajamas.  Although I was heartbroken, I willingly obliged because I remember thinking this was one final thing I could do for my daddy, however small it might be.  But as I helped “roll” his body in one direction and then in the other (tears streaming down my cheeks all the while), I learned that his warmth was gone, and he had become cold to the touch.  Physiologically speaking, it’s amazing how quickly the body, in the absence of blood flow, changes temperatures.

So why am I writing about this? I’m not quite sure, to be honest. These are actually not things I think of often. They are not memories that haunt me, but they do cross my mind now and again. But for some reason, the memory of carrying the deceased Iraqi girl in my arms and the warmth of her body have come back to me a little more often as of late. I don’t feel traumatized by the experience, nor do I feel particularly mournful about it; after all, I never even saw her let alone knew her. This seeming indifference tends to worry me, wondering if I am a bit inhumane, but deep down I do care, and I believe that’s why I have never forgotten her or our momentary encounter and likely never will. Sometimes, particularly in the line of work Samaritan’s Purse does, you have to build a bit of a wall around your heart, or you’ll be a puddle all the time in the midst of human suffering and tragedy and find yourself incapable of carrying out the work at hand. But you don’t want to make that wall such a fortress that your heart cannot be pierced with compassion for those in need. Unlike bodies at the end of life, we mustn’t let the warmth of our humanity turn cold.

I don’t exactly know all the lessons I have gleaned or will continue to glean from this, but I am reminded of the words of Samaritan’s Purse founder Bob Pierce: “Let my heart be broken with the things that break the heart of God.”  May that ever be true of me and of us all.