Reprinted with permission from Veterans Voices, Summer 2022
Mothers lose their sons and daughters.
Husbands never return home,
taken not by their maker, but by
soldiers and their weapons of death.
Aggressor or defender matters not,
they both end life.
Destroy an apartment building, a
maternity hospital, a cancer ward.
This has a name-Collateral Damage.
Death coming to those not in uniform.
Too many are dying; too many are dying.
One man wants what is not his.
Even those that live have a
lifetime of memories-nightmares.
Never forgotten.
Haunted until their death.
