Christopher Hitchens on Mark Daily (Updated) (Twice)
Lt. Mark Daily, commissioned to Iraq as an officer upon graduating with honors from UCLA in 2005, was slain there earlier this year. Before deployment he left behind an eloquent statement on why he joined the Army ROTC despite his prior reservations about the war. According to his family, he’d found a kindred perspective in the writings of Christopher Hitchens.
Recently Hitchens found this out. After the thaw, he went to meet Daily’s family. He describes the experience, and what he learned about Daily himself, in the new issue of Vanity Fair. You don’t want to miss it.
UPDATE: I didn’t sufficiently emphasize the significance of Daily’s “Why I Joined” statement, for the sake of those who haven’t read it. Daily graduated UCLA just before I transferred there, so I never met him. With permission from his brother, Eric Daily, we reprinted “Why I Joined” (initially only available on Myspace) in the April issue of the Bruin Standard. Formatting Daily’s text into the issue, I felt something very similar to what Hitchens describes early in the VF article, without the personal basis for being jarred that obviously applied to Hitchens.
This was, I realize now, entirely because of the vision and personality imparted by Daily’s statement. While Hitchens does a fine job of making his own piece more about Daily than about Hitchens, you need to read Daily’s piece to really learn something. Both pieces, together with the recent disgrace of the The New Republic having published phony dispatches from a semi-literate faux-soldier, show that the fog of war these days is more blinding to those who don’t serve in it.
CORRECTION: Originally I had misstated some details, which I’ve fixed above but want to further clarify here.
1) Daily did not join specifically to go to Iraq. He joined, in his family’s words, “to serve his country and make a difference somewhere in the world, though he knew there was a strong chance he could deploy to Iraq. Ultimately that’s where his job and his duty sent him.”
2) “His commitment to serve his country, and to help the oppressed was solidified well before reading Hitchens’ pieces. He was just gratified to find a writer of Hitchens’ stature and background who felt and wrote so eloquently what he himself felt.”
This is important, considering the popular inclination to portray soldiers as victims of foolish idealism. Any such inclinations toward Daily can be firmly corrected by reading his statement.
