Hey, Sean, its Evan.
Thats how the phone calls always started with the lateEvan 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 wasnt special; Evan was like this with everyone.
But he didnt 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.
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.
He mistrusted hierarchy and power.
He called out bullshit where he found it.
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.
