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Last night I woke up around 5am as I am often wont to do. I knew I wouldn't fall right back to sleep, so rather than reach for a book or turn on the TV like a lot of normal folk would do, I decided to wander downstairs and flip on the computer -- check email, surf a few blogs, check a BBS or two and then head back to bed. It's not an infrequent ritual for me.

That's when I saw the news that Steven Vincent was dead. It really hit me and I knew I had to get a post up or I wouldn't be able to go back to bed. Still, what to say? That same feeling hit me that always hits me when commenting on really serious events -- how petty, how trite anything I might say on this little blog would sound...what can I say? I'm not family and no one's asking me for a eulogy. The one guy who could possibly read what I had to say and care is the one who's dead.

At the same time, I also saw that fourteen Marines and their translator were murdered. Is it really seemly to express such great sorrow over the death of one man when we know that the evils of the world swallow good people without number on a daily basis without filling its belly? Isn't it a bit maudlin to write overwrought prose for one man in view of all that? Intellectually, I understand that we always feel more for the deaths of people we've had some sort of contact with than those we don't know. That's just a fact of human existence. You can't feel the same toward the misfortune of strangers that you feel toward those you have some connection to. Intellectually, I understand that shouldn't be a source of guilt. But still...when it comes time to put pen to paper...there's a pause there.

Still, Steven Vincent, like all men, was an individual. To me, a reader of his and someone who had at least a minimal personal contact with him, he was an individual and deserves to be remembered and honored as one. The fact that we can't do it for everyone doesn't mean we shouldn't do it for someone when we can.

So, having spent much of the day thinking about this, I wanted to say just a couple more things than I did in the minimal post I put up just past dawn this morning.

I want to start with a short anecdote. I'm going to leave out a lot of detail to get as quickly to the point as I can. When I was a young college student not so many years ago, I was part of a group trip to Bangkok. One day, with most of the group gone home, I did what I often do when travelling. I stuck a Baedeker map in my pocket and went out to walk and see what I could find. Now those of you with some travel under your belt know how "foreign" a place like Thailand is. Everything is different -- the people, the customs -- you realize how far from home you are very, very quickly. In a way you may as well be on another planet.

Long story short I ran into a Thai fellow. He spoke very good English and he really shmoozed me. I knew he was some sort of scammer, but I opted to play along with it to see where it lead. At the time I was in pretty good shape and figured if worse came to worse, I'd just keep him close and if anything happened I'd kick the shit out him and take off.

But the environment was on his side. We got into a tuk-tuk (small 3-wheeled Thai taxi) and headed out to somewhere in the Bangkok suburbs to supposedly meet his family. As we rode a funny thing happened. The farther out we got, the farther away from the hotel we got, the more small streets we went through, and neighborhoods we passed, the more I lost my sense of where we were, the more I got that feeling that my tether was getting tighter and tighter. Here I was in a place where no one knows me or my language, where I don't know the customs, and where in any confrontation between me and the locals, the police will be on the other guy's side. The farther we went, the less control I felt, and the more it was surrendered to my host, at who's mercy I increasingly was with every grind of the tuk-tuk's engine.

In the end, nothing horrible happened. The guy got me to "donate" $20 to help his "sick mother get some surgery" she needed, and he put me on a tuk-tuk back to the hotel.

The point is that that feeling of powerlessness has stayed with me to this day -- a lesson well learned.

That feeling was revisited to me on a consistent basis reading Vincent's book, and his dispatches written since his return to Iraq. I think that's why it drew me in so well. Vincent didn't, as a rule, travel with the troops. He was mostly on his own, making connections as he went. He was truly at the mercy of the Beast -- a man virtually alone, like a latter day Sir Richard Burton. I admired that. I've had a nagging feeling of dread reading his dispatches. I could almost feel the thumb of fate, of anarchy, of evil -- whatever you want to call it -- poised over he and his guide, "Layla," every step of the way. Could he feel it too? He lived at the sufferance of forces that crushes individuals like insects without even noticing. Every day in country was a tempation of fate.

I read his stuff and thought about that and at the same time felt a bit self-conscious -- was it really that bad? Am I just falling into my own trap of imagining romantic risk where it really didn't exist. I wish I had been wrong.

Finally, the thumb came down and crushed him.

He didn't have to be there. He didn't have to take the risks he took. He didn't have to go back, and no, I don't believe he went there just for his next book and a few extra bucks in his pocket. He was there for a purpose, a good purpose that he was honest and up front about. He cared about what he was writing about. He cared about Iraq, and America and all the things we hold valuable.

If he had just been on a job and gotten killed, that would have been a tragedy. The fact that he went, and the way he went when he didn't have to makes him a hero.

If there's anything to be salvaged here, it may be that his death not only brings to a larger audience the things he was writing about -- a melancholy salvage at best -- but brings before the klieg lights what people trying to make a difference in unfree, dangerous societies risk every day. From Iraq, to Egypt, to Palestine and beyond -- in five continents there are people putting their lives at risk trying to expose corruption, change old societal ways and fight the good fight with a thumb poised over their heads.

How fortunate we in America are, and how truly rare and miraculous our freedom and safety is in the world. How difficult it was to get here.

I think Steven Vincent would have wanted us to remember that.