Andrew Olmsted, who blogged at Obsidian Wings, was killed yesterday in Iraq, where he was serving in the military. Months ago he composed a post to be published in case he died. It’s here, and it’s heartbreaking. There may be other notes that people serving in Iraq wrote to be read in case they died, but I haven’t seen any of them, and I can’t imagine they could be more powerful than this one. He says that he doesn’t want his death to be used by either side in the debate on the Iraq war, but he also notes that it is easy to gloss over the human costs of war, and that many people do it. Olmsted’s post makes that harder to do.