Uncouth Reflections

Paleo Retiree writes:

In Iraq

On June 18, 2013 The Question Lady and I learned that a friend of ours had died in Los Angeles in a very peculiar car crash. His name was Michael Hastings, and he’d been a celebrated war correspondent and investigative journalist.

At the time of his death Mike was just 33 years old. We were friendly with Mike when he was in his early 20s and had just arrived in the New York City media world. I was working for Newsweek magazine at the time, and one day Mike — a new intern — showed up in my office and introduced himself. We had someone in common, Mike’s older brother Jonathan Hastings, whom The Question Lady and I knew via the professor and critic Steve Vineberg. (Jon had been one of Steve’s favorite students.)

I liked Mike immediately. He was wiry, dark-haired, bright and intense, he was full of nutty gusto, and he had an explosive and dirty sense of humor. At the magazine he was doing low-level stuff — unsigned research, reporting and writing — and he was putting in long hours in a quest to out-excel his fellow interns.

For a couple of years Mike and I had a fun friendship. He stopped by my office regularly to blow off steam, to talk about girls and writing projects, and to ask for tips about how the innards of the magazine — its personalities and politics — worked. (Mike was frighteningly — if also amusingly — ambitious.) He’d monologue with great urgency, and often hilarious ruefulness, about the books he wanted — no, needed — to write, and we’d gossip and compare notes about movies. Brazen, hard-working and smart, Mike reminded me a bit of the British journalist Toby Young (who I also like a lot), and he became friendly with The Question Lady too.

Mike’s career soon took off. After Newsweek hired him fulltime, he did more and more ambitious work. Eventually, at his request, he was sent to Iraq; he sent back a lot of first-class frontline reporting from that war-torn country. For Rolling Stone, Mike published a profile of Gen. Stanley McChrystal, NATO commander in Afghanistan, that resulted in McChrystal being forced to resign. He won a George Polk Award for that story.

Mike was so daring that within a few years he’d acquired near legendary status among journalists and journalism fans. And in 2008, Mike finally did publish his first book: “I Lost My Love in Baghdad,” about his girlfriend Andi Parhamovich, who was ambushed and killed while working in Iraq for the National Democratic Institute. In 2012 he followed that book with another one, “The Operators,” a behind-the-scenes look at the U.S.’s war in Afghanistan.

By then, The Question Lady and I had mostly lost touch with Mike. For all his brains, talent and irreverence, and despite his roguish charm and spirit, Mike was sometimes reckless in ways that could really startle us. Besides, he was on his way up in a world we had nothing to do with. And meanwhile, The Question Lady and I were growing  closer to Mike’s brother Jon, a brilliant pop-culture critic and movie buff.

In the weeks that followed the news of Mike’s death, The Question Lady and I followed developments in the story and raked over our old friendship with Mike. How strange that his Mercedes seemed to have exploded on impact. Rumors were thick: Had Mike been murdered? Were drones and bombs involved? Mike had been doing some dicey reporting on the CIA after all. And how had Mike wound up in L.A. anyway? We were bugged as well by the way a lot of the news reports — and even the memoirs that colleagues of Mike’s published — missed out on dimensions of Mike Hastings as we’d known him.

Then one day we looked at each other and asked, more or less at the same moment, “Why not ask Jon if he’d be willing to do a q&a about his brother for the blog?” Why not indeed? It’d be a great opportunity for us — and for the world generally — to learn more about Mike, as well as a chance to add to the general discussion about Mike and his work.

We contacted Jon and were thrilled that Jon — who’s a, shall we say, close friend of this blog — was willing to talk, and to talk frankly, for the record. I think you’ll find the results very interesting and informative. (The words “unforgettable character sketch” come to mind.)

Here’s the Uncouth Reflections interview with Michael Hastings’ older brother, Jonathan Hastings.

Continue reading →