Libertarian Girl

Andrew Olmsted kept a blog for close to five years, before he stopped posting around last February when he realized that his writing may have gone against Department of Defense guidelines for military personnel. He was sent to Iraq in July, and while there, he started posting at the Rocky Mountain News with DOD approval. Before he left, he composed a final blog entry in case of his death and asked a fellow blogger to post it for him.

On January 3, Major Olmsted was killed in Iraq. The circumstances are still unclear, but it seems to involve gunfire from insurgents. His blogger friend has kept her promise and published his final post on Olmsted’s website.

As those things inevitably go, people became a lot more interested in Olmsted’s writing after he was killed in the war and his friend uploaded his final posting– his blog at the Rocky Mountain News received 100,000 hits in one day. Looking at his website, he seems to be a very good writer who was hopeful about what he could accomplish in Iraq. He described himself as “libertarian” although “not a Libertarian,” with “strongly individualistic beliefs.” One of his last posts on his own website, published last February, references Matthew Yglesias, who had concluded from a bit of evidence that the surge wasn’t working.

Olmsted wrote in response:

Besides, young Matthew has provided a wonderful metric for those of a libertarian bent, like me. Consider:

Social security doesn’t work: some old people are still poor.

Welfare programs don’t work: some people are still poor.

Medicare doesn’t work: some old people don’t have access to health care.

Medicaid doesn’t work: some poor people don’t have acces to health care.

Hell, using Matt’s logic, we ought to have the federal government trimmed at least by half in no time. Why do I get the feeling Matty wouldn’t agree with that extension of his logic?

I like Maj. Olmsted’s way of thinking. We may disagree on one large issue, but he seems to have at least thought his way to that position logically and have been able to give articulate and cohesive arguments in defense of it, qualities which I have not noticed in most of the people who hold a position that the Iraq War is working out well. I was going to say something further, but I’ll respect Olmsted’s last wishes in his final post and just leave it at that.

Instead, I’ll let Major Olmsted have the final words.

… I’m dead. That sucks, at least for me and my family and friends. But all the tears in the world aren’t going to bring me back, so I would prefer that people remember the good things about me rather than mourning my loss. (If it turns out a specific number of tears will, in fact, bring me back to life, then by all means, break out the onions.) I had a pretty good life, as I noted above. Sure, all things being equal I would have preferred to have more time, but I have no business complaining with all the good fortune I’ve enjoyed in my life. So if you’re up for that, put on a little 80s music (preferably vintage 1980-1984), grab a Coke and have a drink with me. If you have it, throw ‘Freedom Isn’t Free’ from the Team America soundtrack in; if you can’t laugh at that song, I think you need to lighten up a little. I’m dead, but if you’re reading this, you’re not, so take a moment to enjoy that happy fact.

… I suppose I should speak to the circumstances of my death. It would be nice to believe that I died leading men in battle, preferably saving their lives at the cost of my own. More likely I was caught by a marksman or an IED. But if there is an afterlife, I’m telling anyone who asks that I went down surrounded by hundreds of insurgents defending a village composed solely of innocent women and children. It’ll be our little secret, ok?

… I wish I could say I’d at least started to get it right. Although, in my defense, I think I batted a solid .250 or so… But on a larger scale, for those who knew me well enough to be saddened by my death, especially for those who haven’t known anyone else lost to this war, perhaps my death can serve as a small reminder of the costs of war. Regardless of the merits of this war, or of any war, I think that many of us in America have forgotten that war means death and suffering in wholesale lots. A decision that for most of us in America was academic, whether or not to go to war in Iraq, had very real consequences for hundreds of thousands of people. Yet I was as guilty as anyone of minimizing those very real consequences in lieu of a cold discussion of theoretical merits of war and peace. Now I’m facing some very real consequences of that decision; who says life doesn’t have a sense of humor?

… If everyone who feels this pain keeps that in mind the next time we have to decide whether or not war is a good idea, perhaps it will help us to make a more informed decision. Because it is pretty clear that the average American would not have supported the Iraq War had they known the costs going in. I am far too cynical to believe that any future debate over war will be any less vitriolic or emotional, but perhaps a few more people will realize just what those costs can be the next time.

This may be a contradiction of my above call to keep politics out of my death, but I hope not. Sometimes going to war is the right idea. I think we’ve drawn that line too far in the direction of war rather than peace, but I’m a soldier and I know that sometimes you have to fight if you’re to hold onto what you hold dear. But in making that decision, I believe we understate the costs of war; when we make the decision to fight, we make the decision to kill, and that means lives and families destroyed. Mine now falls into that category; the next time the question of war or peace comes up, if you knew me at least you can understand a bit more just what it is you’re deciding to do, and whether or not those costs are worth it.

Update: Maj. Olmsted’s family has asked that if anyone would like to make donations, they send them to the education fund for the four children of Captain Thomas Casey, who died attempting to help Maj. Olmsted.

Tags: Andrew Olmsted, Andrew Olmsted Iraq, Andrew Olmsted final post, Iraq War

This entry was posted on Monday, January 7th, 2008 at 3:24 pm and is filed under America, Foreign policy, Media, libertarianism. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.