How Eyjafjallajokull - and the subsequent grounding of planes - helped blow General's career out of the water
The Rolling Stone article that ended McChrystal’s distinguished military career. Photograph: AP
Blame the volcano. What should have been a routine chat with a journalist turned into a fiasco for General Stanley McChrystal after Iceland's Eyjafjallajokull volcano blew its top.
Michael Hastings, the Rolling Stone reporter who wrote the article that blew McChrystal's career out of the water had been scheduled to interview the general in Paris, fly with him to Kabul and then follow him around Afghanistan a bit. But the military intended to control access.
Then Eyjafjallajokull struck, grounding planes in much of Europe, delaying McChrystal and his entourage in Paris and forcing them to take a bus to Berlin. Hastings became part of the mix.
In that time, Hastings got to know the general and his entourage better than he might have expected. The chatted, they drank, they let their guard down and said just what they thought.
"They couldn't fly, so they had to take a bus," Rolling Stone's editor Eric Bates told MSNBC.
"So we really spent a lot of time with him and really got to look behind the curtain, and hear how he and his men, top men, talk among themselves on their own."
McChrystal and his team came to regard Hastings as a member of the team not a pair of alien eyes and ears.
That included getting drunk together in a faux Irish pub as the group who called themselves Team America sang a song they made up which appears to principally contain one word: Afghanistan.
It's not a song McChrystal will be singing in Kabul anymore.
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