Christopher Hitchens learns what most of us already knew

by shamanic

Christopher Hitchens, in a very moving meditation on a fallen soldier in the latest Vanity Fair:

If America can spontaneously produce young men like Mark, and occasions like this one, it has a real homeland security instead of a bureaucratic one.

America spontaneously produces these men all the time, Christopher. Men like my brother, an Alabama National Guardsman for the last decade or more. A man who calls Hitchens "a real revolutionary." I thank God daily that he hasn't had to go to Iraq.

Or a man like Scott Love, a guy one year ahead of me in high school who was always just nice to me for no particular reason, who died June 7, 2006, when an IED detonated near his vehicle in Ar Ramadi, Iraq.

Some of us have always known that this great country produces great men and women with a frequency that should startle even the most jaded commentators. We are willing to send those young men and women to wars waged faithfully and for the right reasons. We protest strongly the shedding of their blood for any other cause, and find ourselves mocked by many who love to believe that their ideals always make their ideas correct.

Christopher Hitchens: you inspire great men to brave and glorious achievements. Please, in the future, pick your battles and their lives with more care.