describes what he experienced in his most recent book, War. ... SEBASTIAN
JUNGER: I've been reporting on wars since Bosnia in the early 90's and it really
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Sebastian Junger Interview – May 25, 2010 This is an unedited transcript of the interview MODERATOR: I'm Peter Robinson. A contributing editor for Vanity Fair Magazine, Sebastian Junger is the best selling author of The Perfect Storm, A Death in Belmont, and Fire. Between June 2007, and June 2008, Mr. Junger embedded with the 173rd Airborne Brigade Combat Team, making five trips, five, to the Korengal, am I pronouncing that correctly? Korengal Valley of Eastern Afghanistan, a location that saw more combat than any other in the Afghan Theater. Mr. Junger describes what he experienced in his most recent book, War. By the time you decided to make five trips to Afghanistan, intentionally seeking danger, you were a successful author and a married man. What were you doing? SEBASTIAN JUNGER: I've been reporting on wars since Bosnia in the early 90's and it really is just how I see myself. The author, the author gig came a little. It worked out better than I could have anticipated, but I never changed my sense of myself as being a reporter and who goes to foreign countries and, and often reports on conflict. MODERATOR: Segment One, you divide war into three subsections, or three books. The first of which is fear. You quote Captain Dan Carney, Commander of Battle Company, this is Dan Carney in your book, “I was blown away by the insurgents ability to continue fighting despite everything America had to throw at them. It was a different enemy than I fought in Iraq, and the terrain offered some kind of advantage I've never seen, or read, or heard about in my entire life” . Young Americans', in the Korengal Valley, who was the enemy and what was distinctive about that terrain? SEBASTIAN JUNGER: It was very mountainous, the valley started around 5,000 feet and was extremely rugged. There was a lot of rocks, a lot of vegetation, a lot of places to hide. There was something called micro-terrain, the military's term for little holes and hiding places in the rocks where you can survive artillery or even 500 pound bombs dropped by planes. So they could completely hammer a Taliban position and then they would, you know, the smoke would clear and the Taliban would pop up and start shooting again. The Taliban were a mix. Starting at the bottom there were local guys who were paid Five Dollars to, you know, shoot off a magazine of AKA at the, you know, at the Americans and sort of run away. There were those guys, not particularly ideological support place and they needed some money. So going on up the chain, there were, there was a lot of timber cutting in there, and there was a kind of local timber mafia, and they would cut these huge trees on the upper ridges and export them to Pakistan illegally. Those guys had a kind of vested criminal interest in keeping government authority out of the Korengal Valley. Not ideological but they saw a sort of common, common goal with the more ideological fighters that came in from Pakistan. There were Pakistanis trained in the training camps of Pakistan, there were foreigners from Saudi Arabia, from Chechnya, those were really, really hard core guys. They really knew what they were doing and they were utterly ideological and probably not people you could really negotiate with. MODERATOR: So you have three levels of harassment from ordinary villagers, if that's the term, that live in the area, the local black market op or syndicate, and then the, then, then people who, who were really part of the international war on terror? Okay. Fear, your, your topic here in this first book, “Combat jammed so much adrenalin through your system that fear was rarely an issue. Far Page 1
Sebastian Junger Interview – May 25, 2010 This is an unedited transcript of the interview more indicative of real courage was how you felt before the big operations. My personal weakness wasn't so much fear, as the anticipation of it.” Explain that. SEBASTIAN JUNGER: One guy said to me, you know, the scariest stuff that happened up there, were the things that didn't happen. The attacks we were expecting that didn't happen. Once an attack started, fear really was not a problem. I mean, you were kind of functional but your mind went kind of blank, at least mine did. The guys were very well trained, they jumped on their weapons and they did what they were trained to do, and fear really was not an issue. But the dread MODERATOR: They jumped on their weapons, you picked up a pen? What, you, you were one of these guys, that the book made clear, you lived as they lived, with them, with the one unvarying distinction that you never picked up a weapon. SEBASTIAN JUNGER: I had a video camera. I was shooting a documentary in addition to writing this book and in combat, and outside of combat, my job was to shoot video. And the one time that I got caught in a, we got hit pretty hard at this outpost, and I didn't have my camera, I couldn't get to it, there was too much gunfire between me and it, and that was the one time that I really sort of panicked in combat. Otherwise, I had a job to do and that job kept me from experiencing fear. The dread before hand, before an expected attack, or before an American operation into a dangerous area, that dread was really sometimes kind of unbearable. But it's a different experience from straight fear. I was blown up by an iAd, I was in a Humvee that got blown up and we were stuck in there for a few minutes taking fire, the Humvee was on fire. I was completely, I had nev, zero fear, I don't think my heart rate even went up. All the fear of that situation happened later in the evening. MODERATOR: Again, another quotation here. “The more literal forms of strengths, like carrying 160 pounds up a mountain, depend on the size of your muscles, but muscles only do what you tell them, so it still keeps coming back to the human spirit”. Is that a clue to your motivation into the theme of this book that you're drawn to reporting on combat, because the human spirit is most, our most vivid display when the human body is in constant danger, is that what's going on here? SEBASTIAN JUNGER: That might be kind of a fancy way to put it. I mean in combat, you see, I think you see, the essence of who we are as human beings, the good and the bad, it's all on, on very sort of vivid display. There was a guy in the platoon who, we were on a very long patrol, a 24 hour movement, everyone was exhausted and one guy started falling out, which was soldiers call, sort of like failing physically, and we were in a really bad place. MODERATOR: Falling out, what, what, he starts to stumble or? SEBASTIAN JUNGER: Slow down, slow everyone down and this one guy in the platoon, the guy was pretty close to said, you can't be tired, you don't have the right to be tired. And I say in my book, you know, combat is the only situation where you don't have the right to experience something as human as exhaustion. And the reason is, that you're, what happens to you, happens to everyone. If you slow down, everyone has to slow down. If you don't drink enough water on patrol and you dehydrate, you become a heat casualty, everyone that is stuck with you so it makes the Page 2
Sebastian Junger Interview – May 25, 2010 This is an unedited transcript of the interview individual completely accountable to the group. It's not a matter of discipline from above, it's lateral discipline from your brothers, your brothers in the platoon, and it's one of the things, being part of a platoon like that and, and accountable to everyone who with a very clear sense of your job out there, is one of the things that men really miss about combat when they come home. It's not so much the adrenalin, it's having that very secure place in the unit, where what's expected of you is very, very clear. MODERATOR: Segment Two. The second sub-book in War. Killing. Like the rest of the book, you're mostly concerning yourself here with narrative, with description, with reporting on what you see, but you offer a couple different ways of understanding the essential activity of combat, killing. Here's one, “War is a lot of things and it's useless to pretend that exciting isn't one of them. It's insanely exciting. War is supposed to feel bad, cause undeniably bad things happen in it but for a 19-year-old at the working end of a 50 cal. during a firefight, war is life, multiplied by some number that no one has ever heard of”. So, forget rationalizations about why war may be just in certain circumstances, young men kill other men because it makes them feel so alive. Is that part of what's going on? SEBASTIAN JUNGER: No, I think you're reversing the cause and effect a little bit. They're put in these situations for political reason. I mean they join up maybe because of 911, or their father was in the military. War is triggered by political problems. One way or another, the guys find themselves out there and what happens to them is that the rational for the war itself, disappears in combat. And what remains, is the bond between the men. And that bond is intoxicating. To be in a small unit, where your job is very clear, and you're functioning the way you were trained to do, protecting your brothers in that platoon and they are protecting you, is a situation you cannot recreate in society. It's a very fulfilling one and it's confusing to these guys because they come back, they come home and they miss something that is absolutely terrible. It's like missing a really, really bad marriage, and it confuses them and they don't know what to do with the contradiction. MODERATOR: Here's one sentence I'm going to quote. “The guy who blows us up is 100 feet away behind a rock”. Describe that incident. SEBASTIAN JUNGER: It was in the winter, the weather was really bad and I couldn't get on a resupply helicopter, there were no flights, so I was on a supply convoy to get into the Korengal Valley. I was in the second Humvee and we were blown up by a roadside bomb, detonated by a guy 100 feet away, behind a rock, with a hard wire to the explosive and it went off under the engine block instead of under us and that spared us injury or worse. And I just, you know later, afterwards, you know, we survived it, there was combat after that, the Humvee caught fire, we got out of it okay and we, and the soldiers found the wire that he had used to blow us up. Then they found the campfire that had kept him warm all night while he was waiting for the convoy to come into the valley. It was very cold. And then they found the battery he used to trigger the, to trigger the charge. There were all these kind of....we could see his footprints, there were all these kind of human evidence of like a human being just 100 feet away who had tried to kill or maim all of us, and I was just struck by the, I don't know, the kind of humanity of the situation and the incredible brutality of it. Like these were, I didn't know him, he didn't know us, and he was trying to do the worse thing possible to us. And Page 3
Sebastian Junger Interview – May 25, 2010 This is an unedited transcript of the interview that, and we were trying to do the same thing to him, the soldiers were, and that is one of the tragedies and ironies of war. MODERATOR: You write “Killing begins to make a kind of sense to me. A man behind a rock, touched two wires to a battery and tried to kill me, tried to kill us. There are ways to understand what he did, but none of them under-rides the raw fact that this man wanted to negate everything I'd ever done in my life or might ever do”. What's so striking there to me in that passage is that killing begins to make a kind of sense. An emotion sense, you understand why the soldiers feel they have no choice but to shoot, to kill when they can, when they're forced to. What, what do you mean when you say it begins to make sense to you there? SEBASTIAN JUNGER: People see killing as a moral choice, and in a situation where your life is in danger, it ceases being a moral choice, and becomes a very practical one. MODERATOR: Got it. Final passage from second sub-book or book of war, “Once in a while you would forget to think of the enemy as the enemy, and you would see them for what they were, teenagers upon a hill who got tired and cold just like the Americans. Once you thought about them in those terms, it was hard not to wonder whether the men themselves, not the commanders but the actual guys behind the guns, couldn't somehow sit down together and work this out.” And what's striking in that passage to me is, once in a while. Why is it, why isn't this thought haunting the entire experience? SEBASTIAN JUNGER: You needed a certain amount of quiet time to get in touch with who the enemy was. When they were shooting at you, it didn't really matter who they were, someone was trying to kill you. I had bullets hit, you know, inches from my head, I got blown up, everyone in the platoon was almost killed, and you really needed a week or two without a firefight to start to think, well there's guys on the next hilltop over who are sort of watching the clouds drift by all day wondering when we're going to attack them and we're wondering the same thing. And in the end, it's just guys like us over there, and, and, but it took a certain amount of peace and quiet to come to that thought. And it didn't go very far from there. MODERATOR: Segment three, the third book within War is entitled simply Love. Quote “The army has a certain interest and understanding what was going through Junta, am I pronouncing that correct? SEBASTIAN JUNGER: Junta, yeah, Junta. MODERATOR: What was going through Junta's mind because whatever was going through his mind helped save the entire unit from getting killed. Tell that story then explain why the army needed to be interested in what was going through his mind. SEBASTIAN JUNGER: First platoon walked into an O-shaped ambush at night on _____(00:13:39) at _____(00:13:41) and they were facing massive firepower, the whole first squad was taken out in the first burst and, and they really, in some ways, the all should have died except Page 4
Sebastian Junger Interview – May 25, 2010 This is an unedited transcript of the interview that they're so well trained. The, the, the only safety in a firefight is shooting more bullets than the other side is and forcing them to get their heads down and then once your head's down, you can't shoot back. And so it's kind of a contest of firepower in those first moments and what you have to do, as a soldier, is ignore the fact you could get killed and concentrate on doing your job with whatever weapon you have and that was what Junta and everyone, everyone in that platoon did when they got ambushed. And as a result, they lost two guys and several were wounded but it could have been an absolute catastrophe and it wasn't, and that was because of the incredible training that these guys have gone through. MODERATOR: “When I asked about their allegiance to one another, they said they would unhesitatingly risk their lives for anyone in the platoon or company, but that the sentiment dropped off pretty quickly after that”. Again, explain that. SEBASTIAN JUNGER: There's a limit to how many people you can affiliate with. Within the core group in the plat, in the squad and the platoon, I really think, and this happens regularly in war, there are guys who would have, would have thrown themselves on a hand grenade to save the other guys in their squad. You can't have that kind of feeling, that kind of commitment, that kind of love basically, for an infinite number of people. The limits seem to be basically the platoon, extending a little bit MODERATOR: Which is how many people? SEBASTIAN JUNGER: About 35 guys. MODERATOR: The squad is the smallest unit? SEBASTIAN JUNGER: A squad is nine guys. MODERATOR: Alright, squad, platoon, company is 100 about 150 guys. SEBASTIAN JUNGER: After the company level, it's pretty abstract. So there was an observation blimp that was owned by the 173rd by the brigade that was in Saudabad, you know, 20 miles away, you know, that was doing something good, it was watching for any enemy movement. It crashed during a thunderstorm. It was a brigade asset, it crashed during a thunderstorm and when the guys in the platoon heard that, they all broke out in a cheer. MODERATOR: I can see indifference but why were they cheering? SEBASTIAN JUNGER: I don't know, I don't think they knew. It was like someone elses problem. MODERATOR: Okay, the Dunbar number. Tell us who Dunbar is, was, and what the Dunbar number is. SEBASTIAN JUNGER: Dunbar study, who is a researcher who studied the frequency of which Page 5
Sebastian Junger Interview – May 25, 2010 This is an unedited transcript of the interview certain numbers of people occur in human society. How they gather in groups, corporate groups, there are, people gather in groups of a certain size and those sizes are not random. They, they, if you plot them, they occur in certain clumps. And one of the really good numbers was 30 to 50 people. And that was from studying hunter gathered groups, in our evolutionary past and also in tribes that are still existing. That's essentially the size of a platoon. The next, the next jump up in group size that's very common in the world is 150 people. That's a company. And you can sort of look at the way the military, not just the U.S. but any military's are divided into units and you can see essentially, our evolutionary origins in the sizes of groups that naturally cluster in different societies around the world. MODERATOR: So there's a sense you can see in, particularly in the last third of the book titled Love. You're groping for, you're trying to understand how these men love each other enough to fight for each other, and one explanation is that in some way they're genetically programmed to. SEBASTIAN JUNGER: One of the guys said look, there are guys in the platoon who straight up hate each other, but we'd all die for each other. In winning terms, that doesn't make much sense. Why would you die for a guy, I mean dying for your children or your spouse, but for a guy you're not related to, another peer, who will go on to have children, and pass on his DNA and you're gonna die and you won't? It makes no sense. But what researchers have figured out, is that in our revolutionary past, those groups of 30 to 50 people, you are related to most of the people in that group so even if you didn't have your own children, you, in a conflict, you were dying to protect your nephews, your cousins, your sisters kids, and then it actually made sort of Darwinian sense to risk your life, sacrifice your life in protection of the group. So the guys in the platoon, in a kind of genetic here.., in a sense of genetic heritage, they don't know they're not related to everyone else, they're functioning as if they were in a way that really captures much of our alutionary past. Let me try two brief quotations from War which seem to me to get it slightly different things. Here's quotation number one “Over and over again and throughout history, men have chosen to die in battle with their friends, rather than flee on their own and survive”. Number one. Number two “The defense of the tribe is an insanely compelling idea.” Those are both getting at Love at the attachment to the platoon or squad. But they're doing it in different ways and that first quotation, you've got “men have chosen to die” there's a kind of free will that seems to me that your, you impugn a guy, you wouldn't use this term, but there's kind of nobility, there's something very attractive to this about this to you. And in the second quotation, it's insane. It's genetic programing. It's just a kind of primeval instinct.
MODERATOR: So, which is it? SEBASTIAN JUNGER: I think, I think it's both of them and I think much of our behavior is derived from our genetic past and that it's further molded by cultural influences. In a firefight, you can hide behind a rock or you can stand up and return fire and help protect everyone else. If you hide behind a rock, you're probably safer, in that firefight. It won't do much for your standing in the platoon, but in that moment, you're probably safer. But, over and over again, and I have video of this, guys will stand up and risk getting hit in order to do their job up in the platoon and keep Page 6
Sebastian Junger Interview – May 25, 2010 This is an unedited transcript of the interview everyone safer and in that sense, they're choosing to participate in a potentially suicidal act in order to safeguard everyone else. And that is a very profound choice that a person makes for the welfare of another person. Putting someone elses welfare above your own, it's at the heart of combat but ironically it's also at the heart of much of religious thought. They're real parallels between the two. MODERATOR: Segment four, The Journalist goes to War. You write in War, “Pure objectivity. Difficult enough to achieve while covering a city counsel meeting, isn't remotely possible in war. Objectivity and honesty are not the same though, and it is very possible to write with honesty about the very personal and distorting experiences of war”. Okay, so objectivity is impossible in war. Somehow I don't, you can't mean to suggest that John Burns, the great foreign correspondent for the New York Times was sending home biased dispatches from Iraq, do you? Or do you? SEBASTIAN JUNGER: Well let's move it back a generation, I don't think the American Press Corp in World War II was object, was evaluating the Nazi point of view objectively. And I don't think they should have been. I think it is possible to be objective about political considerations. When it comes to killing, the killing of people, I think it's very hard to be objective, and if you are with Iraqi civilians and you're watching civilians get killed by American firepower, I think it's very, very hard to be objective about American foreign policy. Likewise, if you're with American soldiers and watching them get killed, and nearly getting killed yourself, by the Taliban, you're not going to be objective about the Taliban. The bond that you create with the men you're with is really the least of your problems when it come to objectivity. MODERATOR: So, are you, if you say objectivity is not possible in war, you're saying that objectivity does not, in some way, exist in this book, at least in a kind of try to formuletic way. So what should readers, what's the bias here? SEBASTIAN JUNGER: Well, what, one of the things that really interested me was my own emotional reactions, because I felt that, I felt that they mirrored the real, the emotional reality of the soldiers. I mean I'm a civilian, I didn't carry a gun but there, my reactions were not completely different so as I became included in this platoon, became friends with these guys, became concerned about them, and they became concerned about me, my level of fear in combat melted, it went away. And I had an insight into how they psychologically dealt with combat. So what I became interested in, I didn't want to deny my emotional connection with these guys, it actually became a topic of great interest because I started to understand, in that connection, their way, a secret to how people deal with psychologically unmanageable situations. They deal with them and they actually find some good in them. MODERATOR: Again, quoting from War. “We reporters had our own issues. Vietnam was our paradine, our template for how not to get hoodwinked by the U.S. Military and it exerted such a powerful influence, that anything short of implicable cynicism sometimes felt like sellout. I'd never been censored at all, and once I'd asked a public affairs officer to help me to fact check an article and he'd answered, sure but you can't actually show it to me, that would be illegal.” So you just said that World War II, the American Press was not objective in covering the Nazi's and it seems as though you're saying that in Vietnam, they weren't objective in covering Americans, the bias Page 7
Sebastian Junger Interview – May 25, 2010 This is an unedited transcript of the interview worked the other say. Did you have the sense that in Afghanistan, the press was in someway guiltier for fighting the last war than the generals? SEBASTIAN JUNGER: Yeah, I think they were. Not everybody, and not everybody, not anybody all the time, but I think that there was a, I think there was a bit of feeling of that and I assessed it myself, I mean the public affairs guy would, public affairs officer, would tell me something and I would watch my brain go, yeah, right, and there was some manipulation of the facts of the public affairs as there is, you know, with any corporate, corporate endeavor that's trying to put a good face on things. But for the most part, they were pretty straight with me. And it was my cynicism that I actually had to kind of, it's tricky, you don't want to be crippled by your own cynicism but you also don't want to be taken advantage of. So the press is in a difficult, it's a difficult balancing act and the military itself , I think, was also had their own sort of like assumptions that the press was out to just put a knife in their back. Neither was entirely true but I think those were a old hangover from Vietnam and I'm hoping that with the embed system, that will get worked out, worked out. MODERATOR: “Vietnam was fought by draftees while the rest of the nation was dropping acid. Afghanistan on the other hand, was being fought by volunteers who more or less respected their commanders and hand the gratitude of the vast majority of American's back home”. You've said already, and you make the point a number of times in the book, that under combat you don't think about politics, but how important was it to those young men with whom you were embedded? SEBASTIAN JUNGER: I think that, that they did have, that at some level, they did respect the reason, the political reasons they were there. You know, they're 19 or 20 years old, their not thinking much about the political reasons that they're there, they, they might have joined the military because of 911, that was the closest they got to a political, to political thinking about the war that I saw. The opinion of the public wasn't very relevant to them out there, it became very relevant when they went home. That was when it became important. Out there, it wasn't, I mean they would get care packages from anonymous people and they registered the fact that that was a very generous thing for people to do and they had some support back home, but it really became important when they came back or they're on leave and walking through the airport and people were coming up to them saying Thank You for your service or one guy went home on leave and even someone in first class, and he was filthy, he had come off a combat operation, and was still covered in dirt, on a flight from Houston to Portland, I think and a guy in first class said, give me your ticket, I'm going to sit where you're sitting, you sit in my seat. MODERATOR: Was it important to them that it was a volunteer army? SEBASTIAN JUNGER: The soldiers, MODERATOR: Nobody had been drafted to go to that valley. SEBASTIAN JUNGER: No one had been drafted, everyone in that unit that I was with, chose to join the Army. If you want to change oil in Humvees in a rear base and draw a paycheck, you can do that. These guys in the Army, they chose to be in a combat unit. They had to work very hard to get Page 8
Sebastian Junger Interview – May 25, 2010 This is an unedited transcript of the interview in that unit, and they were very, very proud of it. None of them talked about how, Oh, it's too bad there's not a draft, we'd have more guys out here, none of them talked like that. MODERATOR: None of that? SEBASTIAN JUNGER: No, zero. MODERATOR: And last question, you said that they more or less respected their commanders. You talked to folks at a very senior level, did you end up respecting the commanders? SEBASTIAN JUNGER: Oh tremendously. MODERATOR: You did? SEBASTIAN JUNGER: I, yeah, I was in a very bad place, you know, I've learned about the U.S. Military. They are smart enough that they don't put bad units, bad officers in bad places cause they'll get chewed up. They put the best people in there so because I was in the Korengal I think that the officers that I met were just like, oh my God were they smart. Really incredible guys. MODERATOR: Okay. Segment five, our last segment. Was Afghanistan, Is Afghanistan worth it?Fighting in the Korengal Valley cost the lives of 42 Americans, 100's more wounded, and yet last month, it was announced that. We're taping this in May, last month it was announced that American's had withdrawn from the Valley. Here you tell a story gripping, moving about the fight for the Korengal Valley and we just surrendered it. How does that, does that revise your opinions of what took place? And how do you respond to that? SEBASTIAN JUNGER: Every war I think has it's Hamburger Hell. At Dunkirk, we lost 30,000 men at Dunkirk. It's hard to reconcile that we still won the war. Every war has it's, we were struck at the outpost that I spent off and on a year at. I mean war, eventually overrun, MODERATOR: We know it was overrun before you got there. SEBASTIAN JUNGER: Well it was given up, given up. They pulled out on the Valley. War is incredibly complicated and it's changing everyday and the strategy changes because the enemies strategy changes. Before the American's pulled out of the Korengal, the Taliban they didn't cease operations but they were drastically reduced, the amount of fighting in the Korengal dropped tremendously in the previous year and both sides moved on, and that happens I think, in every war. I think emotionally it's very hard for the soldiers but in terms of strategy, you know, the commanders I think, are saying, look, we don't have enough men, we don't have enough resources and the 150 men who are in the Korengal are better used elsewhere. MODERATOR: You write of a Lieutenant Colonel Bill Ausland, if I'm pronouncing that correctly, quote “He had such full on enthusiasm for what he was doing, that when I was around him, I sometimes caught myself feeling bad that there wasn't an endeavor of equivalent magnitude in my Page 9
Sebastian Junger Interview – May 25, 2010 This is an unedited transcript of the interview own life. It wasn't the war per se that he was so fired up about as much as the whole idea that America was actually over there, trying to put Afghanistan back together. Were you responding to his enthusiasm because it was so catching or were you really responding to the idea that he had of putting Afghanistan back together? In other words, were you at some level, on board with the program? SEBASTIAN JUNGER: I think both. I mean I've been going to Afghanistan since 1996. It's a country I really care about tremendously. I was there in the 90's, it was a blood bath and if NATO pulls out, it's going to go back to that, and that's a very, very painful thought for me to contemplate. MODERATOR: Blood bath meaning, whose killing whom if we pull out. SEBASTIAN JUNGER: There was a civil war in Afghanistan in the 90's that was stopped the toppling of the Taliban after 911. So the level of suffering by the civilian population of Afghanistan now is greatly reduced compared to what it's been for the past 20 years in that country. I don't think the Afghans are particularly fond of the American's, who wants to have foreign troops wandering around their country but I think most of them are pretty terrified of their prospects if the world pulls out and so out of concern for Afghanistan, I'm kind of on board in that sense because the stakes are very high for the Afghan people that this work, and just in terms of knowing Bill Ausland, Colonel Bill Ausland, he just had some in, such incredible enthusiasm it was hard not to be awed by it and sort of infected by it. MODERATOR: Sebastian, 2 ½ or 3 weeks ago, a man sitting in that chair was _____(00:30:54) a release expert at John Hopkins University. Supporter of the Iraq war, in fact, received a medal from President George W. Bush, not a supporter of the Afghan war, to my surprise frankly, I hadn't realized his feelings on that. Point number one that he made is there is no Afghanistan to put back together. The idea that it was ever a normal country is false. Different regions, different tribes, you've got overlays of tribal conflict with this kind of black market that you were talking about earlier with different effectively war chieftains. How do you respond to that? How do you respond to the notion that Colonel, Lieutenant Colonel Ausland was that there is just no country to put back together. SEBASTIAN JUNGER: That's wrong, that's totally wrong. Kabul was the location of the best medical school in all of Asia, in the 70's, before the Soviets came in and destroyed that country and triggered a civil war that essentially now is still going on. The hippy trail went through Afghanistan I mean, it was a place that many, many western visitors went. The museums, there's ancient monuments that tourists would go to, I mean it wasn't unified in a sense that the United States is unified but that doesn't mean it was in conflict. It was stable for decades. It was stable and functioned. I mean, it's a funky place and that's one of the things that makes it interesting. MODERATOR: You got funky, hold on, you've got unpack funky for me. What do you mean by funky? SEBASTIAN JUNGER: You know, there's tribes and there's nomads and there's all kinds of scenes Page 10
Sebastian Junger Interview – May 25, 2010 This is an unedited transcript of the interview that look like they're right out of the bible. If you grew up in Wisconsin, you're gonna see, and you go over there, you're gonna see things you didn't think you'd ever see. But it was a functioning country and people, it was peaceful, it was peaceful enough that people went there in the 60's and 70's regularly, I mean it was a real tourist destination, and for the adventurous traveler when people went there. And the soviet invasion ruined that and the country's still trying to put itself back together, so in my opinion, he's completely wrong and it can be done. MODERATOR: It can? Okay let me give you one more quotation. This is a direct quotation from _____(00:33:02) “Karzai, the president of Afghanistan is a bandit and the Afghan campaign can't be one. There's nothing to be gained for the United States in Afghanistan. It just doesn't end well” SEBASTIAN JUNGER: I mean he can't see the future anymore than I can or you can. I'm sure there are people. MODERATOR: What kind of ending can you see tho. You must pause at some happy ending or you, you wouldn't be arguing as you are. SEBASTIAN JUNGER: The western world figured out how to drive the German Army out of Europe. They did “D” Day. They swept, they pushed through France, they pushed the Germans back into Germany. If they can do that, there's something like 10,000 or 20,000 Taliban fighters, essentially barefoot in the mountains with AK's. They can probably figure out how to win that fight. I think the problem isn't the military one in Afghanistan, I think it's a political problem in the countries of Europe and United States, and if they really want to do it like they did in World War II, they can probably figure it out. MODERATOR: And how do you, how does one, I'll let you be the Journalist that's just watching it from the outside, how does one put together the political will to do it? SEBASTIAN JUNGER: I mean I'm not in a position to make recommendations on U.S. Foreign Policy but every country in Europe has been attacked or has had a near miss from Al Queda. Madrid, London, Holland, Italy, France, all of them were the subjects of plots or actually had attacks. I think what drove the United States into Afghanistan was 3,000 dead in New York City on 911. I think if those 3,000 dead had happened in Paris, France would be in Afghanistan. I think the world needs to understand that the chaos and violence of Afghanistan can reach out to touch them in the future. In a year or in ten years, if that country isn't stabilized. It was a rogue state, it was a perfect refuge for an organization like Al Queda, there were no extradition treaties, they could hide there, there was a lot of income from poppy, it was a perfect training ground for their fighters and if we go back to the 90's, we may risk going back to 911. MODERATOR: Last question. In this book, you're going back, I'm just giving you my feeling as a reader here, you're going back and forth, trying out different theories for explaining the way the men behave as they do. You use the word courage and then three pages later, you're talking about ways in which they might be genetically programmed. Your objective making clear, sure the reader understands that you didn't that you had a video camera, not a weapon, you were not actually part of Page 11
Sebastian Junger Interview – May 25, 2010 This is an unedited transcript of the interview the unit, and then a moment or two later, it's clear that your feeling like one of the men. So, let me ask you this, as a kind of summary statement, I'm quoting from the book. “Heroism is hard to understand, hard to study in soldiers because they invariably claim that they acted like any good soldier would have. Amount other things, heroism is in the Gretchen of itself. You're prepared to lose your own life for the sake of the others.” So even though this story takes place in a valley that a month ago, the United States gave up on, and even though you're a journalist, you want to call the men you covered heroes? SEBASTIAN JUNGER: I, heroes is such a loaded term. The way it's used commonly is really anyone who served. The soldiers themselves draw greater distinction. Serving on a rear base is very different from serving on a front line and the soldiers are very aware of those differences. The guys themselves, they wouldn't call themselves heroes, and I don't think I would want to describe them in ways that they don't understand themselves to be. They were very, very brave and probably their sorta most noble act I think was joining in the first place and deciding, look I didn't serve my country, I lived my life for myself my entire life. And these guys decided to volunteer to risk their lives and serve their country and whether you're for or against the war, that's a noble thing and I think the real inspiration in this lies in seeing and understanding the profundity of that choice. What happened in the Korengal Valley they did for themselves, they don't call it courage, I think that is something that should be respected, the way they describe their own actions but to join and serve a greater cause, that's a profound thing and it really, it, it's something that has affected me a lot to be around. MODERATOR: Sebastian Junger, the author of War, Thank you very much. Thank you. I'm Peter Robinson for Uncommon Knowledge of the Hoover Institution. Thanks for joining us.
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