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Tag Archives: Sebastian Junger

I’m descended from James

03 Thursday Aug 2017

Posted by jrbenjamin in War

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Advice, conflict, Fighting, Patriotism, Sebastian Junger, Soldiers, Tribe, Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging, War

“Like a lot of boys I played war when I was young, and like a lot of men I retained an intense and abiding curiosity about it. And like a lot of people, my family was deeply affected by war and probably wouldn’t have existed without it. One of my mother’s ancestors emigrated from Germany in order to fight in the American Revolution and was given a land grant in Ohio in return. His last name was Grimm; he was related to the great folklorists who recorded German fairy tales. One of Grimm’s descendants married into another frontier family, the Carrolls, who were almost wiped out by Indians during a raid on their remote Pennsylvania homestead in 1781. The Carroll wife managed to hide in a cornfield with her four-year-old son, James, while the Indians killed her two teenage sons and her dog. The husband was off in town that day. I’m descended from James.

My father was half Jewish and grew up in Europe. He was thirteen when his family fled the Spanish Civil War and settled in Paris, and seventeen when they left Paris ahead of the German army and emigrated to the United States. He tried to sign up for military service but was turned down due to asthma, so he eventually helped the war effort by working on jet engines in Paterson, New Jersey. Later he got a degree in fluid mechanics and worked on submarine design. When I turned eighteen I received my selective service card in the mail, in case the United States needed to draft me, and I declared that I wasn’t going to sign it. The Vietnam War had just ended and every adult I knew had been against it. I had no problem, personally, with fighting a war; I just didn’t trust my government to send me to one that was completely necessary.

My father’s reaction surprised me. Vietnam had made him vehemently antiwar, so I expected him to applaud my decision, but instead he told me that American soldiers had saved the world from fascism during World War II and that thousands of young Americans were buried in his homeland of France. ‘You don’t owe your country nothing,’ I remember him telling me. ‘You owe it something, and depending on what happens, you might owe it your life.’

The way my father put it completely turned the issue around for me: suddenly the draft card wasn’t so much an obligation as a chance to be part of something bigger than myself. And he’d made it clear that if the United States embarked on a war that I felt was wrong, I could always refuse to go; in his opinion, protesting an immoral war was just as honorable as fighting a moral one. Either way, he made it clear that my country needed help protecting the principles and ideals that I’d benefited from my entire life.”

__________

Pulled from Sebastian Junger’s Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging. I’m descended from James.

That sentence, its ordering in the paragraph and use of the informal contraction where a self-serious “I am” would be tempting, is a reason Junger is a great writer.

Image: AARP

Go on:

  • A collection of my posts on Junger
  • How the Brits see their legacy in WW2
  • The 20th century’s major work of philosophy was written in the trenches

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How to Survive a Roadside Bomb: Sebastian Junger Escapes Death in Afghanistan

11 Tuesday Mar 2014

Posted by jrbenjamin in War

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

Afghanistan, Afghanistan war, Battle Company, combat, Fiction, foreign policy, Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, PTSD, Restrepo, Sebastian Junger, Taliban, violence, War, warfare

Sebastian Junger

Later this week I’m going to type up a short review of Sebastian Junger’s remarkable book WAR. Before then, however, I want to introduce those of you unfamiliar with the text to a disturbing (and particularly telling) section of it.

In this scene, which happened midway into Junger’s 15-month stint in Afghanistan, the men of Battle Company have crammed into four Humvees and set off on a routine patrol of the sparsely inhabited surrounding countryside. The Taliban have recently added a new weapon to their arsenal, makeshift roadside bombs (usually consisting of pressure cookers filled with fertilizer and diesel), “because they were losing too many men in firefights” against the vastly superior American force. Through this twisted new tactic, “the enemy now had a weapon that unnerved the Americans more than small-arms fire ever could: random luck.”

And luck isn’t on the American’s side this day. As the Humvees cruise through a neighboring village, a bomb detonates under Junger’s vehicle. The explosion is triggered about a second too early, missing the main cabin by about ten feet and blasting up through the engine block. Junger is one of the only contemporary Western journalists to witness first-hand such a scene, which has now played out countless time over the course of the Allied occupation. Here is a slice of the ensuing half minute:

The explosion looks like a sheet of flame and then a sudden darkening. The darkening is from dirt that lands on the windshield and blocks the sun… “GET ON THAT GUN!” Thyng starts yelling at the gunner. “GET ON THAT GUN AND START FIRING INTO THAT FUCKIN’ DRAW!”… Big, hot .50 cal shells clatter into the interior of the Humvee…

There’s a lot of shooting out there and I’m not looking forward to running through it, but the cabin is filling with toxic gray smoke and I know we’re going to have to bail out eventually. I keep waiting for something like fear to take hold of me but it never does, I have a kind of flatlined functionality that barely raises my heart rate. I could do math problems in my head. It occurs to me that maybe I’ve been injured — often you don’t know right away — and I pat my way down both legs until I reach my feet, but everything is there. I get my gear in order and find the door lever with my hand and wait. There is a small black skeleton hanging from the rearview mirror and I notice that it’s still rocking from the force of the blast. I just sit there watching it. Finally Thyng gives the order and we all throw ourselves into the fresh cool morning air and start to run.

Junger then yanks his reader from combat to the classroom, where he digresses on a vital but overlooked lesson any student of war should assimilate – namely, that combat is one of the most thrilling activities a human being can experience:

War is a lot of things and it’s useless to pretend that exciting isn’t one of them. It’s insanely exciting. The machinery of war and the sound it makes and the urgency of its use and the consequences of almost everything about it are the most exciting things anyone engaged in war will ever know. Soldiers discuss that fact with each other and eventually with their chaplains and their shrinks and maybe even their spouses, but the public will never hear about it. It’s just not something that many people want acknowledged.

Junger elaborates:

War is supposed to feel bad because undeniably bad things happen in it, but for a nineteen-year-old at the working end of a .50 cal during a firefight that everyone comes out of okay, war is life multiplied by some number that no one has ever heard of. In some ways twenty minutes of combat is more life than you could scrape together in a lifetime of doing something else. Combat isn’t where you might die — though that does happen — it’s where you find out whether you get to keep on living. Don’t underestimate the power of that revelation. Don’t underestimate the things young men will wager in order to play that game one more time.

This thought is shaped by a closing sentence which could also function as the book’s thesis:

The core psychological experiences of war are so primal and unadulterated, however, that they eclipse subtler feelings, like sorrow or remorse, that can gut you quietly for years…

Junger is still helplessly strapped into this high-low psychosomatic roller coaster as the men tow their wrecked Humvee back to outpost Restrepo that afternoon. In the still of the Afghan sundown, Junger eventually finds a quiet moment to reflect on the day’s events, and in the process offers a glimpse into how this singular experience of combat-at-full-throttle can disfigure a soldier’s understanding of war.

I’ve been on some kind of high-amplitude ride all day since the bomb went off, peaks where I can’t sit still and valleys that make me want to catch the next resupply out of here. Not because I’m scared but because I’m used to war being exciting and suddenly it’s not. Suddenly it seems weak and sad, a collective moral failure that has tricked me — tricked us all — into falling for the sheer drama of it. Young men in their terrible new roles with their terrible new machinery arrayed against equally strong young men on the other side of the valley, all dedicated to a kind of canceling out of each other until replacements arrive. Then it starts all over again. There’s so much human energy involved — so much courage, so much honor, so much blood — you could easily go a year here without questioning whether any of this needs to be happening in the first place. Nothing could convince this many people to work this hard at something that wasn’t necessary — right? — you’d catch yourself thinking.

Junger then returns to the immediate psychological experience of combat, only now it is his subconscious mind, not his front brain, that is processing the day’s traumas.

That night I rewind the videotape of the explosion and try to watch it. My pulse gets so weird in the moments before we get hit that I almost have to look away. I can’t stop thinking about the ten feet or so that put that bomb beneath the engine block rather than beneath us. That night I have a dream. I’m watching a titanic battle between my older brother and the monsters of the underworld, and my brother is killing one after another with a huge shotgun. The monsters are cartoonlike and murderous and it doesn’t matter how many he kills because there’s an endless supply of them.

Eventually he’ll just run out of ammo, I realize. Eventually the monsters will win.

Whether consciously or not, Junger tinges this paragraph with the unfortunate residuals of warfare, including survivor’s guilt, isolation from family, and dreams charred with post-traumatic terror. That final coda is perhaps the most lacerating moment of the text: a simultaneous recognition of evil and a resignation to its eventual triumph. Junger is too restrained a writer to paint this conclusion in too bold of strokes, but nevertheless it is latent in the text for some if not most readers. This subtlety is the true achievement of the text, as Junger manages to forge a clear-eyed and wholly human narrative out of a conflict that has been so politicized and depersonalized over the past decade.

Restrepo

__________

As I said, be on the lookout for a short review of WAR in the coming week.

Both of the above photos were taken at outpost Restrepo by one of the my heroes, the late photographer Tim Hetherington.

Read on:

  • Vietnam veteran, Catholic, and scholar Andrew Bacevich reflects on war and original sin
  • Sebastian Junger describes how combat changed him for the better
  • I relate how the professional structure of our military is partially to blame for the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars

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How to Communicate

28 Tuesday May 2013

Posted by jrbenjamin in Journalism, Writing

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

books, communication, literature, Sebastian Junger, Writing, Writing with Power Clarity and Style

Sebastian Junger

“When you write a book, when you write for people, what you’re saying is, ‘Okay, please step out of life, and into this weird mental place where you’re just alone with me… for hours, days.’ That’s a big request, and if [your readers] honor you by accepting, you have to really work hard to make it worth their while.

There’s a relationship there. They’re not there to admire you — they may end up admiring you — but that’s not what they’re there for. You are writing to give them an experience, on some level, an entertaining and fulfilling experience. And it’s really not about you…

The sort of world of writing for me is divided into two things: there’s content and then there’s style. There’s what you’re writing about, and there’s the way you write about it. Style is what gets people to keep reading, but ultimately it doesn’t have any inherent value. God forbid we write a book where the writing is the point.

That’s just too self-referential, and it betrays a kind of lack of respect for the world. You’re not more interesting than the world is. Your writing is not more beautiful than the world is. You don’t want the facts of the world to serve as a platform for your skill as a writer. It’s the other way around. The relationship goes the other way. Your skill as a writer serves the world.

You’re not supposed to tell people what to think; you’re supposed to tell them what to think about. You want to address the readers directly. I mean, you want to kind of look them in the eye. It’s like a conversation. It’s a conversation where you have respect for their intellect. You’re not talking down to them. You’re kind of amazed by the world. I mean, the world’s an amazing place, but it’s easy to forget that. If you open yourself to how amazing the world is, your writing will communicate something really valuable to other people.”

__________

From Sebastian Junger on Writing with Power, Clarity, and Style.

I think these ideas generalize to nearly any form of communication. You can replace “writer/writing” above with “artist/painting,” “teacher/teaching,” or “speaker/speechmaking,” and it make exactly as much sense.

Junger upheld this outward-looking philosophy so doggedly that he lived for many years without a mirror in his New York apartment. “So I wouldn’t be thinking about myself,” was Junger’s justification. “When he has to shave or brush his teeth,” his ex-girlfriend once explained, “he uses the back of a CD.”

Sebastian Junger

____

Check out some of Junger’s work below:

Restrepo: Junger and HetheringtonWar, Combat

Sebastian JungerThe Insane Amount of Firepower

Sebastian JungerSomething Noble about Human Beings

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Something Noble about Human Beings

11 Saturday May 2013

Posted by jrbenjamin in Interview, Journalism, War

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

Afghanistan, Afghanistan war, combat, Sebastian Junger, War

__________

You said earlier that your experiences in Afghanistan changed you — how?

I mean, you know, I had the classic jumping at loud noises and stuff like that. Anyone who’s been in combat has a sort of startle response, as it’s called. I had some nightmares. But then the nightmares changed into just dreams about the Korengal. So when I was writing my book, every night… every night, I was back there in my dreams. They weren’t all bad dreams either, I was just back there. And in the end, the negative reactions were transitory. But there was a kind of permanent reaction, which was positive, and it was this: I became more emotional. I just found myself being moved by things, emotionally moved, and not at sad things. Just at the human drama around me. And not on a battlefield. Just the human drama at home. People’s weddings, people’s birthdays. People’s… whatever. I just got emotional.

Did you cry?

Sure. Absolutely. Oh my god, amazing. And, I mean, every guy in the platoon had that happen to him. And they were all amazed, they were like, Oh my god, we’re turning into girls. What’s going on? But they were crying about stuff — I mean they get plenty of crying in over the bad stuff, like their friends that they lost. But then they’d ask What are we doing crying about the good stuff? They didn’t understand. And the same thing happened to me. It just turned me into an emotionally connected person.

What do you think it is? Crying about the good stuff…

I don’t know. I don’t know. It just opened me up, and those guys up. Maybe not all of them, but some of them said that to me. And, so, for me — I’m 48 — better late than never. My wife definitely remarked on it. I mean, I just became a fuller person.

The orthodoxy would be to say you value life when you’re in a situation like that, where life is so precarious, in the hills of death.

You know I saw plenty of precariousness of life in Africa, and it didn’t do that. It just made me shut down. There was something about the connection between these guys.

Look: the decision that you’d rather die, or risk dying, to save someone else is a profound decision for a human being to make. I mean, maybe for your kid, maybe for your spouse — but for a peer? That’s an amazing decision, and I was in that environment, with guys who felt that way about each other, off and on for a year. And I think it sort of opened the door for me on something that’s really, deeply noble about human beings and their willingness for self-sacrifice. No other animal does that, and it really was a very profound experience.

__________

From an interview with Sebastian Junger about combat and its psychological impact.

Sebastian Junger

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The Insane Amount of Firepower

06 Monday May 2013

Posted by jrbenjamin in Current Events, Journalism, War

≈ 5 Comments

Tags

Afghanistan, Afghanistan war, army, battle, firefight, Military, Sebastian Junger, Terrorism, War

Sebastian Junger

“I don’t leave the valley, I stay, and after a few days the war becomes normal again. We go on patrol and I focus on the fact that one foot goes in front of the other. We get ambushed and the only thing I’m interested in is what kind of cover we’ve got. It’s all very simple and straightforward, and it’s around this time that killing begins to make a kind of sense to me. It’s tempting to view killing as a political act because that’s where the repercussions play out, but that misses the point: a man behind a rock touched two wires to a battery and tried to kill me — to kill us. There are other ways to understand what he did, but none of them overrides the raw fact that this man wanted to negate everything I’d ever done in my life or might ever do. It felt malicious and personal in a way that combat didn’t. Combat theoretically gives you the chance to react well and survive; bombs don’t allow for anything. The pressure cooker was probably bought in Kandigal, the market town we passed through half an hour earlier. The bomber built a campfire in the draw to keep himself warm that night while waiting for us. We could see his footprints in the sand. The relationship between him and me couldn’t be clearer, and if I’d somehow had a chance to kill him before he touched the wires together I’m sure I would have. As a civilian, that’s not a pretty thought to have in your head. That’s not a thought that just sits there quietly and reassures you about things.

It was the ten feet that got me; I kept thinking about Murphee and then looking down at my legs. The idea that so much could be determined by so little was sort of intolerable. It made all of life look terrifying; it made the walk to the chow hall potentially as bad as a night patrol to Karingal. (The American contract worker who got shot at the KOP took a bullet to the leg instead of the head only because he happened to change directions on his cot that day.) The only way to calm your nerves in that environment was to marvel at the insane amount of firepower available to the Americans and hope that that changed the equation somehow. They have a huge shoulder-fired rocket called a Javelin, for example, that can be steered into the window of a speeding car half a mile away. Each Javelin round costs $80,000, and the idea that it’s fired by a guy who doesn’t make that in a year at a guy who doesn’t make that in a lifetime is somehow so outrageous it almost makes the war seem winnable. And the roar of a full-on firefight could be so reassuring that you wanted to run around hugging people afterward. That roar was what was keeping you alive, and it created an appreciation for firepower so profound that it bordered on the perverse.”

__________

From Sebastian Junger’s book on the conflict in Afghanistan WAR.

Below is a picture of American soldiers firing a Javelin missile.

Javelin Missile: The art of anti-armor warfare: 3/3 ‘Missile Marines’ prepare for enemy by shooting TOW, Javelin missiles

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War v. Combat

18 Thursday Apr 2013

Posted by jrbenjamin in Current Events, Journalism, War

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

army, combat, Military, Sebastian Junger, the Afghanistan war, Tim Hetherington, War

Restrepo: Junger and Hetherington

“War is a big and sprawling word that brings a lot of human suffering into the conversation, but combat is a different matter. Combat is the smaller game that young men fall in love with, and any solution to the human problem of war will have to take into account the psyches of these young men. For some reason there is a profound and mysterious gratification to the reciprocal agreement to protect another person with your life, and combat is virtually the only situation in which that happens regularly. These hillsides are where the men feel not most alive – that you can get skydiving – but the most utilised. The most necessary. The most clear and certain and purposeful. If young men could get that feeling at home, no one would ever want to go to war again, but they can’t.

Some men make better soldiers than others, and some units perform better than others. The traits that distinguish those men, and those units, could be called the Holy Grail of combat psychology. They could be called the basis for what people loosely refer to as ‘courage’. An Israeli study during the 1973 Yom Kippur War found that high-performing soldiers were more intelligent, more ‘masculine’, more socially mature, and more emotionally stable than average men. At the other end of the spectrum, eight out of 10 men who suffered psychological collapse in combat had a problem at home: a pregnant wife, a financial crisis, a recent death in the family. Those collapses were most likely to be caused not by a near-death experience, as one might expect, but by the combat death of a close friend.

This points to an irony of combat psychology – the logical downside of heroism. If you’re willing to lay down your life for another person, then their death is going to be more upsetting than the prospect of your own, and intense combat might incapacitate an entire unit through grief alone. Combat is such an urgent business, however, that most men simply defer the psychological issue until later.

Tim Hetherington

Statistically, it’s six times as dangerous to spend a year as a young man in America than as a cop or a fireman, and vastly more dangerous than a one-year deployment at a big military base in Afghan­istan. You’d have to go to a remote firebase like the KOP [Korengal Valley Outpost] to find a level of risk that surpasses that of simply being an adolescent male in the US. Combat isn’t simply a matter of risk, though; it’s also a matter of mastery. The basic neurological mechanism that induces mammals to do things is called the dopamine reward system. Dopamine is a neurotransmitter that mimics the effect of cocaine in the brain, and it gets released when a person wins a game or solves a problem or succeeds at a difficult task. The dopamine reward system exists in both sexes but is stronger in men, and as a result men are more likely to become obsessively involved in such things as hunting, gambling, computer games and war. When the men of Second Platoon were moping around the outpost hoping for a firefight it was because, among other things, they weren’t getting their accustomed dose of endorphins and dopamine. They played video games instead.

Women can master those skills without having pleasure centres in their brains light up as if they’d just done a line of coke. One of the beguiling things about combat is that it’s so complex, there’s no way to predict the outcome. That means that any ragtag militia, no matter how small and poorly equipped, might conceivably defeat a superior force if it fights well enough. ‘Every action produces a counter­action on the enemy’s part,’ an American correspondent named Jack Belden wrote about combat during the Second World War. ‘The thousands of interlocking actions throw up millions of little frictions, accidents and chances, from which there emanates an all-embracing fog of uncertainty.’

Combat fog obscures your fate – obscures when and where you might die – and from that unknown is born a desperate bond between the men. That bond is the core experience of combat and the only thing you can absolutely count on. The Army might screw you and your girlfriend might dump you and the enemy might kill you, but the shared commitment to safeguard one another’s lives is unnegotiable and only deepens with time. The willingness to die for another person is a form of love that even religions fail to inspire, and the experience of it changes a person profoundly. What the army sociologists, with their clipboards and their questions, slowly came to understand was that courage was love. In war, neither could exist without the other, and that in a sense they were just different ways of saying the same thing. According to their questionnaires, the primary motivation in combat (other than ‘ending the task’ – which meant they all could go home) was ‘solidarity with the group’. That far outweighed self-preservation or idealism as a motivator. The Army Research Branch cites cases of wounded men going AWOL after their hospitalisation in order to get back to their unit faster than the military could get them there. A civilian might consider this an act of courage, but soldiers knew better. To them it was just an act of brotherhood, and there probably wasn’t much to say about it except, ‘Welcome back.’”

__________

From Sebastian Junger’s book WAR.

Tonight: be sure to watch Junger’s documentary about the work of his friend, war photographer Tim Hetherington. The documentary’s called Which Way is the Front Line From Here? The Life and Time of Tim Hetherington. It starts at 8pm on HBO.

The pictures are of Junger and Hetherington and were taken while the two men were in the Korengal valley of northeastern Afghanistan to film their documentary Restrepo. Junger (author of The Perfect Storm) and Hetherington (an acclaimed combat photographer) directed and produced the film, which went on to receive an Academy Award nomination. As intense as it is intensive, the movie is a study of combat and the psychological stains it leaves on the individual, both while on the front line and back home. Like the soldiers they documented, Junger and Hetherington forged a bond of friendship during their fifteen month deployment/shoot in Afghanistan, returning to the United States with plans to further document conflict zones around the world.

However in 2011, while traveling with a band of rebel fighters in the Libyan civil war, Hetherington was killed from wounds sustained from an RPG round. He died on April 20th.

If I lived in an uncivilized society — to borrow a thought from Hitchens — that anniversary, this Saturday, would be a sort of Martyr’s day for me.

Following the news of his friend’s death, Junger vowed never to return to war again.

See a sample of Hetherington’s work here and here.

Tim Hetherington

Hetherington, Korengal Valley, Afghanistan, 2007.

Tim HetheringtonHetherington, London, 2009.

Tim HetheringtonHetherington, Bengazi, Libya, 2011.

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