‘He Never Stopped Writing’

H
ey, Sean, it’s Evan.” That’s how the phone calls always started with the late Evan Wright. What followed were long, twisting conversations that could last for hours. Evan gave to get. He wanted to dig into your life and was willing to share his inner dialogue and past, too. It was a fair trade-off. I wasn’t special; Evan was like this with everyone. It’s what made him such a gifted reporter — he wanted to know the secrets and thoughts of anyone who crossed his path. But he didn’t pry and never judged. He just loved to talk and write. And when he was ready, thousands and thousands of words would pour out of him. No word count or deadline ever held firm. He blew past them all.

I was a junior staffer working with him and then-deputy managing editor Will Dana on the series of Rolling Stone articles that became Generation Kill, Evan’s landmark reporting on the Iraq war. He had embedded with a team of recon Marines leading the invasion and racing along the deadly road to Baghdad. The three-part story won the National Magazine Award for Excellence in Reporting, then became 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 minute. It felt like the first draft of history. There was no rah-rah varnish to the story — this was brutal, bloody, and raw. His work stands as some of the best combat reporting ever written. 

Evan was a lot more than a war reporter, though. He wrote about murders, drug dealers, anarchists, mobsters, porn stars, and strippers. He fully immersed himself in whatever subculture he was investigating. He often told me that his years roaming the country digging into stories for RS were the happiest times in his life. But he also admitted his process was exhausting. Read his work on the RS website and you’ll find a fearless writer who searched for stories with one arched eyebrow, a wry smile, and a willingness to go anywhere. 

He had a troubled youth, and many of those wounds never healed, but they also toughened him. He mistrusted hierarchy and power. He called out bullshit where he found it. The TV writer David Simon, who produced and directed HBO’s Generation Kill, called Evan “feral,” and there was truth in that; Evan was not made to sit in an office. Like all good things, he needed to be wild and free. 

In the past few months, Evan had been openly talking to me about his struggles with PTSD. Like the Marines he wrote about, he brought more home from the war than he first let on. He was a person who lived with trauma his whole life, and the psychic price was steep. Yet he never ceased to be generous or curious. And he never stopped writing. Just days before he died, we had been talking about stories he was going to write. He was a journalist until the very end.