Long Live Hitch

  And here’s something from one of his last letters home:

  I was having a conversation with a Kurdish man in the city of Dahok (by myself and completely safe) discussing whether or not the insurgents could be viewed as “freedom fighters” or “misguided anti-capitalists.” Shaking his head as I attempted to articulate what can only be described as pathetic apologetics, he cut me off and said “the difference between insurgents and American soldiers is that they get paid to take life — to murder, and you get paid to save lives.” He looked at me in such a way that made me feel like he was looking through me, into all the moral insecurity that living in a free nation will instill in you. He “oversimplified” the issue, or at least that is what college professors would accuse him of doing.

  In his other emails and letters home, which the Daily family very kindly showed me, he asked for extra “care packages” to share with local Iraqis, and said, “I’m not sure if Irvine has a sister-city, but I am going to personally contact the mayor and ask him to extend his hand to Dahok, which has been more than hospitable to this native-son.” (I was wrenched yet again to discover that he had got this touching idea from an old article of mine, which had made a proposal for city-twinning that went nowhere.) In the last analysis, it was quite clear, Mark had made up his mind that the United States was a force for good in the world, and that it had a duty to the freedom of others. A video clip of which he was very proud has him being “crowned” by a circle of smiling Iraqi officers. I have a photograph of him, standing bareheaded and contentedly smoking a cigar, on a rooftop in Mosul. He doesn’t look like an occupier at all. He looks like a staunch friend and defender. On the photograph is written “We carry a new world in our hearts.”

  In his last handwritten letter home, posted on the last day of 2006, Mark modestly told his father that he’d been chosen to lead a combat platoon after a grenade attack had killed one of its soldiers and left its leader too shaken to carry on. He had apparently sounded steady enough on the radio on earlier missions for him to be given a leadership position after only a short time “in country.” As he put it: “I am now happily doing what I was trained to do, and am fulfilling an obligation that has swelled inside me for years. I am deep in my element . . . and I am euphoric.” He had no doubts at all about the value of his mission, and was the sort of natural soldier who makes the difference in any war.

  At the first chance I got, I invited his family for lunch in California. We ended up spending the entire day together. As soon as they arrived, I knew I had been wrong to be so nervous. They looked too good to be true: like a poster for the American way. John Daily is an aerospace project manager, and his wife, Linda, is an audiologist. Their older daughter, Christine, eagerly awaiting her wedding, is a high-school biology teacher, and the younger sister, Nicole, is in high school. Their son Eric is a bright junior at Berkeley with a very winning and ironic grin. And there was Mark’s widow, an agonizingly beautiful girl named Snejana (“Janet”) Hristova, the daughter of political refugees from Bulgaria. Her first name can mean “snowflake,” and this was his name for her in the letters of fierce tenderness that he sent her from Iraq. These, with your permission, I will not share, except this:

  One thing I have learned about myself since I’ve been out here is that everything I professed to you about what I want for the world and what I am willing to do to achieve it was true. . . .

  My desire to “save the world” is really just an extension of trying to make a world fit for you.

  If that is all she has left, I hope you will agree that it isn’t nothing.

  I had already guessed that this was no gung-ho Orange County Republican clan. It was pretty clear that they could have done without the war, and would have been happier if their son had not gone anywhere near Iraq. (Mr. Daily told me that as a young man he had wondered about going to Canada if the Vietnam draft ever caught up with him.) But they had been amazed by the warmth of their neighbors’ response, and by the solidarity of his former brothers-in-arms — 1,600 people had turned out for Mark’s memorial service in Irvine. A sergeant’s wife had written a letter to Linda and posted it on Janet’s MySpace site on Mother’s Day, to tell her that her husband had been in the vehicle with which Mark had insisted on changing places. She had seven children who would have lost their father if it had gone the other way, and she felt both awfully guilty and humbly grateful that her husband had been spared by Mark’s heroism. Imagine yourself in that position, if you can, and you will perhaps get a hint of the world in which the Dailys now live: a world that alternates very sharply and steeply between grief and pride.

  On a drive to Fort Knox, Kentucky, and again shortly before shipping out from Fort Bliss, Texas, Mark had told his father that he had three wishes in the event of his death. He wanted bagpipes played at the service, and an Irish wake to follow it. And he wanted to be cremated, with the ashes strewn on the beach at Neskowin, Oregon, the setting for his happiest memories of boyhood vacations. The first two of these conditions had already been fulfilled. The Dailys rather overwhelmed me by asking if I would join them for the third one. So it was that in August I found myself on the dunes by an especially lovely and remote stretch of the Oregon coastline. The extended family was there, including both sets of grandparents, plus some college friends of Mark’s and his best comrade from the army, an impressive South Dakotan named Matt Gross. As the sun began to sink on a day that had been devoted to reminiscence and moderate drinking, we took up the tattered Stars and Stripes that had flown outside the family home since Mark’s deployment and walked to his favorite spot to plant it. Everyone was supposed to say something, but when John Daily took the first scoop from the urn and spread the ashes on the breeze, there was something so unutterably final in the gesture that tears seemed as natural as breathing and I wasn’t at all sure that I could go through with it. My idea had been to quote from the last scene of Macbeth, which is the only passage I know that can hope to rise to such an occasion. The tyrant and usurper has been killed, but Ross has to tell old Siward that his boy has perished in the struggle:

  Your son, my lord, has paid a soldier’s debt;

  He only lived but till he was a man;

  The which no sooner had his prowess confirm’d

  In the unshrinking station where he fought,

  But like a man he died.

  This being Shakespeare, the truly emotional and understated moment follows a beat or two later, when Ross adds:

  Your cause of sorrow

  Must not be measured by his worth, for then

  It hath no end.

  I became a trifle choked up after that, but everybody else also managed to speak, often reading poems of their own composition, and as the day ebbed in a blaze of glory over the ocean, I thought, Well, here we are to perform the last honors for a warrior and hero, and there are no hysterical ululations, no shrieks for revenge, no insults hurled at the enemy, no firing into the air or bogus hysterics. Instead, an honest, brave, modest family is doing its private best. I hope no fanatical fool could ever mistake this for weakness. It is, instead, a very particular kind of strength. If America can spontaneously produce young men like Mark, and occasions like this, it has a real homeland security instead of a bureaucratic one.

  But Mark Daily wasn’t yet finished with sending me messages from beyond the grave. He took a bag of books with him to Iraq, which included Thomas Paine’s The Crisis, War and Peace, Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged (so, nobody’s perfect), Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time, John McCain’s Why Courage Matters, and George Orwell’s Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-four. And a family friend of the Dailys, noticing my own book on Orwell on their shelf, had told them that his father, the Trotskyist militant Harry David Milton, had been “the American” who rushed to Orwell’s side after he had been shot in the throat by a fascist sniper. This seemed to verge on the eerie. Orwell thought that the Spanish Civil War was a just war, but he also came to understand that it was a dirty war, where a decent cause was
hijacked by goons and thugs, and where betrayal and squalor negated the courage and sacrifice of those who fought on principle. As one who had argued strongly for the liberation of Iraq — perhaps more strongly than I knew in this particular case — I had grown coarsened and sickened by the degeneration of the struggle, and the sordid news of corruption and brutality (Mark Daily told his father how dismayed he was by the appalling scenes at Abu Ghraib) and by the paltry politicians who squabble for precedence while lifeblood is spilled by young people whose boots they are not fit to clean.

  It upsets and angers me more than I can safely say, when I re-read Mark’s letters and poems and see that — as of course he would — he was magically able to locate the noble element in all this, and to take more comfort and inspiration from a few plain sentences uttered by a Kurdish man than from all the vapid speeches ever given. Orwell had a rather similar experience when encountering a young volunteer fighter in Barcelona, and realizing with a mixture of sadness and shock that for this boy all the tired old slogans of liberty and justice were still authentic. He cursed his own cynicism and disillusionment when he wrote:

  For the fly-blown words that make me spew

  Still in his ears were holy,

  And he was born knowing what I had learned

  Out of books and slowly.

  However, after a few more verses about the lying and cruelty and stupidity that accompany war, he was still able to do a kind of justice to the brave young man:

  But the thing I saw in your face

  No power can disinherit:

  No bomb that ever burst

  Shatters the crystal spirit.

  May it be so, then, and may death be not proud to have taken Mark Daily, whom I never knew but whom you now know a little, and — I hope — miss.

  * Recently declassified papers show the British embassy in Baghdad reporting back to London in these terms: Saddam’s accession to office was “the first smooth transfer of power since 1958” and, though “strong-arm methods may be needed to steady the ship, Saddam will not flinch.”

  * I used to make a point, later on in Washington, of arguing that no operations in Iraq should ever again be given the stupid code-name prefix of “Desert.” Mesopotamia is not a desert.

  * Today, in an echo of the Latin American vernacular about those who were, rather than had, “disappeared,” Kurdish people describe certain towns or groups as having been “Anfalled.”

  * Kanan got his museum, and the Memory Foundation is now an archive for victims and survivors whose narrative would otherwise never have been set down. This remarkable achievement remains a continual cause of spite and resentment.

  * I had of course heard that Ahmad had once been indicted — by a military court in Jordan when it was Saddam’s ally — for being a shady businessman. I have also read persuasive evidence that this was a frame-up, as were many other charges — “puppet of the CIA,” for one absurd example — that were made against him. My main difference with him is, and remains, his alignment with a confessional bloc in the Iraqi parliament. But without him, there might well not be an Iraqi parliament.

  * See, for the best account of this upheaval in real time, James Fenton’s book The Snap Revolution.

  * To be fair, Ian McEwan’s highly acute novel Saturday, which is easily the best evocation of this street-theater event, does capture the anguish of many “liberals” who did turn out. His work was also the first to isolate the unstinting self-regard that underlies the terribly OK-seeming mantra of “Not In Our Name.”

  * It impressed me very much to see my Kurdish friends, including Iraq’s first-ever democratically chosen president, Jalal Talabani, publicly voice their opposition to the death penalty for Saddam Hussein and the other convicted war criminals. This appeal to clemency arose partly from their adherence to the Socialist International and also from their wish to begin Iraq again without a blood reckoning. After what they had endured, their forebearance was something extraordinary. In Kurdistan itself, where tribal retributionism was not so much in evidence, Barham Salih personally declined to sign death-warrants for the Islamist gangsters who had murdered his guards and very nearly slain him on his own doorstep.

  * This document was originally published by my old friend Patrick Cockburn, perhaps the best chronicler of the war and certainly its most fervent and intelligent critic.

  * This verifiable account is often confused with a bungled attempt to sell some forged documents from the embassy of Niger in Rome: a false trail that, whether out of cupidity or design, wasted the time of several already time-wasting “inquiries.”

  Something of Myself

  Ah wad some power the giftie gie us

  To see ourselves as others see us.

  — Robert Burns

  Many men would take the death-sentence without a whimper, to escape the life-sentence which fate carries in her other hand.

  — T.E. Lawrence

  Plato says that the unexamined life is not worth living. But what if the examined life turns out to be a clunker as well?

  — Kurt Vonnegut: Wampeters, Foma and Granfalloons

  ABOUT ONCE OR TWICE every month I engage in public debates with those whose pressing need it is to woo and to win the approval of supernatural beings. Very often, when I give my view that there is no supernatural dimension, and certainly not one that is only or especially available to the faithful, and that the natural world is wonderful enough — and even miraculous enough if you insist — I attract pitying looks and anxious questions. How, in that case, I am asked, do I find meaning and purpose in life? How does a mere and gross materialist, with no expectation of a life to come, decide what, if anything, is worth caring about?

  Depending on my mood, I sometimes but not always refrain from pointing out what a breathtakingly insulting and patronizing question this is. (It is on a par with the equally subtle inquiry: Since you don’t believe in our god, what stops you from stealing and lying and raping and killing to your heart’s content?) Just as the answer to the latter question is: self-respect and the desire for the respect of others — while in the meantime it is precisely those who think they have divine permission who are truly capable of any atrocity — so the answer to the first question falls into two parts. A life that partakes even a little of friendship, love, irony, humor, parenthood, literature, and music, and the chance to take part in battles for the liberation of others cannot be called “meaningless” except if the person living it is also an existentialist and elects to call it so. It could be that all existence is a pointless joke, but it is not in fact possible to live one’s everyday life as if this were so. Whereas if one sought to define meaninglessness and futility, the idea that a human life should be expended in the guilty, fearful, self-obsessed propitiation of supernatural nonentities . . . but there, there. Enough.

  The clear awareness of having been born into a losing struggle need not lead one into despair. I do not especially like the idea that one day I shall be tapped on the shoulder and informed, not that the party is over but that it is most assuredly going on — only henceforth in my absence. (It’s the second of those thoughts: the edition of the newspaper that will come out on the day after I have gone, that is the more distressing.) Much more horrible, though, would be the announcement that the party was continuing forever, and that I was forbidden to leave. Whether it was a hellishly bad party or a party that was perfectly heavenly in every respect, the moment that it became eternal and compulsory would be the precise moment that it began to pall.

  A memoir of the New School for Social Research, where I have the honor to be an occasional visiting teacher, describes how in the immediate post-1945 period Erich Fromm gave a lecture on “The Struggle Against Pointlessness.” I have never been able to trace even one paragraph of this talk, though I hunger to know what it said. Attending the lecture would have been many young men just out of uniform, coming to the school on the GI Bill and having just inflicted a defeat on the fascist Axis. They can hardly have considered that st
ruggle to have been “pointless” but then what of the millions who died so horribly in Europe and Asia and who died having barely lived? What was the “point” of them, except perhaps as ghastly illustrations of a wider point?

  Attempts to locate oneself within history are as natural, and as absurd, as attempts to locate oneself within astronomy. On the day that I was born, 13 April 1949, nineteen senior Nazi officials were convicted at Nuremberg, including Hitler’s former envoy to the Vatican, Baron Ernst von Weizsacker, who was found guilty of planning aggression against Czechoslovakia and committing atrocities against the Jewish people. On the same day, the State of Israel celebrated its first Passover seder and the United Nations, still meeting in those days at Flushing Meadow in Queens, voted to consider the Jewish state’s application for membership. In Damascus, eleven newspapers were closed by the regime of General Hosni Zayim. In America, the National Committee on Alcoholism announced an upcoming “A-Day” under the nonuplifting slogan: “You can drink — help the alcoholic who can’t.” (“Can’t”?) The International Court of Justice at The Hague ruled in favor of Britain in the Corfu Channel dispute with Albania. At the UN, Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko denounced the newly formed NATO alliance as a tool for aggression against the USSR. The rising Chinese Communists, under a man then known to Western readership as Mao Tze-Tung, announced a limited willingness to bargain with the still-existing Chinese government in a city then known to the outside world as “Peiping.”

  All this was unknown to me as I nuzzled my mother’s breast for the first time, and would certainly have happened in just the same way if I had not been born at all, or even conceived. One of the newspaper astrologists for that day addressed those whose birthday it was: