November 20, 2009|By Childs Walker | childs.walker@baltsun.com
Back in the U.S., friends often joked about his ability to live sans possessions. During one stretch in Baltimore, he stayed in a small space over Club Charles, refrigerating his food by keeping it on the windowsill and telling time by the passing of city buses. The few possessions that mattered -- his art, his vintage motorcycle, his restored 1968 Camaro with no air conditioning -- stayed with friends or family.
He worked as a director of student housing at the Art Institute of Seattle and at Loyola Marymount Institute in Los Angeles. In 2005, he came back to Baltimore, helping local artist Eric Anderson to design and market custom furniture and bartending at night. He became a favorite "uncle" to his friends' kids and with his taut physique, electric smile and fearless patter, had a succession of girlfriends.
None of it was enough.
The idea of a 41-year-old deciding that he had to beat the age deadline and sign up for wartime military service might seem unfathomable to most. But Coffland's family and friends were not shocked. They knew he felt called to serve his country and that he had contemplated enlisting throughout his adult life. Only his reservations about the Army's rigidity and long training commitment kept him from signing up sooner.
"What surprised me was that he had never conformed, but he was choosing a life that was all about conforming," Lynn Coffland said. "What he said was that he lived his life as a free spirit but conformed when necessary. And this was necessary to him."
Coffland considered a six-figure offer to work as a corporate recruiter for a former classmate. But after analyzing the situation from every angle and talking to recruiters and intelligence specialists, he signed on with the Army Reserves in December 2007, a month before he turned 42. He headed to Fort Sill in Oklahoma for boot camp.
Though Coffland was older than the parents of some fellow soldiers, "he was probably in better shape than anybody there," said Tom Feehan, his roommate.
The same curiosity that had caused him to start serious discussions with his friends' parents and plunge into the African jungle for research made Coffland turn to intelligence as a specialty. He believed he would be the perfect guy to swoop into a village after a bombing and get the natives talking about what had happened. He figured he might later work for a national intelligence agency.
"The work was perfect for him, absolutely perfect," Feehan said. "Basically, our job is to go out and talk to people and find out what's going on. That came to him very naturally."
A performance evaluation from intelligence school praised Coffland for "communicating his ideas, building rapport, and controlling the outcome of all his personal meetings in a variety of challenging situations."
By last summer, he knew he was headed for Afghanistan.
As bold and fearless as he could be, Coffland approached his deployment with a full awareness that he could be killed. In his last conversations with friends, he sounded sober about the prospect but eager to be dispatched to a dangerous area where his skills would be tested.
In an e-mail to his sister the night before he was killed, Coffland joked that he was getting to use "an extraordinary amount of James Bond gadgets" and complained about the itchiness of his beard, grown full to help him fit in with the locals. But in another e-mail, copied to her by accident, he spoke of numerous roadside explosives in the area and said "it's only a matter of time."
The cause of Coffland's death, 2 1/2 weeks after he arrived in Afghanistan, is likely to be investigated for months. But his commander called and told his sister he had been on the way to investigate another roadside explosion in the remote Sayed Abad district when his vehicle was hit Nov. 13.
A group of 20 relatives and friends traveled to Dover, Del., the next night to watch his coffin come off a military plane. To his sister, the scene seemed terribly wrong. Chris Coffland had spent his whole life refusing to conform, a round peg that others could never hammer into a square hole. Yet there he lay, in a box. She wanted to crawl in and free him.
