H
Oh, Sean, it's “Evan.” That’s how phone calls with the late Evan Wright always began. What followed were long, complicated conversations that could last for hours. Evan would give and take. He wanted to dig into your life and was willing to share his inner dialogue and his past, too. It was a fair trade. I wasn’t special; Evan was like that with everyone. That’s what made him such a gifted reporter—he wanted to know the secrets and thoughts of anyone who crossed his path. But he was never curious and he never judged. He just loved to talk and write. And when he was ready, thousands upon thousands of words would flow from him. There was never a fixed word count or deadline. He exceeded them all.
I was a junior staffer working with then-Deputy Editor Will Dana on the series. Rolling Stone Articles that have become Generation Killing Evan was one of the most important journalists to report on the Iraq War. He joined a team of Marine reconnaissance officers who led the invasion and trudged the deadly road to Baghdad. The three-part story won the National Magazine Award for Excellence in News Coverage and was turned into a book and an HBO miniseries. We did it all on deadline, sending pages to the printer in the wee hours of the morning at the last possible moment. It read like a first draft of history. There was no polishing of the story—it was brutal, bloody, and raw. His work remains some of the best combat reporting ever written.
Ivan was more than just a war correspondent. He wrote about murders, drug dealers, anarchists, gangsters, porn stars, and strippers. He was completely immersed in whatever subculture he was investigating. He often told me that the years he spent crisscrossing the country collecting stories for RS were the happiest of his life. But he also admitted that the research was exhausting. If you read his work on the RS website, you will find a fearless writer who seeks out stories with an arched brow, a wry smile, and a willingness to go anywhere.
He had a troubled youth, and many of those wounds never healed, but they also made him stronger. He distrusted hierarchy and authority. He called out bullshit wherever he found it. TV writer David Simon, who produced and directed the HBO series Generation Killing They called Ivan “the Wild One,” and rightly so; Ivan was not designed to sit in an office. Like all good things, he needed to be wild and free.
For the past few months, Evan has been speaking openly to me about his struggle with PTSD. Like the Marines he wrote about, he brought home more from war than he initially let on. He was someone who lived with trauma his entire life, and the psychological toll was high. Yet he never stopped being generous or curious. And he never stopped writing. A few days before his death, we were talking about the stories he intended to write. He remained a journalist until the end.
