3. He will win whose army is animated by the same spirit throughout all its ranks.

I don't think I need to list how Andrew inspired an army of citizen journalists. But in case you need a reminder:

4. He will win who, prepared himself, waits to take the enemy unprepared.

Even before I worked at the company, I could tell when Andrew had a scoop. When Larry O'Connor and I did an Internet radio show together, Andrew often called in. A few times while I was screening his call he would be just a little more hyped than usual. When that happened he would sometimes ask me, "Am I going to go on in the next 30 seconds?" If my answer was "no" he would pause and say, "Ok, YOU CAN'T TELL ANYBODY, but...". I have no idea why he would tell me some things that I absolutely had no business knowing about. I asume it was because I was on the phone with him at the right time in the middle of the night.

After I was hired, I remember hearing Andrew talk about breaking stories. He described his strategy as playing "mental Jiu jitsu" with the left. Before he broke a major story he would describe to me what would happen: "First, we'll release this audio. Then the left will respond this way. Then they'll claim that we don't have more. Then we'll release the second part of the audio. Then the media will say 'that's it.' And then we'll really elevate the story with this video!" Andrew was brilliant at predicting exactly how the left and media would respond. A person could really watch Andrew's talent when he would engage the media and the left as they desperately tried to respond to whatever Andrew had unfolded. O'Connor once described it as watching Andrew "ride the waves" of the media cycle.

You can watch Andrew describe his method at the 9/12 Tea Party in Washington, D.C:

While no one acknowledged it at the time, that freedom was really one of Andrew's greatest assets. Andrew wasn't, and never wanted to be, a political operative carrying out missions dictated by suits. He was an independent force, a wild card, such that the left never knew when or what they would encounter with him. Being an independent entity gave Andrew a fire that drove him to release and cover the unlikely story. Although, in the beginning, he was out there in the new media blazing the trail for investigative journalism on his own, he was never held back by concerns of what "The Hill" would think of him. He knew what he had to do, and he did it with reckless abandon.

This is the Andrew that everyone remembers, the one that mastered the art of war. And yet Andrew mastered the art of laughter even more skillfully.

In the very few years that I was able to observe Andrew, it appeared that his favorite endeavor was not standing on a hill yelling "charge," but it was making those he loved around him laugh. Outside of spending time with his family, that seemed to be the thing that gave him the most happiness. Andrew loved to laugh. He loved to make others around him laugh even more.

The week that Andrew died was the same week that we were working on the relaunch of Breitbart.com. The new setup was very different than the old, and we spent hours in training learning the ins-and-outs of the technical infrastructure. During one of the many 10-hour days, I remember Andrew looking over my shoulder at the fake webpage I had created for practice. He seemed very pleased with it and asked me several questions about my methods. He was nervous about the launch, but he could barely contain his excitement about the new features and paced around the room smiling.

Later that week we were watching the Academy Awards on a projector in the office. Andrew was doing a "Mystery Science Theatre: 3000" type commentary on the affair. After the initial raucous laughter had died out, everyone gave at least a courtesy chuckle to all his jokes. During a portion of the show when they were showing clips of movies only people in LA or NYC had seen, Andrew made a joke that happened to really tickle me. I have a loud laugh anyway, but no one else was laughing, so it was really loud in the echoey office. I saw Andrew's head pop out of the cluster of people around him (even when it was just the editors, Andrew was always surrounded) and look right at me. He had the biggest smile on his face. It conveyed something like, "Aha! I got one!" I realized that he was happier with me then, for laughing at his joke, then he was with me the whole dang week I'd been killing myself learning the site.