| | This is a great, very sincere article by Hitchens. Ted's incredibly disingenous statement not withstanding, this soldier, an agnostic, admired Hitchens and was inspired by him, far from 'blaming' Hitchens, his family invited Hitchens to the funeral and spent the day with him later. The most touching piece of this was the letter from this soldier to his wife -
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.
Strangely, Hitchens doesnt seem to think very much of Rand, commenting on the books this young man brought with him to Iraq, he wrote -
because Mark Daily wasn't yet finished with sending me messages from beyond the grave. He took a pile of books with him to Iraq, which included Thomas Paine's The Crisis; War and Peace; Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged (well, nobody's perfect); Stephen Hawking's A Brief History of Time; John McCain's Why Courage Matters; and George Orwell's Animal Farm and 1984
I am dissapointed that Hitchens would take an aside from such a sincere and powerful article, and use the demonstration of this soldiers intellectual honesty and integrity, to take a potshot at Rand.
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