The Costs of War: Twenty-One Years Later

The following essay was written by my mom, Teri Wills Allison, more than twenty years ago while I was a young infantry squad leader serving in Iraq. It was originally published at TomDispatch and later reprinted in The Nation and other outlets. I’m sharing it again this Memorial Day weekend because her words still cut straight to the truth about what war costs, and not just for those who fight.

After her piece, I’ve added some reflections of my own—what it’s like to read her words two decades later as both a veteran and a parent, a few thoughts on Memorial Day, and some updates on the people she wrote about.

Nick Allison,
May 24, 2026

The Costs of War: A Mother’s View

Teri Wills Allison
October 20, 2004

I am not a pacifist. I am a mother. By nature, the two are incompatible, for even a cottontail rabbit will fight to protect her young. Violent action may well be necessary in defense of one’s family or home (and that definition of home can easily be extended to community and beyond); but violence, no matter how warranted, always takes a heavy toll. And violence taken to the extreme—war —exacts the most extreme costs. A just war there may be, but there is no such thing as a good war. And the burdens of an unjust war are insufferable.

I know something about the costs of an unjust war, for my son, Nick—an infantryman in the U.S. Army—is fighting one in Iraq. I don’t speak for my son. I couldn’t even if I wanted to, for all I hear through the Mom Filter is: “I’m fine, Mom, don’t worry, I’m fine, everything is fine, fine, fine, we’re fine, just fine.” But I can tell you what some of the costs are as I live and breathe them.

First, the minor stuff: my constant feelings of dread and despair; the sweeping rage that alternates with petrifying fear; the torrents of tears that accompany a maddening sense of helplessness and vulnerability. My son is involved in a deadly situation that should never have been. I feel like a mother lion in a cage, my grown cub in danger, and all I can do is throw myself furiously against the bars—impotent to protect him. My tolerance for bullshit is zero, and I’ve snapped off more heads in the last several months than in all my 48 years combined.

For the first time in my life, and with great amazement and sorrow, I feel what can only be described as hatred. It took me a long time to admit it, but there it is. I loathe the hubris, the callousness, and the lies of those in the Bush administration who led us into this war. Truth be told, I even loathe the fallible and very human purveyors of those lies. I feel no satisfaction in this admission, only sadness and recognition. And hope that—given time—I can do better. I never wanted to hate anyone.

Xanax helps a bit. At least it holds the debilitating panic attacks somewhat at bay, so I can fake it through one more day. A friend in the same situation relies on a six-pack of beer every night; another has drifted into a la-la land of denial. Nice.

Then there is the wedge that’s been driven between part of my extended family and me. They don’t see this war as one based on lies. They’ve become evangelical believers in a false faith, swallowing Bush’s fear-mongering, his chicken-hawk posturing and strutting, and cheering his “bring ’em on” attitude as a sign of strength and resoluteness. Perhaps life is just easier that way. These are the same people who have known my son since he was a baby, who have held him and loved him and played with him, who have bought him birthday presents and taken him fishing. I don’t know them anymore.

But enough of my whining. My son is alive and in one piece, unlike the 1,102 dead and 7,782 severely wounded American soldiers—which equals 8,884 blood-soaked uniforms—and doesn’t even count the estimated 20,000 troops—not publicly reported by the Department of Defense—medevacked out of Iraq for “non-combat related injuries.” Every death, every injury burns like a knife in my gut, for these are all America’s sons and daughters. And I know I’m not immune to that knock on my door either.

And what of the Iraqi people? How many casualties have they suffered? How many tens of thousands dead and wounded? How many Iraqi mothers have wept, weep now, for their lost children? I fear we will never know, for though the Pentagon has begun—almost gleefully—counting Iraqi insurgent deaths, there is little chance of getting an accurate verification of civilian casualties. You know, “collateral damage.”

Yes, my son is alive and, as far as I know, well. I wish I could say the same for some of his friends.

One young man who was involved in heavy fighting during the invasion is now so debilitated by post-traumatic stress disorder that he routinely has flashbacks in which he smells burning flesh; he can’t close his eyes without seeing people’s heads squashed like frogs in the middle of the road, or dead and dying women and children, burned, bleeding, and dismembered. Sometimes he hears the sounds of battle raging around him, and he has been hospitalized twice for suicidal tendencies. When he was home on leave, this 27-year-old man would crawl into his mother’s room at night and sob in her lap for hours. Instead of getting treatment for PTSD, he has just received a “less than honorable” discharge from the Army. The rest of his unit redeploys to Iraq in February.

Another friend of Nick’s was horrifically wounded when his Humvee stopped on an IED. He didn’t even have time to instinctively raise his arm and protect his face. Shrapnel ripped through his right eye, obliterating it to gooey shreds, and penetrated his brain. He has been in a coma since March. His mother spends every day with him in the hospital; his wife is devastated, and their 1½-year-old daughter doesn’t know her daddy. But my son’s friend is a fighter and so is making steady, incremental progress toward consciousness. He has a long, hard struggle ahead of him, one that he need never have faced—and his family has had to fight every step of the way to get him the treatment he needs. So much for supporting the troops.

I go visit him every week, and it breaks my heart to see the burned faces, the missing limbs, the limps, the vacant stares one encounters in an acute-care military hospital. In front of the hospital there is a cannon, and every afternoon they blast that sucker off. You should see all the poor guys hit the pavement. Though many requests have been made to discontinue the practice for the sake of the returning wounded, the general in charge refuses. Boom.

Then there is Nick’s 24-year-old Kurdish friend, the college-educated son of teachers, multilingual and highly intelligent. He works as a translator for the U.S. Army for $600 a month and lives on base, where he is relatively safe. (Translators for private contractors, also living on base, make $7,200 a month.) He wants to travel to the States to continue his education, but no visas are now being issued from Iraq. Once the Army is through with him, will they just send him back into the streets, a virtual dead man for having worked with the Americans? My son places a high premium on loyalty to family and friends, and he has been raised to walk his talk. This must be a harsh and embittering lesson on just how unprincipled the rest of the world can be. My heart aches for his Iraqi friend as well as for him.

A year ago in January, when Nick left for Iraq, I granted myself permission to be stark raving mad for the length of his deployment. By God, I’ve done a good job of it, without apology or excuse. And I dare say there are at least 139,999 other moms who have done the same—though taking troop rotations into consideration to maintain that magical number of 140,000 in the sand could put the number of crazed military moms as high as 300,000, maybe more. Right now, you might want to be careful about cutting in line in front of a middle-aged woman.

I know there are military moms who view the war in Iraq through different ideological lenses than mine. Sometimes I envy them. God, how much easier it must be to believe one’s son or daughter is fighting for a just and noble cause! But no matter how hard I scrutinize the invasion and occupation of Iraq, all I see are lies, corruption, and greed fueled by a powerful addiction to oil. Real soldiers get blown to tatters in their “Hummers,” so that well-heeled American suburbanites can play in theirs.

For my family and me, the costs of this war are real and not abstract. By day, I fight my demons of dreaded possibility, beat them back into the shadows, into the dark recesses of my mind. Every night, they hiss and whisper a vile prognosis of gloom and desolation. I order the voices into silence, but too often they laugh at and mock my commands.

I wonder if George Bush ever hears these voices.

And I wonder, too—just how much are we willing to pay for a gallon of gas?

Teri Wills Allison, a massage therapist and a member of Military Families Speak Out, lives near Austin, Texas, with her husband. She is the mother of two grown children, the oldest of whom is a soldier deployed to Iraq.

Afterword

Nick Allison

I didn’t read this essay when my mom first published it. In fact I didn’t even know it existed. Despite her strong convictions about the war, she never sent it to me. She knew I had a job to do and that I needed to stay focused, and although she was obviously worried, she didn’t feel it was her place to shape my experience with her opinions—no matter how strong or valid they were. I love her for that, and for a hundred other reasons. And honestly, I wouldn’t have been open to hearing this perspective at the time anyway. I wouldn’t exactly say that I was a “true believer” in the idea of nation building, or whatever the ultimate goal in Iraq was, but I definitely didn’t agree with the protestors back then. That’s often how it goes with young men in uniform. You’ve got the mission and your brothers, and then you’ve got everything else. Everything else doesn’t really matter all that much.

Back in 2004, my life experience consisted mostly of high school and a war zone. Now I’m a couple years shy of the age my mom was when she wrote this, and I have an 18-year-old son of my own who’s about to graduate high school and is seriously considering joining the military, as a medic or mechanic, thankfully, not an infantryman like his dad. I understand her perspective more every year. You just see things differently once you’ve had enough time and enough life on the other side.

I think at this point a lot of us who served in Iraq would agree, at least when we’re being honest, that the invasion was largely a mistake. My mom knew that from the start, it just took me a few years and some distance to see what she and so many others saw back then. The costs of war she wrote about are real. Although I was lucky to make it home mostly unscathed, many of my friends and fellow soldiers weren’t. Several were killed during that deployment and the many that followed over the next twenty years of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. One of them was Colin—one of my best friends and one of the finest leaders I’ve ever known. Colin was the soldier my mom mentioned in her piece who was wounded in an IED ambush, my friend she visited every week at the military hospital . Ultimately, that “steady, incremental progress toward consciousness” she wrote about didn’t happen, and after ten years in a coma, Colin died from the wounds he suffered in Iraq in 2004. He fought like hell, but there are some fights we just don’t get to win.

My Kurdish interpreter friend (we’ll just call him “Jay”) is a much happier story, thanks in large part to my mom. She helped connect him with an immigration attorney, and eventually he was able to come to the States. Jay built a life here, started a family, and after many years decided to return home on his own terms. He’s safe, happy, and successful now.

This coming Monday is Memorial Day, a day I always think about Colin and the others who didn’t come home, though honestly, like most combat veterans will tell you, we don’t really need a special day for that. There isn’t a day that goes by that I don’t think about them. What I try to do with that, or at least what I aim for, is to live with the kind of gratitude and intent they would have wanted for us, to treat the days I have as the gift they are, the extra days Colin and so many others never got. I can’t think of a better way to honor the fallen than that. I fall short sometimes, I’m not immune to self-pity or the occasional spiral over something minor, some petty frustration those guys would have been glad to have, but I keep trying. That’s all any of us can do.

I’ve never been the kind of veteran who thinks everyone needs to spend all twenty-four hours of Memorial Day being completely somber and serious. Go ahead and fire up the grill if you want. Watch the Indy 500. Have people over. Go to the beach. And sure, the red, white, and blue corporate advertising feels pretty cringeworthy, but if you need new tires or a new mattress, absolutely take advantage of the sales and save yourself a few bucks. When I think about Colin and the other guys we lost along the way, I don’t think they’d want us sitting around being dour every May. I know I wouldn’t. If I’d gotten killed in Iraq and there’s some kind of afterlife where I’m watching all of this unfold, I’d be pissed if my friends spent every Memorial Day in solemn mourning instead of living. That said, if there’s a veterans cemetery or a memorial event near you, it’s worth an hour of your time. We owe those men and women a measure of respect we can never fully repay, but we also owe them something else, the genuine effort to live our best lives with whatever time we have left, the bonus time they didn’t get.

It’s also worth remembering that the powerful people in Washington who send America’s sons and daughters to war should think a hell of a lot harder about the justification and costs before they do it. Like my mom, I’m not a pacifist. I believe war can be justified, but only as a last resort, one reached through thought, restraint, and humility. I don’t think George W. Bush is an “evil” man, but I do believe his decision to invade Iraq was shaped by three things: the wave of fear and vengeance that swept the country after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the people more concerned with power and profit than with the lives they were risking, and the bad intelligence that nobody in a position of power seemed particularly motivated to question.

My mom’s essay is over twenty years old now, and reading it again, I think she was right about all of it—I also now know exactly where I inherited my love of the em dash.

Thanks for always being a voice of conscience, Mom, even when it wasn’t popular. You spoke up at a time when criticizing the war got you called unpatriotic, and taught me that sometimes true patriotism means loving your country enough to tell it when it’s wrong.

To anyone reading this who lost someone, I hope your Memorial Day is full of both some quiet gratitude for who they were, and everything else they would have wanted for you.

Featured image: Nick and a fellow squad leader, Kirkuk, Iraq, circa 2004

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