Death in the family

I was having an oppressively normal morning a few months ago, flicking through the banality of quotidian e-mail traffic...

I was having an oppressively normal morning a few months ago, flicking through the banality of quotidian e-mail traffic, when I idly clicked on a message from a friend headed “Seen This?” The attached item turned out to be a very well-written story by Teresa Watanabe of the Los

Angeles Times. It described the death, in Mosul, Iraq, of a young soldier from Irvine, California, named Mark Jennings Daily… I read on… I saw the following: “Somewhere along the way, he changed his mind. His family says there was no epiphany. Writings by author and columnist Christopher Hitchens on the moral case for war deeply influenced him…” I had just returned from a visit to Iraq with my own son (who is 23, as was young Mr Daily) and had found myself in a deeply pessimistic frame of mind about the war. Was it possible that I had helped persuade someone I had never met to place himself in the path of an I.E.D.?

I… wrote to his parents, I was quite prepared for them to resent me… In the midst of their own grief, to begin with, they took the trouble to try to make me feel better. I wasn’t to worry about any “guilt or responsibility”: their son had signed up with his eyes wide open and had “assured us that if he knew the possible outcome might be this, he would still go rather than have the option of living to age 50 and never having served his country…”

Story continues below this ad

Lieutenant Daily crossed from Kuwait to Iraq in November 2006… On the 15th of January last, he was on patrol and noticed that the Humvee in front of him was not properly “up-armoured” against I.E.D.’s. He insisted on changing places and taking a lead position in his own Humvee, and was shortly afterward hit by an enormous buried mine… Yes, that’s right. He, and the three other American soldiers and Iraqi interpreter who perished with him, went to war with the army we had…

I have now talked to a good number of those who knew Mark Daily, and it’s clear that the country lost an exceptional young citizen… He seems to have passed every test of young manhood, and to have been admired and loved and respected by old and young, male and female, family and friends. He could have had any career path he liked…

Excerpted from an article in the November issue of ‘Vanity Fair’