The Costs of War: A Mother’s View

Note: This essay was written by my mom, Teri Wills Allison, more than twenty years ago (twenty-one, to be exact) 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 here again because her words still cut straight to the truth about what war costs—not just for those who fight, but for those who have to wait, worry, and live with the aftermath.

After her piece, I’ve included a few reflections of my own—some thoughts on what it’s like to read her words two decades later, as both a veteran and a parent, along with a few updates on the people she wrote about.
— Nick Allison, Veterans Day 2025

The Costs of War
A Mother’s View
By 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: Twenty-One Years Later
Nick Allison

I didn’t read this essay when my mom first published it. In fact, I didn’t even know about it. Despite her strong convictions about the war, she never sent it to me—she knew I had a job to do and 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.

Honestly, I wasn’t open to hearing this perspective at the time anyway. I wouldn’t say I was a “true believer” in the idea of “nation building,” but I definitely didn’t agree with the protestors back then. That’s often how it goes with young men in uniform—the world feels divided into duty and distractions. At that point, my life experience consisted mostly of high school and a war zone.

Now I’m about three 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 Army—as a medic, thankfully, not an infantryman like his dad. And I understand her perspective more and more. Time and experience have a way of stripping the blinders off.

I think most of us who served in Iraq would agree, at least when we’re being honest, that the invasion was a mistake. My mom knew that from the start. It just took me a few years and a lot of life to see what she and so many others saw back then. And the costs of war she wrote about are real. While 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 ones that followed, including one of my best friends and the best leader I ever knew, Colin, the soldier my mom mentions who was wounded in an IED ambush. That “steady, incremental progress toward consciousness” she wrote about was not to be. After ten years in a coma, Colin died from the wounds he suffered in Iraq in 2004. Colin was indeed a fighter, but there are some fights we just don’t get to win.

My interpreter friend (we’ll just call him “Jeff”) is a story with a much happier ending, thanks in large part to my mom. She helped connect him with an immigration attorney, and eventually he was able to come to the U.S. Jeff 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.

Part of me thought reposting this piece might make more sense on Memorial Day, but it fits today too. It’s not just about the men and women who made the ultimate sacrifice; it’s about all the veterans who served and the families who supported them, waiting and worrying and carrying the invisible parts of war.

It’s also a reminder of the costs our elected officials should consider before deciding to send young Americans into combat.

Like my mom, I’m not a pacifist. I believe that violence can be justified in defense of others, 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 we now know all too well: bad intelligence, people more concerned with power and profit than with truth, and the wave of fear and vengeance that swept the country in the aftermath of 9/11—all of it steeped in what Michael Scheuer, a former CIA analyst who once led the bin Laden unit, called imperial hubris.

Her essay is over twenty years old now, but reading it again, I’m struck by how right she was—and by how much I still have to learn from it. Also, I now know exactly where I got 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 was seen by many as unpatriotic, and you did it anyway—not out of defiance, but out of compassion and conviction. You reminded people that loving your country doesn’t mean agreeing with everything it does and that maybe the truest kind of patriotism is caring enough to question it.

And to any of my fellow veterans reading this, happy Veterans Day and thank you sincerely for your service.

—Nick