Andrew O’ Hagan
Down at the boathouse it was dark and the town’s lights were reflected in the black ripples of the river. Al Zimmerman, another of John’s teachers, showed me the boat that was named after John and the memorial plaque. Mr Zimmerman used to teach Latin and Greek at the school and he wrote the words for the plaque; he skirted around them when I was there, as if shy of what he had produced. The boathouse was full of expired energy and prolonged ideals. Al talked of what they tried to give John and about what he gave them. His voice lapped gently and kindly at my back as I looked out at the river, and beyond that to the merging borders of Pennsylvania and Delaware and New Jersey, wondering how many of the people out there once knew a young man called John Spahr. And what did his life say about theirs? About ours? About the lives of nations? ‘He liked to roll his sleeves up and get the job done,’ Al Zimmerman said. ‘And that’s what you really need in crew. He applied those same principles elsewhere.’
From Andrew O’Hagan’s piece “Iraq, 2 May 2005″ in the London Review of Books. O’Hagan takes two deaths that occurred in Iraq that day, one of a British soldier and the other of an American pilot, and tells us their stories. There is no glorification of war here, and yet the piece is full of warmth and sympathy. At one point in the piece, O’Hagan notes, “In trying to give an account of a life fully lived, a writer wonders what matters most. In the end, what we write is not merely an account of the bare facts, but an account of our choices and of other people’s….” There is no critique of the Bush doctrine or of Halliburton’s greed, and yet to read the piece is to feel that war is a waste, and is wrong, because you don’t want to see diminished the ordinary but wonderful scale of human lives.
