Christopher Hitchens en de herinnering aan Mark Daily, een Amerikaanse soldaat in Irak.
Posted by Pro Wisorio on Wednesday, May 18, 2011 Under: boeken
Uit Hitch 22, a memoir van Christopher Hitchens aan het eind van een hoofdstuk waarin hij uitlegt waarom hij achter de inval in Irak stond en staat:
Postscript
I was having an oppressively normal morning at the dawn of 2007,
flicking through the banality of quotidian email traffic, when I idly
clicked on a message from a friend headed “Seen This?” The
attached item turned out to be a very well-written story by Teresa
Watanabe of the Los Angeles Times. It described the death, in Mosul,
Iraq, of a young soldier from Irvine, California, named Mark
Jennings Daily, and the unusual degree of emotion that his
community was undergoing as a consequence. The emotion derived
from a very moving statement that the boy had left behind, stating his
reasons for having become a volunteer and bravely facing the
prospect that his words might have to be read posthumously. In a
way, the story was almost too perfect: this handsome lad had been
born on the Fourth of July, was a registered Democrat and
self-described agnostic, a UCLA honors graduate, and during his
college days had had fairly decided reservations about the war in
Iraq. I read on, and actually printed the story out, and was turning a
page when I saw the following:
“Somewhere along the way, he changed his mind. His family says
there was no epiphany. Writings by author and columnist Christopher
Hitchens on the moral case for war deeply influenced him…”
I don’t exaggerate by much when I say that I froze. I certainly felt a
very deep pang of cold dismay. I had just returned from a visit to Iraq
with my own son (who was then twenty-three, as was young Mr.
Daily) and had found myself in a deeply pessimistic frame of mind
about the war. Was it possible that I had helped persuade someone I
had never met to place himself in the path of an IED?
Over-dramatizing myself a bit in the angst of the moment, I found I
was thinking of William Butler Yeats, who was chilled to discover
that the Irish rebels of 1916 had gone to their deaths quoting his play
Cathleen ni Houlihan. He tried to cope with the disturbing idea in his
poem “Man and the Echo”:
Did that play of mine send out
Certain men the English shot?…
Could my spoken words have checked
That whereby a house lay wrecked?
Abruptly dismissing any comparison between myself and one of the
greatest poets of the twentieth century, I feverishly clicked on all the
links from the article and found myself on Lieutenant Daily’s
MySpace site, where his statement “Why I Joined” was posted. The
site also immediately kicked into a skirling noise of Irish
revolutionary pugnacity: a song from the Dropkick Murphys album
Warrior’s Code. And there, at the top of the page, was a link to a
passage from one of my articles, in which I poured scorn on those
who were neutral about the battle for Iraq… I don’t remember ever
feeling, in every allowable sense of the word, quite so hollow.
I writhed around in my chair for a bit and decided that I ought to call
Ms. Watanabe, who could not have been nicer. She anticipated the
question I was too tongue-tied to ask: Would the Daily family—those
whose “house lay wrecked”—be contactable? “They’d actually like
to hear from you.” She kindly gave me the email address and the
home number.
I don’t intend to make a parade of my own feelings here, but I expect
you will believe me when I tell you that I emailed first. For one thing,
I didn’t want to choose a bad time to ring. For another, and as I wrote
to his parents, I was quite prepared for them to resent me. So let me
introduce you to one of the most generous and decent families in the
United States, and allow me to tell you something of their
experience.
In the midst of their own grief, to begin with, they took the trouble to
try to make me feel better. I wasn’t to worry about any “guilt or
responsibility”: their son had signed up with his eyes wide open and
had “assured us that if he knew the possible outcome might be this,
he would still go rather than have the option of living to age fifty and
never having served his country. Trust us when we tell you that he
was quite convincing and persuasive on this point, so that by the end
of the conversation we were practically packing his bags and waving
him off.” This made me relax fractionally, but then they went on to
write: “Prior to his deployment he told us he was going to try to
contact you from Iraq. He had the idea of being a correspondent from
the front-lines through you, and wanted to get your opinion about his
journalistic potential. He told us that he had tried to contact you from
either Kuwait or Iraq. He thought maybe his email had not reached
you…” That was a gash in my hide all right: I think of all the junk
email I read every day, and then reflect that his precious one never
got to me.
Lieutenant Daily crossed from Kuwait to Iraq in November 2006,
where he would be deployed with the “C,” or “Comanche,” Company
of the Second Battalion of the Seventh Cavalry Regiment—rather
unpromisingly General Custer’s old outfit—in Mosul. On the 15th of
January 2007, he was on patrol and noticed that the Humvee in front
of him was not properly “up-armored” against IEDs. He insisted on
changing places and taking a lead position in his own Humvee, and
was shortly afterward hit by an enormous buried mine that packed a
charge of some 1,500 pounds of high explosive. Yes, that’s right. He,
and the three other American soldiers and Iraqi interpreter who
perished with him, “went to war with the army we had,” as Donald
Rumsfeld so carefully put it. It’s some consolation to John and Linda
Daily, and to Mark’s brother and two sisters, and to his widow (who
had been married to him for just eighteen months) to know that he
couldn’t have felt anything.
Yet what, and how, should we feel? People are not on their oath
when speaking of the dead, but I have now talked to a good number
of those who knew Mark Daily or were related to him, and it’s clear
that the country lost an exceptional young citizen, whom I shall
always wish I had had the chance to meet. He seems to have passed
every test of young manhood, and to have been admired and loved
and respected by old and young, male and female, family and friends.
He could have had any career path he liked (and had won a George
C. Marshall Award that led to an offer to teach at West Point). Why
are we robbed of his contribution? As we got to know one another
better, I sent the Daily family a moving statement made by the
mother of Michael Kelly, my good friend and the editor-at-large of
The Atlantic Monthly, who was killed near the Baghdad airport while
embedded during the invasion of 2003. Marguerite Kelly was highly
stoic about her son’s death, but I now think I committed an error of
taste in showing this to the Dailys, who very gently responded that
Michael had lived long enough to write books, have a career, become
a father, and in general make his mark, while their son didn’t live
long enough to enjoy any of these opportunities. If you have tears,
prepare to shed them now…
In his brilliant book What Is History?, Professor E.H. Carr asked
about ultimate causation. Take the case of a man who drinks a bit too
much, gets behind the wheel of a car with defective brakes, drives it
round a blind corner, and hits another man, who is crossing the road
to buy cigarettes. Who is the one responsible? The man who had one
drink too many, the lax inspector of brakes, the local authorities who
didn’t straighten out a dangerous bend, or the smoker who chose to
dash across the road to satisfy his bad habit? So, was Mark Daily
killed by the Ba’athist and bin Ladenist riffraff who place bombs
where they will do the most harm? Or by the Rumsfeld doctrine,
which sent American soldiers to Iraq in insufficient numbers and
with inadequate equipment? Or by the Bush administration, which
thought Iraq would be easily pacified? Or by the previous Bush
administration, which left Saddam Hussein in power in 1991 and
fatally postponed the time of reckoning?
These grand, overarching questions cannot obscure, at least for me,
the plain fact that Mark Daily felt himself to be morally committed. I
discovered this in his life story and in his surviving writings. Again,
not to romanticize him overmuch, but this is the boy who would not
let others be bullied in school, who stuck up for his younger siblings,
who was briefly a vegetarian and Green Party member because he
couldn’t stand cruelty to animals or to the environment, a student
who loudly defended Native American rights and who challenged a
MySpace neo-Nazi in an online debate in which the
swastika-displaying antagonist finally admitted that he needed to
rethink things. If I give the impression of a slight nerd here I do an
injustice. Everything that Mark wrote was imbued with a great spirit
of humor and tough-mindedness. Here’s an excerpt from his “Why I
Joined” statement:
Anyone who knew me before I joined knows that I am
quite aware and at times sympathetic to the arguments
against the war in Iraq. If you think the only way a person
could bring themselves to volunteer for this war is through
sheer desperation or blind obedience then consider me the
exception (though there are countless like me)…. Consider
that there are 19 year old soldiers from the Midwest who
have never touched a college campus or a protest who have
done more to uphold the universal legitimacy of
representative government and individual rights by placing
themselves between Iraqi voting lines and homicidal
religious fanatics.
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.”
(Iwas 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.
Postscript
I was having an oppressively normal morning at the dawn of 2007,
flicking through the banality of quotidian email traffic, when I idly
clicked on a message from a friend headed “Seen This?” The
attached item turned out to be a very well-written story by Teresa
Watanabe of the Los Angeles Times. It described the death, in Mosul,
Iraq, of a young soldier from Irvine, California, named Mark
Jennings Daily, and the unusual degree of emotion that his
community was undergoing as a consequence. The emotion derived
from a very moving statement that the boy had left behind, stating his
reasons for having become a volunteer and bravely facing the
prospect that his words might have to be read posthumously. In a
way, the story was almost too perfect: this handsome lad had been
born on the Fourth of July, was a registered Democrat and
self-described agnostic, a UCLA honors graduate, and during his
college days had had fairly decided reservations about the war in
Iraq. I read on, and actually printed the story out, and was turning a
page when I saw the following:
“Somewhere along the way, he changed his mind. His family says
there was no epiphany. Writings by author and columnist Christopher
Hitchens on the moral case for war deeply influenced him…”
I don’t exaggerate by much when I say that I froze. I certainly felt a
very deep pang of cold dismay. I had just returned from a visit to Iraq
with my own son (who was then twenty-three, as was young Mr.
Daily) and had found myself in a deeply pessimistic frame of mind
about the war. Was it possible that I had helped persuade someone I
had never met to place himself in the path of an IED?
Over-dramatizing myself a bit in the angst of the moment, I found I
was thinking of William Butler Yeats, who was chilled to discover
that the Irish rebels of 1916 had gone to their deaths quoting his play
Cathleen ni Houlihan. He tried to cope with the disturbing idea in his
poem “Man and the Echo”:
Did that play of mine send out
Certain men the English shot?…
Could my spoken words have checked
That whereby a house lay wrecked?
Abruptly dismissing any comparison between myself and one of the
greatest poets of the twentieth century, I feverishly clicked on all the
links from the article and found myself on Lieutenant Daily’s
MySpace site, where his statement “Why I Joined” was posted. The
site also immediately kicked into a skirling noise of Irish
revolutionary pugnacity: a song from the Dropkick Murphys album
Warrior’s Code. And there, at the top of the page, was a link to a
passage from one of my articles, in which I poured scorn on those
who were neutral about the battle for Iraq… I don’t remember ever
feeling, in every allowable sense of the word, quite so hollow.
I writhed around in my chair for a bit and decided that I ought to call
Ms. Watanabe, who could not have been nicer. She anticipated the
question I was too tongue-tied to ask: Would the Daily family—those
whose “house lay wrecked”—be contactable? “They’d actually like
to hear from you.” She kindly gave me the email address and the
home number.
I don’t intend to make a parade of my own feelings here, but I expect
you will believe me when I tell you that I emailed first. For one thing,
I didn’t want to choose a bad time to ring. For another, and as I wrote
to his parents, I was quite prepared for them to resent me. So let me
introduce you to one of the most generous and decent families in the
United States, and allow me to tell you something of their
experience.
In the midst of their own grief, to begin with, they took the trouble to
try to make me feel better. I wasn’t to worry about any “guilt or
responsibility”: their son had signed up with his eyes wide open and
had “assured us that if he knew the possible outcome might be this,
he would still go rather than have the option of living to age fifty and
never having served his country. Trust us when we tell you that he
was quite convincing and persuasive on this point, so that by the end
of the conversation we were practically packing his bags and waving
him off.” This made me relax fractionally, but then they went on to
write: “Prior to his deployment he told us he was going to try to
contact you from Iraq. He had the idea of being a correspondent from
the front-lines through you, and wanted to get your opinion about his
journalistic potential. He told us that he had tried to contact you from
either Kuwait or Iraq. He thought maybe his email had not reached
you…” That was a gash in my hide all right: I think of all the junk
email I read every day, and then reflect that his precious one never
got to me.
Lieutenant Daily crossed from Kuwait to Iraq in November 2006,
where he would be deployed with the “C,” or “Comanche,” Company
of the Second Battalion of the Seventh Cavalry Regiment—rather
unpromisingly General Custer’s old outfit—in Mosul. On the 15th of
January 2007, he was on patrol and noticed that the Humvee in front
of him was not properly “up-armored” against IEDs. He insisted on
changing places and taking a lead position in his own Humvee, and
was shortly afterward hit by an enormous buried mine that packed a
charge of some 1,500 pounds of high explosive. Yes, that’s right. He,
and the three other American soldiers and Iraqi interpreter who
perished with him, “went to war with the army we had,” as Donald
Rumsfeld so carefully put it. It’s some consolation to John and Linda
Daily, and to Mark’s brother and two sisters, and to his widow (who
had been married to him for just eighteen months) to know that he
couldn’t have felt anything.
Yet what, and how, should we feel? People are not on their oath
when speaking of the dead, but I have now talked to a good number
of those who knew Mark Daily or were related to him, and it’s clear
that the country lost an exceptional young citizen, whom I shall
always wish I had had the chance to meet. He seems to have passed
every test of young manhood, and to have been admired and loved
and respected by old and young, male and female, family and friends.
He could have had any career path he liked (and had won a George
C. Marshall Award that led to an offer to teach at West Point). Why
are we robbed of his contribution? As we got to know one another
better, I sent the Daily family a moving statement made by the
mother of Michael Kelly, my good friend and the editor-at-large of
The Atlantic Monthly, who was killed near the Baghdad airport while
embedded during the invasion of 2003. Marguerite Kelly was highly
stoic about her son’s death, but I now think I committed an error of
taste in showing this to the Dailys, who very gently responded that
Michael had lived long enough to write books, have a career, become
a father, and in general make his mark, while their son didn’t live
long enough to enjoy any of these opportunities. If you have tears,
prepare to shed them now…
In his brilliant book What Is History?, Professor E.H. Carr asked
about ultimate causation. Take the case of a man who drinks a bit too
much, gets behind the wheel of a car with defective brakes, drives it
round a blind corner, and hits another man, who is crossing the road
to buy cigarettes. Who is the one responsible? The man who had one
drink too many, the lax inspector of brakes, the local authorities who
didn’t straighten out a dangerous bend, or the smoker who chose to
dash across the road to satisfy his bad habit? So, was Mark Daily
killed by the Ba’athist and bin Ladenist riffraff who place bombs
where they will do the most harm? Or by the Rumsfeld doctrine,
which sent American soldiers to Iraq in insufficient numbers and
with inadequate equipment? Or by the Bush administration, which
thought Iraq would be easily pacified? Or by the previous Bush
administration, which left Saddam Hussein in power in 1991 and
fatally postponed the time of reckoning?
These grand, overarching questions cannot obscure, at least for me,
the plain fact that Mark Daily felt himself to be morally committed. I
discovered this in his life story and in his surviving writings. Again,
not to romanticize him overmuch, but this is the boy who would not
let others be bullied in school, who stuck up for his younger siblings,
who was briefly a vegetarian and Green Party member because he
couldn’t stand cruelty to animals or to the environment, a student
who loudly defended Native American rights and who challenged a
MySpace neo-Nazi in an online debate in which the
swastika-displaying antagonist finally admitted that he needed to
rethink things. If I give the impression of a slight nerd here I do an
injustice. Everything that Mark wrote was imbued with a great spirit
of humor and tough-mindedness. Here’s an excerpt from his “Why I
Joined” statement:
Anyone who knew me before I joined knows that I am
quite aware and at times sympathetic to the arguments
against the war in Iraq. If you think the only way a person
could bring themselves to volunteer for this war is through
sheer desperation or blind obedience then consider me the
exception (though there are countless like me)…. Consider
that there are 19 year old soldiers from the Midwest who
have never touched a college campus or a protest who have
done more to uphold the universal legitimacy of
representative government and individual rights by placing
themselves between Iraqi voting lines and homicidal
religious fanatics.
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.”
(Iwas 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.
In : boeken
Tags: irak "christopher hitchens"
