Sebastian Junger - Episode 7

Behind The Shield

James Geering

Health & Fitness, Mental Health, Fitness

4.9 • 667 Ratings

🗓️ 28 December 2024

⏱️ 60 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Award winning author Sebastian Junger talks about human yearning to be part of a tribe. We discuss the effects of war on man and how the tribal culture is fundamental to First Responders.

Sebastian Junger is the #1 New York Times Bestselling author of THE PERFECT STORM, FIRE, A DEATH IN BELMONT, WAR and TRIBE. As an award-winning journalist, a contributing editor to Vanity Fair and a special correspondent at ABC News, he has covered major international news stories around the world, and has received both a National Magazine Award and a Peabody Award. Junger is also a documentary filmmaker whose debut film "Restrepo", a feature-length documentary (co-directed with Tim Hetherington), was nominated for an Academy Award and won the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance.

"Restrepo," which chronicled the deployment of a platoon of U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan's Korengal Valley, is widely considered to have broken new ground in war reporting. Junger has since produced and directed three additional documentaries about war and its aftermath. "Which Way Is The Front Line From Here?", which premiered on HBO, chronicles the life and career of his friend and colleague, photojournalist Tim Hetherington, who was killed while covering the civil war in Libya in 2011. "Korengal" returns to the subject of combat and tries to answer the eternal question of why young men miss war. "The Last Patrol", which also premiered on HBO, examines the complexities of returning from war by following Junger and three friends--all of whom had experienced combat, either as soldiers or reporters--as they travel up the East Coast railroad lines on foot as "high-speed vagrants."

Junger has also written for magazines including Harper's, The New York Times Magazine, National Geographic Adventure, Outside and Men's Journal. His reporting on Afghanistan in 2000, profiling Northern Alliance leader Ahmed Shah Massoud, who was assassinated just days before 9/11, became the subject of the National Geographic documentary "Into the Forbidden Zone," and introduced America to the Afghan resistance fighting the Taliban.

He lives in New York City and Cape Cod.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to episode seven of Behind the Shield. My name is James Gearing and I'm extremely excited to bring you this week's guest, Sebastian Junger.
0:10.6	Sebastian is probably best known for his book, The Perfect Storm, which was written about the fishing boat, the Andrea Gale, and was consequently made into a movie featuring George Clooney.
0:23.5	However, some of his other work, I think, is really what drew me to him as a first responder,
0:30.2	as a firefighter.
0:31.8	He's written two books, War and Tribe, that really resonated with me about the effects of trauma on a human basically
0:41.6	and then what happens after they leave their group, their tribe. And then he's also the man
0:48.5	that brought us Restrepo, the documentary about the 173rd airborne guys that were on a remote outpost in the middle of the Corengal Valley in Afghanistan.
1:01.1	And those men saw more combat than any other unit in the conflict so far.
1:07.2	And again, he sees what it's like to be a soldier in this crazy, crazy war and then the
1:12.7	effects of their time served after they leave the valley.
1:20.5	The insight that he has on humans, on us as a species, on the fact that we fundamentally are supposed to be tribal.
1:30.9	He talks about how when early settlers came to the U.S., many of them were fleeing two Native American tribes to be a part of something that they felt was more organic and almost worthy than our quote-unquote
1:47.3	civilized society that we have.
1:50.3	And his view on people banding together during tragedy like 9-11 and the London Blitz.
1:59.5	And then the effects of these men and women when they leave the
2:02.9	conflict, they leave the tribe, they leave their army units, navy units, and come back into
2:08.9	suburban America or England or whatever country they demob from. And the troubles that these
2:16.7	men and women have and how this leaving the tribe affects
2:20.1	them and now is when the PTSD and all these other um afflictions start to hit them so i really wanted
2:28.2	to get him on the show i really wanted to pick his brains about some of his philosophies and in all
2:33.1	honesty i also want to
2:34.5	urge everyone listening to this podcast to go out and buy Tribe. I am not the kind of person
	...

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