Stanley McChrystal: ‘I Think I Am at Peace’
The ‘snake-eating’ general on Trump, war movies — and the Rolling Stone interview that got him fired
By Janan Ganesh
“My wife will shoot me if I let you see our messy bedroom,” says Stanley McChrystal, as we negotiate the figure-hugging stairs of his Virginia row home. “But I have been shot before.”
America’s most controversial general since Curtis LeMay, that zealous bomber of things, is now a gracious suburban host of 64. “This is my father in Vietnam,” — we are on the landing now, which he could charge admission to as a gallery — “and this is a hand-drawn map of Kabul by British officers from 1842. This is the route they took to Jalalabad. One guy made it out of 15,000. I kept it on my desk in Afghanistan as a reminder. ‘Let’s not be too sanguine.’ ” Or the enemy too sanguinary.
Before he commanded all coalition troops there, McChrystal re-wrote counter-insurgency doctrine as head of the US special forces. He joined his soldiers on night raids and tussled with Washington over resources. His spartanness and dissident streak put commentators in the mind of, variously, Martin Luther, a Jedi, Marlon Brando’s renegade colonel in Apocalypse Now and, in the magazine article that exploded his career, a “snake-eating rebel”. It was…
