Collateral Damage: Birthday Reflections
- Dan Strawn
- Apr 24
- 3 min read
Updated: Apr 25
A Poem by Dan Strawn
Introductory Note:
When I was growing up, my Uncle Dan could silence a whole pack of wild cousins with his stories and legendary campfire tacos. In his retirement years he became a prolific author who writes with heart, humor, and hard-won wisdom.
Now in his eighties, Dan's recent poem is an elder’s elegy on the human cost of warfare. It's a call-to-conscience reflection from one man who, over a lifetime, watches the world and, time and time again, mourns what remains tragically unchanged . . . civilians in the crossfire.
--Colleen Akiko
On my birthday in the year of twenty-twenty-four
I wonder about collateral damage
The ceaseless murder of civilians in war
In my eighty-six years gone
My mind rests on the day in nineteen-forty-five
when I become seven
Peace happens twelve days later
The world's warriors quit fighting and stop
making collateral damage out of
fathers and mothers daughters and sons
grandfathers and grandmothers
In the fifties when I am twelve
The world's warriors wrestle to win Korea
with no regard for collateral damage
They wreak havoc on helpless humans
Collateral Damage!
This murder of civilians in war
occurred when I was seven in nineteen-forty-five
and when I was twelve in nineteen-fifty-two
and
and
and
It's April twenty-twenty-five now
I will be eighty-seven soon
Every day since my last birthday
Russia Ukraine Israel and Palestine
have turned
grandfathers grandmothers mothers
fathers brothers and sisters
into
Collateral Damage
Thus
it has been in my life
Thus
it has been in human history
Nothing has changed
Nothing
©April 2, 2025
About Dan Strawn:
One Saturday in mid-June of 1957, Dan Strawn turned down a journalism scholarship, a job working for the local newspaper, and an offer to be trained by the US Navy as an officer specializing in Journalism. Instead, he reported to work on Monday morning at a local office of Pacific Telephone. Not until a few days earlier did his family know he would be moving to an apartment on the Sunday after Saturday's graduation. In the ensuing six-plus-decades, Strawn has enjoyed a life of new-venture successes, such as:
While working full-time at his career, he earned a Bachelor of Science Business Administration (with honors) at the University of Redlands.
He and his wife raised a large family, all of whom have carved successful lives for themselves.
In the course of his telephone and post-telephone careers, he taught business administration and computer science courses as an adjunct professor in the California community college system.
At age forty-eight he retired from the phone company and spent the next fourteen years teaching and consulting with large and small companies.
In 2001, at age sixty-three, Strawn retired a second time, moved to Vancouver, Washington, and took up creative writing as a post-retirement activity.
In addition to Strawn’s longer works, his stories and essays have been published in Trail Blazer Magazine and several editions of Idaho Magazine. His short story “Son” was a first-place winner in Idaho Magazine’s 2014 Short Fiction Contest. His essay Everyman’s Smalltown was a finalist in the University of Oregon’s 2005 Northwest Perspectives Essay Contest. His novel Black Wolf’s Return was nominated for a 2014 book award by the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association.
ArtChowder Magazine featured Strawn’s creative writing ventures in the Nov/Dec 2023 issue.
Strawn is a life member of the Telephone Pioneers and a member of the Nez Perce National Historic Trail Foundation.
He volunteered for over ten years in the early 2000's as an interpreter of The Nez Perce Experience for the Nez Perce National Park.
Between 2005 and 2015, he taught courses for the Mature Learning Division at Clark Community College in Vancouver. He taught courses that he designed about Pacific Northwest history in general and Nez Perce culture and history in particular. In 2008, he took his students to central Idaho, and eastern Oregon and Washington, where they experienced first-hand the Nez Perce stories they studied.
LINKS FOR MORE INFO:
Book Description: “PAST AWAKENED: Wars, Letters, Brothers”
FaceBook page
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