Iran fired ballistic missiles at a U.S. aircraft carrier and a destroyer, but the ships were able to evade the attacks, Central Command said.
Page F2From§Eachthe coffee break edition — 5 September 2026
War that killed 18 Americans and cost households $1,200 apiece is 'small potatoes,' Trump says
As it ran on the front
Walk me through it. Not the speech — I've got the speech, everybody's got the speech — I mean the part before the speech, where somebody sits with the numbers and decides what to call six months. Show me the procedure, step by step, because I've been trying to reconstruct it on my own time and I keep getting stuck on the same step.
Here's how I picture it going. You've got a war — Iran, six months now, nobody's arguing the calendar — and at some point a line has to go out to the wires. Does the phrase get picked to fit a number, or does somebody go looking for a number small enough to fit the phrase already picked? Because what came out, this week, was "small potatoes." I'd like to see that memo. I don't think anybody's shown me that memo.…
…(cont) I ask because there's a Gold Star father who ran his own version of that math, and his number didn't come out small. First Lieutenant Tyler James Feehan, twenty-five, deployed to an air base in Jordan, missiles and drones lit the sky and he didn't come home — one of eighteen Americans dead since the war started. The Times sat with the father this week and walked through what it actually costs a family, the invoice version, not the speech version. Does that ledger start with the funeral? Does it start earlier, with the last phone call? I don't know how a family gets through that math. I know I couldn't.
There's a second number I want to be fair to. Moody's chief economist, quoted Monday, puts the war's cost to the average American household at twelve hundred dollars over six months. I sat with that figure out at the toll plaza the other morning, the fan belt in my car doing its noise again, waiting on the arm to go up, and I ran it on the dash: twelve hundred divided by six is two hundred a month. Two hundred a month is real money at my house. Is it the same two hundred at his?
Eighteen dead is the count in the paper that carries Lieutenant Feehan's name. On September 2nd, a different paper carried nineteen more — a single overnight strike, answered by Iran, one of the nineteen a four-year-old at a wedding. Same six months. I keep trying to walk the procedure from that list to the phrase in the first paragraph, and I can't locate the step. Is there a step? Somebody drafted that step. I'd like it explained the way you'd explain it to a claims adjuster, because that's about my level of paperwork.
And the Vice President's contribution — that six months of this wasn't a war at all — I'd like that walked through too, because if it wasn't a war, what's the file called that Lieutenant Feehan's family, and the rest of the eighteen, and the twelve-hundred-dollar households, get filed under? Every war I've ever heard of gets a name. This one's apparently unnamed and inexpensive on the same page, and I don't know the procedure that gets a war to hold still for both.
Oh — excuse me, one more thing, before you head out. Twelve hundred dollars a household, eighteen Americans dead, a father with an invoice, a four-year-old who didn't make it home from a wedding either. Six months of that, added up the way the father had to add it up. Is "small potatoes" the number he got read to him, or is that the number reserved for the rest of us?
“They tell you it's "small potatoes" the same week the invoice comes due — twelve hundred bucks a household, eighteen caskets, and a four-year-old at a wedding who's not on anybody's balance sheet. That's not a war they're playing down, that's a receipt they're hoping you don't read. Small potatoes is just what they call the check when somebody else is the one paying it.”
“Look, "small potatoes" is relative — you put six months next to a real world war, it's proportionate language, that's just context, that's all that is. And the Vice President's got a point too, Congress never actually declared this thing, so technically — wait, did I just say the eighteen dead don't count technically? That's not — that's not what I meant to say.”
The receipts
First Lt. Tyler James Feehan, who was 25, had been deployed to an air base in Jordan when enemy missiles and drones lit up the sky. He is among the 18 Americans who have died since the war began.
· Iran War Has Cost the Average American More Than $1,200 Over Six Months, Economist Estimates from the morgue, 1 Sep 2026
· You can’t separate the cost-of-living crisis from foreign policy from the morgue, 2 Sep 2026
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front.