Hitchens Teaches Me About Every War in the World

Second, his knowledge of these wars and the countries that bred them?their political structures, social fabrics, cultural peculiarities?was dizzyingly deep. I particularly remember him waxing lyrical, and in detail, on the revolutionaries of the Polisario Front, fighting for the independence of the Western Sahara from Morocco.

Third, he was almost dumbfoundingly generous. Jacob Weisberg has written of Hitchens? kindness to younger journalists. I didn?t exactly fall in that category. He was only five years older, and toiling in only slightly less obscurity, than I was. Yet he shared everything he knew about every war we discussed, without hesitation or expectation of reward (apart from the cheap lunch).

He shouldn?t be sentimentalized. Hitch could be a real shit if you fell on the wrong side of his favor. Among our mutual friends, he had fallings-out, in some cases multiple ones, with almost every one of them. And yet, at some point, they always fell back in. He was too irresistible and, in a pinch, too good a friend.

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