You know that Michael Hastings who Broke Story about McCrystal on Rolling Stone Mag.?

Here's something about him...a good read for DU'ers for Background.

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Michael Hastings: The Hurt Locker, and What It Means to Be Addicted to War
2010 March 4
by admin

The Hurt Locker looked poised to win big at the Oscars this weekend until getting embroiled in a controversy about whether or not it’s realistic. Iraq and Afghanistan veteran advocate Paul Rieckhoff pointed out a couple of significant inaccuracies (bomb squad techs acting like infantrymen, bad tactics, wrong uniforms, etc.), a bunch of bomb techs have complained it’s way too Hollywood, and a soldier who claims the story was based on him now plans to sue the filmmakers. But the pre-Oscar kneecapping misses the point: despite being set in Baghdad, Kathyrn Bigelow’s film was never really about Iraq.

First off, the film doesn’t engage the American experience in Iraq in a real political or intellectual way — certainly, not in the way films like Platoon or Apocalypse Now or Deer Hunter raised questions about Vietnam, or even how Saving Private Ryan and Band of Brothers explored the U.S. role in World War II. Iraq is merely the backdrop for an action movie — a remake of Bigelow’s Point Break set in Mesopotamia — that screenwriter Mark Boal uses to examine another theme entirely: the war junkie, embodied in Jeremy Renner’s character, Staff Sergeant William James.

The film’s true subject is explicit from the opening quote: “The rush of battle is a potent and almost lethal addiction, for war is a drug.” That’s a line from former war correspondent Chris Hedges book, War Is A Force that Gives Us Meaning. The movie cuts out the last bit of his quote. Hedges, a Pulitzer Prize winner, says war is a drug he “ingested for many years.” It’s no accident that Hedges is a journalist, and that the screenwriter Boal worked as reporter in Iraq: when it comes to being a war junky, journalists and writers have been at the forefront of exploring this destructive, adrenaline fueled, terrain.

I write this as someone who was recently accused, in conversation with a top newspaper editor, of being a war junkie. I denied it. But it’s a question I ask myself each time I get my travel documents ready to head off to a deadly conflict, something I’ve been doing regularly for the past five years. Am doing this for the right reasons? Are there right reasons? Or have I, like Sgt. James in The Hurt Locker, fallen prey to an addiction? Am I about to take another potentially lethal dose?

For me, these questions became painfully acute after I suffered a devastating personal loss in Iraq. The girl I planned to marry, Andi Parhamovich, who was working for an NGO, was killed three years ago in an attempted kidnapping in Baghdad. To deal with the trauma, I did what war journalists are supposed to do. I wrote about the horrors of what I saw and felt, the numbing destruction of Iraq, and the timeless reasons, relearned as each generation loses its innocence, of why war is so terrible. It destroys what we love, people, children, sons and daughters, things, culture, buildings, possessions, morality, emotions, and our own sense of who we are as human beings. There is not much new for me to learn about war.

And yet, I’ve kept going back.

Much More of a Good Read at............................................
http://worldnews.hometips4u.com/michael-hastings-the-hurt-locker-and-what-it-means-to-be-addicted-to-war

Great post, koko!

:kick:

A good read, with kind of a neo-Hemingway feel to it.

"Life Exprience" changes many of us.

Many reporters who live in DC and are Inter-Married and wedded to INFLUENCE might learn something from Hastings....I would think. They could learn someting about Reporting from the "Inner Circle" as opposed to doing the Grunt Work from the "Outer Circle" like Hastings and other "New Journalists" are trying to do.

Haven't we had enough of "Press Inbreeding?"

might be worth looking it up on the MSNBC site if you missed it Monday.

Thanks!

I remember Rachel Maddow talking about devasted she was when she heard the news.