Looks like the journalist who killed the general now has a book deal and two more big stories on the way.

From Forbes:

One is a piece on the Iraq war that took a year to report. Another is about helicopter pilots in Afghanistan. “I feel really privileged to have the job that I have, and to have been given the reporting opportunities I’ve been given,” he said in an email.

Hastings has a colorful background. (Check out his True/Slant profile here.) He’s an alum of Newsweek who wrote a memoir called I Lost My Love in Baghdad: A Modern War Story about his fiancee’s death while working as an aid worker. He’s open about his past struggles with alcohol. And he seems principled, having left Newsweek after it became clear it was valuing opinion-journalism over reporting.

I can’t wait to see what Hastings does next. His Rolling Stone story, if you haven’t read it yet, is a great piece of work. McChrystal’s mouthing off is the least-interesting part—to me, anyway. (What? A former black ops honcho with an iron will and a gruff, macho demeanor? Who could’ve possibly imagined?) But the way Hastings frames the state of the war in Afghanistan, the changing strategies, Obama’s paradoxes, McChrystal’s history, how the military and its academies have changed over the years, etc. etc.—that’s the good stuff. He surveys several large territories in a swift, efficient, perceptive way.

And he’s put Rolling Stone back on the map. I’m curious about what’ll be in the next issue—a curiosity I haven’t felt in at least 15 years.

Brend an Kiley has worked as a child actor in New Orleans, as a member of the junior press corps at the 1988 Republican National Convention, and, for one happy April, as a bootlegger’s assistant in Nicaragua....

4 replies on “That McChrystal Article Was Just Michael Hastings’s Opening Salvo”

  1. I really enjoyed his book. It was hard to put down. “Every man in this village is a liar” has a similar first-person perspective (and some great insight on feminism and the Mideast) by a writer for the LA Times.

  2. Next issue will have something on the Army private who got charged with leaking the video of US pilots slaughtering unarmed civilians and news people in Iraq.

  4. BK, if you haven’t been curious about the next issue of RS, then you’ve been living under a rock since the 08 prez. campaign. Matt Taibbi’s and Tim Dickinson’s work has, for several years now, been some of the best-written (and informative) magazine writing I’ve seen.

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