Hastings was torn between his desire to please General McChrystal and his staff, who gave him unprecedented access and who treated him as a friend, and his desire to expose the injustice and stupidity of the war.
Just when the article was first being published, Hastings was back in Afghanistan doing an article for a different magazine. At a helicopter air force base, soldiers were avidly reading the article about McChrystal. Several of them asked him if he'd read it. "I wrote it," he said. Hastings was afraid that some of the soldiers would be angry, but most of them welcomed the article, because they too knew the war wasn't going well and that they were being asked to risk their lives for a lie.
Obviously, some people in the military were angry at Hastings for his article that brought down their hero McChrystal. Some of Hastings' opponents questioned his professionalism, claiming he'd broken faith by exposing material that was off-the-record. Hastings says that some people in the White House and the Pentagon quite liked his article. Surprisingly, quite a few journalists were angry at him too. Hastings says that some journalists have "paid gigs at defense industry-funded think tanks, essentially getting financial support from the very same people they were supposed to be covering." So Hastings coined the phrase "media-military-industrial complex."
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