Anti-Climacus

QUOTE: On the Hitch (your friend and mine), from Andrew Sullivan's blog:

"Just a short note of thanks. Christopher Hitchens' unswerving dedication to his conscience reinvigorated my own sense of purpose, long dormant through disillusionment. Thanks for honoring, if not the specifics of his stand, the courage he displayed in severing ties with The Nation. I served as a weapons specialist, of sorts, in the US Navy during Desert Storm/Shield. At the time, I truly believed in what we were doing; it seemed we could only be right. Then, as we returned to the States, and the post-deployment culture shock only further alienated us from our families and friends, we found, to our horror, that the war effort wasn't so monolithically supported as we'd thought. We'd had no clue that, while we were fighting, and some of our friends were dying, others picketed and rallied against us. At least it seemed they were against us. It was our blood, wasn't it? I first heard the phrase, "Blood for oil," after I'd already served my time in the Gulf. And as attrition and time chipped away my certainty, I began to lose that spark of patriotism that had been my impetus for serving my country at all. The last three years of my six year enlistment were hell. I didn't have anything to prop me up when things got hairy. America, and especially American politicians, just didn't seem worth dying for. I didn't want to bleed for oil anymore. I received my Honorable discharge in 1996. I'm sure my supervisors, not the same men who knew me during the Gulf War, breathed a deep sigh of relief and wrote me off as another one-hitch loser. Fine by me. I started a business. I raised a family. I stayed away from politics. Then came September, 11th 2001. Fanatical men shattered what small buffer of ignorant bliss I'd managed to maintain around myself and my family. Men no different than those we'd fought and beaten ten years earlier. And I once again felt I had to do something. I'm now in the hiring pools for both the Federal Air Marshal program and the Transportation Safety Administration's Airport Security Screener. That's my stand, and people like Hitchens remind me why I took it then, and why I do it now. Thanks."