I’m kind of blown away by this:
The last words uttered by Richard Holbrooke were, according to family members, a plea to end what he saw as an increasingly unwinnable military engagement.“You’ve got to stop this war in Afghanistan,” he told his Pakistani surgeon, as reported in the Washington Post. Holbrooke never recovered from the surgery, his death reported Monday evening.
It is characteristic of this hard-driving, high-octane professional that his final thoughts would be of the task that he had left undone.
I guess that’s true, but my first thought when I read that Holbrooke said this was how moving it was, because obviously he knew this was probably his last conscious moment to express any wishes or thoughts at all, and the thought that was uppermost in his mind was not about himself or his torn aorta or the surgery he was about to undergo or the likelihood that he would never wake up again.
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