FLOW MY TEARS, THE DRUNKEN BLOWHARD SAID

There's an article by Christopher Hitchens in the November Vanity Fair about a young soldier who died in Iraq after volunteering for military service -- partly under the influence of the Hitch's own writings.

It's an especially appalling chapter in Hitchens's quite appalling recent history, though he means the story to be inspiring. I can't really do it justice, but I do want to point out that, early on, Hitchens tells his readers,

I don't intend to make a parade of my own feelings here...

Just in case you're wondering how that turned out, here are some excerpts:

I don't exaggerate by much when I say that I froze. I certainly felt a very deep pang of cold dismay.

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.

I don't remember ever feeling, in every allowable sense of the word, quite so hollow.

That was a gash in my hide all right...

I was wrenched yet again to discover that he had got this touching idea from an old article of mine...

... tears seemed as natural as breathing and I wasn't at all sure that I could go through with it.

I became a trifle choked up after that...

... I have grown coarsened and sickened by the degeneration of the struggle...

It upsets and angers me more than I can safely say, when I reread Mark's letters and poems...

Can't quite imagine what would this article have been like if Hitchens had intended to make a parade of his own feelings....