Collateral Damage, Iraq

The two friends were your basic three-egg omelet and hash-brown kind of guys.

They wore their hair short and weren’t much concerned about how they dressed. From time to time waitresses would mistake them for cops. They weren’t.

The two met for lunch once a week for more than thirty years, after vacations it might be several days in a row. They ended up in the same booth in the same Midwestern Greek diner almost every time. They agreed their Friday lunches were the perfect way to kick off a weekend.

Eventually the two friends would cut back on their billable hours — semi-retirement came to both of them. Now they could share coffee and current events long after their booth was cleared.

Although neither had members or financial interests at risk, they took the U.S. invasion of Iraq to heart. It was a war waged by their elected officials paid for by their tax dollars. Lives were being spent in their names.

A difference of opinion over the war developed between the two. The more they tried to ignore it, the more it festered. It was as if they were speeding toward an IED, hidden on the side of the road, that would destroy their friendship. One they wouldn’t see until it was too late.

Before the war Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld wrote a series of short memos he called ‘snowflakes.’ His snowflake of October 15, 2002 warned “…there could be higher than expected collateral damage.”

The friends of more than thirty years walked out of their coffee shop one Friday afternoon, six and a half years after the war began, and never saw each other again.