In Memory of Chris Coffland

 Chris Coffland was killed by an IED last week in Afghanistan while serving our country. He is the first person I've known to die in either Iraq and Afghanistan. I have not seen him since I graduated in 1986, and I hadn't kept up with where he was or what he was doing, although someone told me not long ago that he had decided to join the Army, at age 41. I know lots of people from the State Department who have served in Iraq and Afghanistan, and there have been other distant acquaintances there in the military. They all survived. Chris didn't. 

Chris was my teammate at Washington and Lee University. As a football player, he was tough, aggressive and fearless. He would take on anybody, no matter how much bigger they were, and he never held back. You got everything he had as long as he was on the field, and you wanted to be out there with him because he played with passion, as though there was nothing more after that next play. 

My senior year, or maybe it was when I was a junior, Chris started making phony concert fliers using our pictures from the W&L media guide and album covers by bands no body every heard of. He posted them on campus during the night. He made one that included me, Tim Janyska, Chris Wilson and Chris Bleggi. We were billed as Puzzle People, our faces imposed on bodies sitting on a fence and wearing some of the finest 70s threads I had ever seen. I pulled down one of the copies, careful not to tear it, knowing that soon I my football career would be over and I would be graduating. I put it away as one more memento. I've kept it. I'm glad I did.