It’s always hard to decide what personal things should be shared on this public blog. Funny stories? Sure. Babies and pets? Without question, though with the restraint that comes from knowing that other people’s babies and pets are of real but finite interest. Tragedies? Well, only when they’re really important.

My friend Scott Gerwehr was killed in a traffic accident last week.

It’s tempting to inflate our personal losses to a loss for All Of Us, but in the case of Scott this is literally true. If we are actually ever going to “win” this “war on terror,” Scott was one of the guys who was figuring out how we might really DO that. At RAND, and later elsewhere, Scott was on the forefront of blending cutting edge cognitive and neuroscience with global security. In short, he was concentrating on the neglected “hearts and minds” part of the whole “hearts and minds” thing.

A lot of what he was working on is classified, and much of it is too recent to even be found in books yet (and to hear him talk about it with joyful enthusiasm was an immense treat, as was his tremendous, generous pleasure when he understood that you understood what he was talking about), but you can find a taste of his public writings here.

And of course, all that has nothing whatsoever to do with why I’ll miss him so much. Scott was a gargantuan personality on stumpy little legs. In a social circle filled with outsized personalities, Scott’s was supersized, the guy for whom every cliché about magnetism and presence was written and quickly shredded as inadequate. The supremely considerate and loving side of him was perfectly balanced with his gleefully and blatantly shocking sense of humor. At any given moment, if you needed to know where “the line” was, it was a safe bet that you could find it over there, on the other side of that horrifying thing that Gerwehr just said.

Again, tragedy and premature passing make people run towards hyperbole, and to some extent everyone’s a hero and an icon after they’re gone. So if I can communicate anything about Scott right now, it’s that I want you to understand that to the people who knew him, he was that rare bird who was a hero and an icon while he was still here. A strange kind of hero, yes, and as I’ve mentioned, as icons go, he didn’t literally “tower over” anything but certain small dogs. But a hero and an icon nonetheless.

We had a memorial service for him on Thursday. A couple hundred people from all sides of his multifaceted existence. One thing that the think-tankers had in common with the artsy types, that the academicians had in common with the bad-movie aficionados, was that we were all unquestionably talking about the same Gerwehr. He did not lead a double or triple life - just a very, very large one.

Ultimately, reading back, there’s not much objective reason to be talking about losing Scott on this site, other than the fact that I want to. One of the artifacts of grief is the compulsion to keep saying goodbye, as though that will provide a little perspective, a little distance from something that is inextricably attached to you, like an animal fleeing its own burning tail. [Yipes, that’s a gruesome image! I leave it here only because Gerwehr would have wanted it that way…] It doesn’t work, not really. But it can’t hurt. So again, finally and for what won’t ever be the last time: “Goodbye, Gerwehr.” And “What the fuck?” And “We love you.”

Gerwehr