I read of Hastings’ death and pulled down my copy of The Operators: The Wild & Terrifying Inside Story of America’s War in Afghanistan. Fortuitously, it’s just coming out in paperback, if you still need a copy. Here are the first and next-to-last paragraphs from the epilogue, “Someday, This War’s Gonna End”:
The car horns sounded like victory. I could hear them blaring from my apartment. Osama Bin Laden was dead. We’d killed him…
That night, I thought of all the dead, and what adding Bin Laden’s name to the list actually meant… I thought of the thumbs hanging off barbed wire, the pools of blood, like oil on concrete, in small outposts I could barely remember. The memorial services with grown men crying over empty boots. The memorial service with me crying over an empty coffin. The explosions in hotels and government office buildings. I thought of the operators, all of us who’d made our careers off Bin Laden’s horror show: McChrystal, Petraeus, Duncan, Dave, the Flynss, Lamb, Starkey, Hoh, Hicks, the twenty-three Navy SEALs who killed him, and even the president himself, who’d ridden to power on an antiwar tide. I thought of the harsh judgement history was going one day to render on us all…
Max Fisher, at the Washington Post:
…[F]or all his take-no-prisoners bravado, in my all-too-brief encounters with Hastings he was more thoughtful than he let on in public. After I wrote critically about his McChrystal profile, he reached out to offer a kind word and invite me to drinks, a small gesture but one that few writers – perhaps myself included – would have been generous and unguarded enough to make to a critic.
Last year, he offered ten tips on Reddit for aspiring journalists. He was in a better position to offer them than I was, but I can reproduce them for you here. If you’re just entering journalism or considering it, follow his advice, and not just because it’s good, although it is. We could use more like him.
1.) You basically have to be willing to devote your life to journalism if you want to break in. Treat it like it’s medical school or law school.
2.) When interviewing for a job, tell the editor how you love to report. How your passion is gathering information. Do not mention how you want to be a writer, use the word “prose,” or that deep down you have a sinking suspicion you are the next Norman Mailer….9) Mainly you really have to love writing and reporting. Like it’s more important to you than anything else in your life–family, friends, social life, whatever….