It got real for his newlywed wife when Tim Darms showed her plans for the ward set aside for ISIS terrorists in the Iraq field hospital he would help build.
It got real for him on his first day at the site, 15 kilometers outside siege-wracked Mosul, when he felt the percussion of two bombs exploding in the city.
"You didn't feel the explosion," he said. "It was more like a sound you could feel." He turned to see smoke mushrooming in the sky.
Darms, 28, is a project engineer for Water Mission, the North Charleston-based nonprofit dedicated to providing safe drinking water to people in developing countries and disaster areas. The organization was asked by Samaritan's Purse to support construction of its emergency facility in Mosul, Iraq.
The Purse, like the Mission, is a Christian international relief organization. The hospital is treating civilians and soldiers from all sides. Darms' job was to engineer safe water equipment and lines.
Mosul was a city of more than 1 million people when the deadly terrorist group overran it in 2014. Iraqi troops, supported by coalition forces including U.S. military, have battled to re-take it since October, in a campaign considered the largest since the Iraq war and the largest under way anywhere on the planet.
On Thursday, the coalition made a significant gain, wresting control of the airport.
About half of all casualties so far have been civilians. The first ones to come to the hospital as Darms worked were a woman with her grade-school-age daughter. The girl had been disemboweled by an IED, an improvised explosive device.
The engineers' escort was a tough Iraqi who could fend for them. Darms remembers the hurt in the man's eye as he rushed to find supplies that doctors were calling for to help the girl. She later died.
Another mom came in with two daughters. Each girl had her left side laced with shrapnel. They had been sitting on the same side at a dinner table when a car bomb went off outside.
Despite the executions, other atrocities and refugees fleeing, more than a half-million people still live in Mosul. Darms was struck when he arrived how the highway was busy with commerce and travel in and out of the city. The day before, ISIS forces fired on a gravel truck supplying the construction.
"Everything is more complex than portrayed," Darms said. "There's still an economy. People are still living their lives," he said. But "in a moment you could lose half your family."
Madisson and Tim Darms had been married half a year when operations vice president Seth Womble, his low-key boss, came into the engineering room at the North Charleston headquarters last fall, and began his usual spiel, "What about this..." Then he said, "Who wants to go to Mosul for Christmas?"
The risks were as daunting as they were obvious. But a job that entails responding to disasters is inherently risky. Part of the hiring process at the mission is to instill that expectation, Womble said. Darms, like all his people, was ready. They work at Water Mission because of a calling to help where they are needed most.
Still, "Iraq was a little different. It was our first time in a war zone," Womble said. He told Darms, "you might want to check with your wife before you miss your first Christmas."
Madisson Darms, though, is a physical therapist, and the calling is mutual for the West Ashley couple. She said if God could send his son to help at Christmas, she could send her husband.
"She's awesome. She's a wonderful wife," Darms said.
The month in Iraq wasn't easy. Darms, quiet-voiced and even-keeled, tried to share when the couple communicated, but at first he couldn't bring himself to tell her a few details: how a car bomb had gone off a mile from the Erbil, Iraq, site where they prepped to build the hospital or how he was asked to redesign the specs to include a chemical weapon decontamination shower.
When he returned home, though, the couple sat together as he shared it all, showed her photographs of the people who had befriended him, the faces of the two Iraqi engineers one Muslim and one Christian who had worked side by side with him. And the horrors.
"Just being sad about it," he said. While Darms trained his replacement the day before he left, a drone flew overhead. The security forces fired at it but missed. The next day, he heard after he returned home, two rockets exploded in an empty field about a quarter mile from the hospital and the friends he left behind.
"Being home and hearing that was the first time I was overwhelmed by fear," he said.
Would he go back? The nod is understated, businesslike. "Yeah." Madisson and he both plan to go overseas, somewhere with the greatest need and the best fit for their skills, he said. "The Lord leading."
Reach Bo Petersen Reporter at Facebook, @bopete on Twitter or 1-843-937-5744.
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North Charleston engineer helps build hospital in war-wracked Mosul, Iraq - Charleston Post Courier