Sebastian Junger - "Everyone's against war, any sane person's against war, and yet everyone goes to see war movies..."

An acquaintence of mine from Middleboro, MA recently inquired about the "tone" of my comments here, especially regarding my rather spirited bashing of POTUS & his administration, The Governor of Massachusetts and many of those held dear by the Left. He stated that I was regurgitating Fox News.

In my defense, I rarely, if ever have cited FOX News on this blog....I read many different sources and try to gain a multi-faceted view. Hate to say it, our Nobel Prize Winner in the White House and his lefty ilk were the ones spouting " Protest is Patriotic" for years....seems a little hypocritical for any Lefty Leaning person to now say it is uncalled for as the shoe is on the other foot... Can't take the "heat", stay out of the kitchen.

For the record, I am "unenrolled" and follow neither party as I vote the Man/Woman and NOT the party.

Actually, I digress. Enclosed is a copy of an article written about a person whom I have much respect and admiration for, Massachusetts native and War Correspondant Sebastian Junger.

He admits to being a Lefty politics wise but supports the Afghanistan War. He has felt the heat of battle and understands what most of the Lefties back stateside have no clue on....Do He & I agree on all things ?? NOPE. Then again, I disagree with one of my Heroes in life, US Senator John McCain but that doesn't stop me from supporting him either. The difference is Sebastian Junger & John McCain both make intelligent arguements and have HONOR. They are thinking and caring passionately about what they are espousing.

OBAMA, Pelosi, Deval Patrick, Geitner, Napolitano, Biden ??? NOPE....None of them are worthy to stand next to Sebastian Junger or Senator McCain as the only thing they care about is controlling your life and your money. They are devoid of honor and integrity as a group. My opinion, and solely based on my observations. Many agree with me and many disagree. If I had to go somewhere "hot", I'd trust John McCain & Seabstian Junger long before I would consider trusting any of the aforementioned bunch.


OK - I digressed a 2nd time. Now the words from Sebastian Junger. Read on as it is worth your time to hear what he says. I hope one day to meet Sebastian just as I have met John McCain. I would really like to get to know him better.

Sebastian Junger reflects on friendship, war and peace

After the death of photojournalist and friend Tim Hetherington in Libya, Junger resolves to cease front-line reporting. But war, he says, remains one of humanity's master narratives.

By Reed Johnson, Los Angeles Times
June 9, 2011


Last Oscar season, author Sebastian Junger and photojournalist Tim Hetherington walked the red carpet together.

Their documentary "Restrepo," recorded while they were embedded with a U.S. Army platoon in Afghanistan's remote and dangerous Korengal Valley, was nominated for an Academy Award. For months the two men had lived with the troops, sharing the same food, the same stifling quarters, and the same long stretches of boredom punctuated by moments of adrenaline-fueled terror.

Barely two months after the Oscars, on April 20, Hetherington was killed in a mortar attack in Misurata, Libya, where he was covering the rebel uprising against Moammar Kadafi's regime. In the months since, Junger has resolved to pull back from combat journalism.

"I'm not going to do any more front-line reporting, because I don't want to put my wife through what I went through with Tim," he said during a recent stopover in Los Angeles to promote the new paperback edition of his 2010 book "War," which Junger was compiling while he and Hetherington were filming "Restrepo."

"It was a very obvious thought to come to in the wake of all this. Tim's death made war reporting feel like a selfish endeavor."

It's a startling concession from an author whose eyewitness accounts from Liberia, Afghanistan and other global hot spots can make readers imagine they're inches away from the mortar blasts and AK-47 rounds.

Written in sinewy, stripped-to-the-waist prose, "War" not only paints vivid profiles of the U.S. soldiers Junger met, and the harrowing conditions they endured, it also penetrates deeply into the strange, terrifying allure of combat and the motivations of the young men who mostly wage it. The book has drawn critical comparisons with such canonical literature as Michael Herr's Vietnam-era "Dispatches" and the World War I and Spanish Civil War reflections of Ernest Hemingway and George Orwell.

In this month's Vanity Fair magazine, Junger eulogizes Hetherington's valor and vision in conveying the world's suffering to others. Another photojournalist, Chris Hondros, was fatally wounded in the same Libyan attack that killed Hetherington, and two other photojournalists were injured.

Before Hetherington's death, Junger said, the perils of war reporting had always felt abstract. He's not judging other journalists' decisions to place themselves in harm's way, but he's had enough.

"I thought it couldn't happen to me, and I'd never known anyone who had got killed — couple guys that got shot. You know, there's a lot of denial. I mean, denial works."

A trim 49-year-old with intense storm-gray eyes, Junger has the demeanor of a youthful college English professor who moonlights as the track coach — an Ivy League mind outfitted in solid blue-collar principles. He projects a restless curiosity, a touch of rah-rah adventurism, a dash of low-key machismo.

The author and his wife of six years, Daniela, a Bulgarian native to whom "War" is dedicated, have no children but are discussing starting a family.

Junger said that his father, a theoretical physicist, opened his mind to science and the idea that the physical and human worlds "can be understood and should be understood." His mother, a painter, gave to her son a more aesthetic and spiritual mode of understanding. Journalism merged his left- and right-brain tendencies "in kind of a nice way."

Despite his own vow to pull back from the trenches, Junger still not only considers war to be a great journalistic subject, he regards it as one of the three or four master narratives of human life — or, at least, guys' lives.

"Look at the cave paintings in France. What do they show? They show the game animals that they've hunted — a form of warfare, in a way, violence. They show warfare, they show men fighting each other. They show fertile females. I mean, what topics preoccupy men? You want to look into the male brain? It's like, OK, I need to kill game, I need to sustain myself — basically, career. Conflict and combat, manliness and proving yourself. Hot chicks. And the final one is shamanism, connection to the divine. That comprises the entirety of what's on the walls of the caves in France. That's the male brain, that's human society in a lot of ways."

Stories of violent conflict and men acting gracefully (or otherwise) under duress have been the alpha and omega of Junger's writing career, in books such as "The Perfect Storm" (1997), about a fishing boat disaster, and "Fire," about men who earn their living, and sometimes their deaths, by doing perilous jobs in places like Sierra Leone and Kosovo.

As a writer, Junger credits Hetherington with "opening my eyes up" to the rich complexity of visual experience. When he was trying to organize "War" around a unifying principle, Junger asked himself, "What would Tim do and how would Tim think about this material?"

Junger concluded that his friend "wouldn't be organizing it in an event-driven, linear way, he'd be looking for some deeper structure that reflects the human experience." That helped Junger eventually build "War" around three thematic blocks. "Fear" elucidates the primal emotions and human frailties that combat unleashes. "Killing" illuminates military tactics, political gamesmanship and the grotesque seductiveness of high-tech weaponry.

The book's final section, "Love," explores the ties of loyalty and affection that bind soldiers to one another far above any mere ideology.

"Everyone's against war, any sane person's against war, and yet everyone goes to see war movies," Junger said. "All my lefty friends — and in case you hadn't picked up on it I'm pretty left-wing — went to see 'Saving Private Ryan.' They're going to see 'Saving Private Ryan' because war is dramatic and compelling and important and reveals tremendous things about the human soul. And you get it on oil rigs, you get it in logging camps, you get it on fishing boats, you get it in platoons."

If all war is insane, and yet horribly compelling, in Junger's view there are good wars and bad wars. Afghanistan, which he has reported on since the 1990s, is among the former, he believes. Even before the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, drew the U.S. deeper into the country, he said, it was clear that only the international community could end Afghanistan's endless civil wars.

Junger believes that if the U.S. and its allies can ever pressure Hamid Karzai's corrupt government to reform so that the people will support it, U.S. forces can withdraw and Afghanistan can achieve peace, security and at least a form of "middle-ground" democracy between the failed state it was in the 1990s and "democracy like we see it in Iowa."

By contrast, invading Iraq was an error, he thinks, and he refused to cover it because "I don't want to risk my life covering a mistake."

There's one other dangerous assignment that Junger shuns: writing fiction. In his early 20s, inspired by the brainy tough-guy holy trinity of Raymond Carver, Richard Ford and Tobias Wolff, Junger tried his hand at a few short stories, but they rightfully ended up buried in a closet, he said.

"I mean, a bad novel is hard to write," he said. "A brilliant novel, like I don't even know how that happens. So that's why I don't do it. Writing fiction feels like it would be like going off the diving board into a swimming pool that has no water in it.

"Maybe one day I will, and the pool will be filled with water and it'll be nice, but right now it doesn't feel that way."

Sebastian Junger bids farewell to his good friend Tim Hetherington

He now belongs to the Ages..... (insert sound of a sad kindred spirit here)

Sebastian Junger Remembers Tim Hetherington

The death of an incomparable photojournalist, killed on April 20 while covering the conflict in Libya, is recounted by his collaborator, confrère, and friend.

By Sebastian Junger
April 21, 2011

Tim, man, what can I say? For the first few hours the stories were confused enough that I could imagine maybe none of them were true, but they finally settled into one brief, brutal narrative: while covering rebel forces in the city of Misrata, Libya, you got hit by a piece of shrapnel and bled to death on the way to the clinic. You couldn’t have known this, but your fellow photographer Chris Hondros would die later that evening. I’m picturing you wounded in the back of a pickup truck with your three wounded colleagues. There are young men with bandannas on their heads and guns in their hands and everyone is screaming and the driver is jamming his overloaded vehicle through the destroyed streets of that city, trying to get you all to the clinic in time.

He didn’t. I’ve never even heard of Misrata before, but for your whole life it was there on a map for you to find and ponder and finally go to. All of us in the profession—the war profession, for lack of a better name—know about that town. It’s there waiting for all of us. But you went to yours, and it claimed you. You went in by boat because the city was besieged by forces loyal to Muammar Qaddafi (another name you probably never gave much thought to during your life) and you must have known this was a bad one. Boat trips are usually such nice affairs, but not this one. How strange to be out on the water off a beautiful coastline with the salt smell and the wind in your face—except this time, you’re headed toward a place of violence and killing and destruction. You must have known that the unthinkable had to be considered. You must have known you might not ever get back on that boat alive.

You and I were always talking about risk because she was the beautiful woman we were both in love with, right? The one who made us feel the most special, the most alive? We were always trying to have one more dance with her without paying the price. All those quiet, huddled conversations we had in Afghanistan: Where to walk on the patrols, what to do if the outpost gets overrun, what kind of body armor to wear. You were so smart about it, too—so smart about it that I would actually tease you about being scared. Of course you were scared—you were terrified. We both were. We were terrified and we were in love, and in the end, you were the one she chose.

I’m in the truck with you. I’m imagining those last minutes. You’re on your back watching the tops of the buildings jolt by and the blue Mediterranean sky beyond them. I almost drowned once, and when I finally got back to the beach I was all alone and I just lay there watching the clouds go by. I’d never really thought about clouds before, but there they were, all for me, just glorious. Maybe you saw those clouds, too, but you weren’t out of it yet, and you probably knew it. I know what you were thinking: What a silly way to die. What a silly, selfish, ridiculous mistake to have made.

Don’t think that, brother. You had a very specific vision for your work and for your life, and that vision included your death. It didn’t have to, but that’s how it turned out. I’m so sorry, Tim. The conversation we could have had about this crazy stunt of yours! Christ, I would have yelled at you, but you know that. Getting mad was how we kept each other safe, how we kept the other from doing something stupid.

Your vision, though. Let’s talk about that. It’s what you wanted to communicate to the world about this story—about every story. Maybe Misrata wasn’t worth dying for—surely that thought must have crossed your mind in those last moments—but what about all the Misratas of the world? What about Liberia and Darfur and Sri Lanka and all those terrible, ugly stories that you brought such humanity to? That you helped bring the world’s attention to?

After the war in Liberia you rented a house in the capital, and lived there for years. Years. Who does that? No one I know except you, my dear friend. That’s part of Misrata, too. That’s also part of what you died for: the decision to live a life that was thrown open to all the beauty and misery and ugliness and joy in the world. Before this last trip you told me that you wanted to make a film about the relationship between young men and violence. You had this idea that young men in combat act in ways that emulate images they’ve seen—movies, photographs—of other men in other wars, other battles. You had this idea of a feedback loop between the world of images and the world of men that continually reinforced and altered itself as one war inevitably replaced another in the long tragic grind of human affairs.

That was a fine idea, Tim—one of your very best. It was an idea that our world very much needs to understand. I don’t know if it was worth dying for—what is?—but it was certainly an idea worth devoting one’s life to. Which is what you did. What a vision you had, my friend. What a goddamned terrible, beautiful vision of things.

Sebastian Junger is a contributing editor of Vanity Fair.

Sebastian Junger- Filmmaker; Author, War and The Perfect Storm (5/25/10) - Please watch this video

YOU TUBE video of a discussion with Sebastian Junger, Author of WAR, the definitive book about Afghanistan, especially the battle for the Korengal Valley - Please take the time to watch this, if not for any other reason, in tribute to the MEN who fought there.

Next time you are having a bad day, think about how tough the guys had it out there. Bet you will feel better about your day immediately.

WAR by Sebastian Junger... A vision into the HELL that was duty in Korengal Valley, Afghanistan

I've been delving into the book " WAR" by Sebastian Junger. WOW...I mean WOW...and I thought my time in country sucked.

Since the release of the book, Junger’s been getting the usual political questions from interviewers. He obliges, though reluctantly, lamenting the reductionist view of the American soldier: “To the right wing, they’re heroes and patriots and that’s it. The left wing doesn’t even know what to think of them. Their actual experience drops out.”

Junger would rather focus on the men of the 173rd Airborne Brigade’s Battle Company, a brave, rowdy and — in his hands — utterly human bunch of young soldiers who accepted him and photographer Tim Hetherington into their world. They’re tough guys who crave armed conflict and chose this life of hardship and danger. “It’s like crack,” a rifleman in Second Platoon named Kyle Steiner, who survived a bullet to the helmet, tells Junger. “You can’t get a better high.”

Many of my friends have asked me, " What is it like to be in combat?? " My experience was limited to time in Fallujah, Convoys from Fallujah to Mumidiyah, back to Baghdad, a week or so in Baghdad then return to Fallujah, and most recently, spending time in Afghanistan. I do not have the " A-All & B-All " of combat experience, but I feel I have met the criteria for being considered a " Combat Veteran"

Mr. Junger spent some serious time in Korengal Valley, with the guys who REALLY got to see Combat as they were way out there in the undisputed "Most Dangerous Place On the Earth".

Korengal Valley wins hands down.

One of the key passages in the book explains what happens to you when "the shite hits the fan", a.k.a. Combat. I found the description enlightening as I experienced it first hand and I feel he got it spot-on.

" Humans evolved in a world where nothing moved two thousand miles an hour, so there is no reason for the body to be able to counter that threat, but the brain still had to stay ahead of the game. Neurological processes in one of the most primitive parts of the brain, the amygdala, happen so fast that one could say they compete with the bullets.The amygdala can process an auditory signal in fifteen milliseconds - about the time it takes a bullet to go 30 feet. The amygdala is fast but very limited; all it can do is trigger a reflex and wait for the conscious mind to catch up. That reaction is called a startle, and it is composed of protective moves that would be a good idea in almost any situation. When something scary and unexpected happens, every person does the exactly the same thing: they blink, crouch, bend their arms, and clench their fists. The face also sets itself into what is known as a "fear grimace": the pupils dilate, the eyes widen, the brow goes up, and the mouth pulls back and down. Make that expression in front of a mirror and see not only how instantly recognizable it is, but also hot it seems to actually produce a sense of fear. It's as if the neural pathways flow in both directions, so the expression triggers fear as well as being triggered by it.

The videotape I shot during the ambush in Alibad shows every man dropping into a crouch at the distant popping sound. They don't do this in response to a loud sound - which presumably is what evolution has taught us - but in response to the quieter snap of bullets going past. The amygdala requires only a single negative experience to decide that something is a threat, and after one firefight every man in the platoon would have learned to react to the snap of the bullets and to ignore the much louder sound of men near them returning fire. In Alibad the men crouched for a second or two and then straightened up and began shouting and taking cover. In the moments their higher brain functions decided that the threat required action rather than immobility and ramped everything up: pulse and blood pressure to heart attack levels, epinephrine and norepinephrine level through the roof, blood draining out of the organs and flooding the heart, brain, and the major muscle groups.

" There's nothing like it, nothing in the world, : Steiner told me about combat. " If it's negative twenty degrees outside, you're sweating. If it's a hundred and twenty, you're cold as shit. Ice cold. It's an adrenaline rush like you can't imagine."

Yeah, it's like that. I encourage you to pick up a copy of Sebastian Junger's book, WAR. You will be able to gain a greater perspective on what these brave men did for our country while in one of the worst places in the world.

As I have said to friends, I have no worries about going to Hell, as I have already served my time there. I would say that the men who did their duty in Korengal Valley, they will be also guaranteed time in heaven far more than me. I salute them for their sense of duty, honor and raw courage.