“The news tells us of the cold weather that is coming over the United States. We on the other hand are having some spring time experiences. After all the rain from last week, we have grass! It is growing in and around cracks and in between the C wire. It is soft bright green grass. I know it is soft because I stopped to pet it, it’s a simple pleasure,” Chaplain Janis Dashner wrote in her journal on December 12, 2003.
The moment reminded her of Song of Solomon 2:11–12 “For lo, the winter is past, the rain is over and gone. The flowers appear on the earth.” And in this case, grass.
“I’m sure our winter isn’t over just yet. But it is nice to have a preview of the spring to come. I’m sure the winter for the Iraqi people isn’t over either… but spring will come,” she continued.
Dashner served at a Mobile Aeromedical Staging Facility in Baghdad. The television show, M*A*S*H, depicted doctors and nurses rushing to helicopters to retrieve wounded patients. MASFs are a modern version but with a key difference. Military medical staff stabilize wounded patients at a MASF and then load them onto a plane that takes them to a hospital. The MASF is mobile and usually used at the beginning of a war. When the situation is stabilized, a Contingency Aeromedical Staging Facility takes over. Dashner witnessed this transformation.
“The MASF has grown into a CASF which is a larger facility with the capability to hold patients for longer periods of time. This is the place where patients are ‘collected’ from various treatment areas, field hospitals, and surgical hospitals; they stay with us until airlift is ready to fly them, usually to Germany,” she wrote in her journal, noting that loading patients onto planes is often heavy work.
And while spring had not fully come to the people of Iraq, the transformation of the MASF to a CASF was a hopeful indicator of a more stable Iraq, a little green grass growing under the barbed wire. The day after Dashner wrote about the hopeful signs of spring, United States soldiers captured Sadaam Hussein. Hope was on the horizon.
Father, thank you for the hopeful signs you give of new life to come, of the change of seasons that electrify the earth. I pray for continued hope for the people of Iraq.
“See! The winter is past; the rains are over and gone. Flowers appear on the earth; the season of singing has come, the cooing of doves is heard in our land.” (Song of Solomon 2:11–12)