MICHAEL Hastings may forever be known as the reporter whose article got General Stanley McChrystal in trouble.
But his work also includes coverage of two wars and a book on the death of his girlfriend in Baghdad.
Hastings rocketed into the public eye this week with his Rolling Stone profile, in which General McChrystal, the top US commander in Afghanistan, and his senior aides appeared to disparage President Barack Obama and top administration officials.
The explosive article was his first for the magazine, but he has worked for or contributed to a string of respected publications, including The Washington Post and Los Angeles Times .
Hastings scored a job with Newsweek magazine covering Iraq at the peak of the country’s violence between 2005 and 2007.
At 25, he was the publication’s youngest-ever war correspondent, writing on the US military’s struggle against the increasing use of improvised explosive devices and the forbidden love of two Iraqi teachers, one Shi’ite, one Sunni.
In August 2006, his girlfriend, Andi Parhamovich, moved to Baghdad to be with him, taking a job with the National Democratic Institute.
By 2007, Hastings planned to propose to Parhamovich, but on January 17 of that year, she was killed in an ambush in Baghdad – a tragedy that was the subject of Hastings’s 2008 book, I Lost My Love in Baghdad.
Along with Parhamovich’s family and friends, Hastings is a member of the Andi Foundation, established in her name, which grants scholarships and other assistance to students.
When Hastings returned to the US in 2007, Newsweek assigned him to a project about the behind-the-scenes action during the US presidential election that was to be published after the ballot.
“So my job was basically: ride the buses and planes with the candidates, have big lunches and dinners on the expense account, get sources drunk and singing, then report back the behind-the-scenes story,” Hastings wrote in an article about the experience for GQ magazine.
His more recent work includes contributions to online publications such as Salon and Slate and a blog on True/Slant that he describes as focused “on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as other newsy foreign-ish things”.
His blog, The Hastings Report, says he has spent time at “Catholic school, prep school . . . a number of colleges, county jail, rehab, the Lower East Side, Baghdad, Kabul, Vermont, Baghdad”.
In his profile attached to the blog, he describes himself as “currently addicted to: unpleasant countries with little to recommend them, except for an occupation force that looks like me”.
Who gives a ….? Many, many more wives and mothers have lost their husbands and sons/daughters in the war than this one little greasy reporter.
Obviously he cares, as it mean a lot to him to lose someone that you love irrespective of the circumstances.