Collateral Damage
That use which is collateral and intervenient is no less worthy than that which is principal and intended.
—Roger Bacon, A History of Mathematics
Something that is collateral is something that is secondary, something that is extrinsic to a main consideration. One of the word's meanings is “odds and ends of trash” or “rubbish” (“a woodshed full of collateral”). Clearly the people who live in the region we have invaded are regarded as collateral—they are secondary to the true interests of the war makers. Their deaths are deplored but shrugged off as inevitable (President Bush, I read, is untroubled by his decision to go to war and “sleeps like a baby”).
There is another definition of collateral, one in which what is secondary comes to the forefront. A person applying for a loan is asked for “collateral security.” The collateral is secondary to the loan, but it is a primary asset, without which the loan could not be obtained. I suggest that a nation’s people are collateral in this sense: they are the raw material of the future. They are, indeed, the nation. Without drawing on this collateral one cannot build anything lasting. A wise leader considers the effect his action has on the people, for resentment can linger for decades, centuries, or even millennia, as we have seen in Palestine. I fear that our obstinate display of military might has damaged our Gulf collateral for many years into the future.
Bakhat Hassan is collateral. He was a “dirt farmer,” according to a Knight Ridder report filed by Meg Laughlin (which is my source for the following). On the last day of March, he grabbed a leaflet dropped from an American helicopter. The leaflet advised him to “be safe” and flee his village of Karbala.
Hassan and his family dressed in their best clothes—“to look American,” he explained. His father put on a pinstriped suit. Hassan piled more than a dozen family members into a vehicle. When the family approached a first U.S. checkpoint, they waved to the soldiers, and in turn were waved through. “We were thinking these Americans want us to be safe,” Hassan said. Then they approached a second checkpoint. Again they waved, but this time the soldiers responded by firing on them. Hassan lost his daughters, age two and five, and his son, age three. He lost both his parents. He lost two older brothers, their wives, and two nieces, age twelve and fifteen.
“I saw the heads of my two little girls come off,” cried Hassan’s wife, who is nine months pregnant. “It would be better not to have the baby,” she added. “Our lives are over.”
An army report termed the incident “miscommunication.”
Another article in my local paper explains that fatigue is the soldiers’ worst enemy, so they are kept jazzed up on dexadrine. Truckers, hipsters, and children of the sixties (and probably military leaders as well) know that a diet of dex will turn a person edgy, jumpy, paranoid, and aggressive.
But it’s all collateral damage, and it surprises no one, least of all the masterminds of this war, who are constantly reminding us that war is a dirty business. The war may be illegal, unnecessary, and unjust, but these planners’ global vision does not give much weight to “collateral damage."
This essay was written in 2003 for an anthology entitled Shock and Awe: Responses to War, edited by Peter Laufer. Because the publisher went out of business (after more than 30 years), the book has gone out of print, so I am posting the essay here. I think it has proven reasonably prophetic.
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>collateral damage<
preemptive action
mood of the nation
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