This is an email sent to me, from my youngest daughter who is stationed in the Middle East. This is her second one year tour.
I mention this only because I think it has a direct baring on the psychological impact of what she saw, and how it affected her.
I have included the photos she took.
Here is the letter:
Every day, on my way to the office from the bus stop, I walk across this little footbridge that spans what is really just a ditch between the two roads encircling Warrior camp. I make the same walk every day, and the scenery includes a lot of gravel and rocks, generators that smell like an exhaust pipe, port-o-johns that smell even worse, dirty puddles that never seem to dry up even though the sun beats down on them all day, dust, discarded water bottles and other trash, and the occasional scrubby bush. So I don't look around much.
Then one morning, about a week ago, as I came off the far end of the little footbridge and looked both ways to cross the second road, I saw something new. Very new. About ten or twenty feet to the right of the footbridge, right on the edge of the road, was a sunflower about three feet tall, all alone. I had NOT seen it the day before, and my first thought was that it was fake, and someone had stuck it in the ground there as a joke. I walked down to it and knelt in front of it. It was not fake. The leaves were dusty and torn, but the flower itself was gorgeous and perfect, the brightest yellow you ever saw. It bobbed gently in the breeze, seeming to defy reality.
I just sat there in front of it for a moment, trying to imagine how on earth this had happened. There was nothing else growing anywhere near it, and being the middle of summer, it had been very hot for many days, with no rain at all. And I don't even need to mention that sunflowers certainly don't just grow wild here. It had to have grown from a sunflower seed someone accidentally dropped there, but I couldn't imagine how it would even have penetrated the hard packed dust, or how it had germinated with no water. And since I hadn't seen it the day before, that meant that even though it had obviously been growing there for some time, the flower must have opened completely overnight. I reached out and touched the stem, just to make sure it was really real, and sure enough, it was solidly rooted in the ground. After staring at it for a little longer, I remembered that I had my little camera in my bag. I pulled it out and took a few pictures, thinking, "No one will believe this!"
When I got to the office, I asked if anyone had seen it. They hadn't, but I pointed it out when we drove by later. Everyone was as amazed as I was. It was almost like a kind of magic, a little piece of beauty in an otherwise bare and dusty place. I felt like I owed it something, just for trying so hard and making it this far. So I got a water bottle from the office and went out and poured it on the ground around it. I did the some thing the next day, and every time I walked by it, I couldn't help sitting there for a minute and staring at it. Looking back now, I should have dug it up and replanted it somewhere else. Somewhere safer. But it never even occurred to me. It seemed like it was meant to be there.
That little flower stayed there for four days - through a dust storm, and then a rain storm - and then one day when I walked by after work, it was gone. Completely gone, like it had never been there at all. All I found of it was a single golden petal. It makes me sad to think that someone would just walk by and pull it up, for some senseless reason, but I suppose that is the way of the world, especially over here. At least I managed to get some pictures of it first, and I thought I would share them with you all...
My Opera
