A Bit of Optimism - Be Necessary with war journalist Sebastian Junger

Episode Date: May 21, 2024

War reporters risk their lives to document conflict. And yet, after a career living on battlefields, Sebastian Junger's closest brush with death was surviving an aneurysm.Sebastian's story of his sudden internal hemorrhage and making sense of what he saw while dying is the subject of his new book In My Time of Dying. As someone who usually writes as an outside observer, it's an atypical and personal exploration of death.I was privileged to speak with Sebastian about the fragility of life and why being necessary to others is one of our highest needs of all. This...is A Bit of Optimism.To learn more about Sebastian and his work, check out:sebastianjunger.comhis book, In My Time of Dying 

Sebastian Junger is the author of The Perfect Storm. He's written numerous books on war, and he's a documentary filmmaker responsible for the award-winning movie Restrepo. And though Sebastian has made a career of risking his life, the closest brush with death he's ever had was surviving an aneurysm. It's a story he tells in his new book, In My Time of Dying, and a topic we get into in this conversation. I feel privileged to have chatted with Sebastian about the fragility of life and how the imminence

of death clarifies our priorities, that being necessary to others is actually one of the highest needs for all of us. This is a bit of optimism. Sebastian, such a pleasure to meet you. Oh, likewise. Thanks for having me on. I've been an admirer of you and your work for many, many years, and we've never met before. Yeah. Thank you. I really appreciate that. You recently survived an aneurysm, and the feeling you had and the fears you had and the sense of survival you had was more profound from that than all the other experiences you've had where your life was at risk. Yeah. I mean, specifically, I had an undiagnosed aneurysm in my abdomen, my pancreatic artery. And so an aneurysm, for your listeners who may not know,

is that it's a ballooning of the blood vessel, right? It's not high cholesterol. It's not a lifestyle issue. It's a structural abnormality. It's very rare, the kind that I had. And it's asymptomatic, and it's hard to diagnose until it ruptures. And when it ruptures, you basically bleed out as if you've been stabbed in the stomach, except you're bleeding out internally into your own abdomen. Once the blood's out of your arteries and into your abdominal cavity, it's of no use whatsoever, and you could die of blood loss and not have a single drop of blood on the floor, right? If you've been stabbed, the advantage to being stabbed or shot or whatever is that the doctors, when they finally get you at the hospital, they know where to sort of put their finger, right? They know how to plug the leak because the wound shows them where the leak is.

With internal hemorrhage, they have no idea. Your abdomen's a big bowl of spaghetti, right? They know how to plug the leak because the wound shows them where the leak is. With internal hemorrhage, they have no idea. Your abdomen is a big bowl of spaghetti, right? Trying to find a bleed in your abdomen is extremely hard. So what happens, I felt this sort of sudden pain in my abdomen and the aneurysm, I didn't know I had, it had ruptured. In mid-sentence, talking with my wife, oh my God, what is that? Immediately, I was losing a pint of blood every 10 or 15 minutes. Now, there's about 10 pints of blood in the human body. And I lived one hour away from the hospital. You could do the math, right? I was a human hourglass. And by the time I got to the hospital, I was minutes from dead. I was conscious. I was going into end-stage hemorrhagic shock. I was convulsing, very confused. And the doctors stuck a large gauge needle straight into my neck,

into my jugular to transfuse me. My blood pressure was 60 over 40, which is like, you're running on fumes at that point. And as they were working on me, this black pit opened up underneath me. And let me just say right now that I'm an atheist. I've been an atheist my entire life. I'm still an atheist. My father is an atheist and a physicist. And there's nothing mystical in me. I, woo woo just gives me the creeps. Like, I mean, I just have no tendency in that direction. Right. A black pit opened up underneath me and I started to get pulled into it and I started to panic. I had no idea I was dying.

Absolutely none. But I was getting pulled into this black pit and I started to panic. And as I panicked, my dead father appeared above me in this strange sort of energy form. And basically he was like, it's okay. You don't have to fight it. You can come with me. I'll take care of you. And I was horrified.

I was like, you're dead. I'm alive. I'm not going anywhere with you. The suggestion was grotesque to me. And I said to the doctor, you got to hurry. You're losing me right now. I'm going. And it took them about six hours, but they finally managed to embolize that they got a catheter from my groin into the ruptured artery and they blocked they embolized it with a coil and stopped the bleeding. And they managed to save my life. And I woke up in the ICU the next morning. I had no idea that I'd almost died. And I woke up very confused.

And the nurse said to me, well, congratulations, Mr. Younger, you almost died. We almost lost you last night. In fact, no one can believe you're alive. And I was shocked. I had no idea that I'd almost died. I mean, I was completely horrified and shocked. And then suddenly I remembered my father, that I'd seen my dead father. And I remembered the pit. And the nurse came back, you know, an hour later and said, how are you doing? And I said, you know, not that well, frankly, because what you told me is terrifying. And I can't stop thinking about it. And she said, try this. Instead of thinking about it like something scary, try thinking about it like something sacred. And then she walked out. And I've been trying to do that ever since. I was allowed to go to the precipice. I was allowed to look over the edge.

And I was allowed to come back. I've been going to front lines my whole life, coming back with information that I thought could be of use to people, of service to people. I went to the ultimate, the final front line, and I was allowed to come back. What did I learn? What did I have for other people that might help them with their fears, help them live dignified, courageous lives? And so that, my book, In My Time of Dying, about this process, was an attempt to answer, to do what she told me to do, to think about it as something

sacred and also to explain in rational terms what the hell I saw as I was dying. But one of the interesting things about it was that in the weeks and months following, I had classic post-trauma disorder. I had a massive anxiety problem and real depression. And it was way worse than, you know, the pretty significant trauma that I had from the combat that I experienced. It was way worse than that. It took me really a couple of years to recover from it so that it was sort of firmly in my rear view mirror and not affecting me on a daily basis. What did you learn about yourself from your aneurysm that you never learned about yourself all those years in combat? Well, I learned that all of us, when we wake up in the morning, every single one of us could be dead by dinnertime. I've fostered the virtues of strength and toughness and courage in my life,

not with enormous success, but I've at least tried to foster those values. And what I realized is that the truth is I'm incredibly fragile and that we're all incredibly fragile. And in that fragility is actually our salvation. When you realize how fragile you are, you realize how precious life is. when you realize how fragile you are, you realize how precious life is. If you don't understand how fragile you are, you're missing out on a sort of great opportunity to be kind to yourself, to forgive yourself, to just give yourself a freaking break, you know, to like stop and appreciate the moment. And I found this incredible story. So the great Russian writer Dostoevsky, I found this incredible story.

So the great Russian writer Dostoevsky, when he was in his 20s, before he was a well-known writer, he was a bit of a political agitator. And he was, you know, this is in the 1840s, and he was sort of speaking out against serfdom. He was sort of articulating, you know, the idea that the serfs should be freed. And so he and his buddies would get together and sort of, you know, talk about liberating the serfs. Well, the czar wasn't that keen on such talk. So the czar's police rounded Dostoevsky up and his buddies up and sent them to prison for eight months. And, you know, no one took it particularly seriously, right? I mean, they were just, it was like a chat group that they had when they talked about these ideas. And, you know, one morning,

the warden showed up and loaded everybody, him and his like six buddies, into a carriage, and they just assumed they were going to be released after doing their penance of eight months in whatever prison it was. Instead, they were driven to a town square, a city square, and tied to posts. And a firing squad was lined up in front of them, and they charged their weapons and leveled their weapons. And Dostoevsky realized in two minutes, they went from young men who were being released from prison to, oh my God, we're all about to die. So we know what people think in those moments, because he survived that. at the last moment. I mean, literally after they'd copped their guns, a rider cantered into the square and said that the czar had, and this was all theater, of course, right? But a rider cantered into the square and said that the czar

had forgiven them. But what Dostoevsky said was that as he stood there waiting for the end, he saw sunlight glinting off the roof and he realized, my God, in a few moments, I'm going to be part of the sunshine. I'm going to be part of all things. I'm going to join the world. And if I should somehow survive this, I will turn every moment into an infinity. I will treat every moment like the miracle that it actually is. And through incredible luck, he was actually able to do that. But you don't need to face the czar's firing squad to understand that life is precious. Every moment's precious because none of us know,

as I said, if we're going to be alive by the end of the day. The day I almost died was an utterly ordinary day. I was an extremely fit and healthy 58-year-old man. I had no reason to think that I was at any risk of dying, and I wasn't driving anywhere. And yet, it almost happened. And that's true for everybody. And if you could live with the kind of presence, the veneration for existence that Dostoevsky achieved in those moments, you really will be truly living a rich life. And it takes focus and concentration. It doesn't happen by accident. You have to choose to do it. You seem to like putting yourself into dangerous situations. Where did that come from as a war journalist? How did you find yourself

writing about difficult situations and putting yourself in them? Well, just to start with the disclaimer, there are thousands of journalists who are really in the trenches month in, month out, year in, year out, much more than I've ever been. So in my population, I'm at the very low end of risk-taking journalists, but I'm also kind of high profile as an author. So I get a lot of sort of attention. I grew up in a pretty affluent suburb of Boston. And, you know, understand that humans are wired to deal with a lot of adversity and a lot of danger. And young males, particularly in every society in the world, are sort of trained to deal with some of the riskier things that society needs done, including in our society.

Firemen, it's almost all men. Drilling for oil, almost all men. The mortality rate and the accident rate in the workplace is virtually all males. I had this sense as a young man that I just had never been tested. Like I just didn't even, I didn't know if I was brave or not, if I would act on behalf of others, if it was incurring any risk to me. I didn't know any of these essential things that most young men throughout thousands, hundreds of thousands of years have had to deal with and have wanted to deal with. And the first risks that I started taking, other than a bit of traveling that got a little dodgy sometimes, was I was a climber for tree companies.

And so I'd be working 70, 80, 100 feet in the air on a line with a chainsaw taking trees down in sections. And it was just inherently risky work. And after getting hurt doing that, I thought, I got to get out of this. I wanted to be a writer, and I'm going to write a book about dangerous jobs. One chapter of that book that I imagined became The Perfect Storm. It was a chapter that was going to be on commercial fishing. I was living in the town of Gloucester, Massachusetts, and a local boat was sunk in a huge storm in 1991. But another chapter was going to be on war reporters. And my dad had grown up in Europe. He was a refugee from two wars. He was born in

1923. They left Germany. His dad was Jewish. They left Germany in 1933, the year of the Reichstag fire. They went to Spain. They left Spain when the fascists came in in 1936 with Franco. And they went to Paris. And of course, they left Paris when the Nazis rolled in in the spring of, what was it, spring of 40. So he came to this country. So war has been sort of an idea in my mind, because for family reasons, my whole childhood. And there was a civil war in Bosnia. Sarajevo was besieged by the Bosnian Serbs, a modern army shooting civilians like fish in a barrel for years. And I just thought, I want to know how that works. I want to know what it's like. I want to be a

journalist in that situation. And I want to know about myself, like how will I react in a situation of danger and risk and hardship? Things that young people have had to, questions they've had to answer for eons. And this was my chance. And so I went off and became a freelance war reporter in Sarajevo in the summer of 1993. What did you learn about yourself? war reporter in Sarajevo in the summer of 1993. What did you learn about yourself? I learned that I was completely vulnerable to being addicted to a life of meaning. And the life that I'd led before that didn't seem very meaningful. I waited tables. I was a climber for tree companies. I was writing short stories. None of it really mattered very much to anyone. And suddenly I'm in a

situation where even though I'm the bottom of the food chain as a freelance, like radio stringer, I mean, that's plankton on the journalistic food chain. But I was part of this thing, right? We were, there was a cadre of foreign reporters in Sarajevo and in Bosnia telling the world what was happening. It was ethnic cleansing. It was genocide. Whatever you want to describe it, it was horrific. And I was part of the system that communicated that to the rest of the world. And that was completely addictive. What I also learned was that I was naturally drawn to situations where people were relying on each other and putting the group's concerns ahead of their own, right? And we saw

this in the suburbs of Sarajevo. They had these sort of local militias that were defending completely home-dug front lines, right? And these are teenagers, you know, fighting with inside of their apartment blocks. And I just thought, oh, that, and as an anthropologist, I realized, oh, of course, that's the human norm, right? What I'm seeing right now in a modern city is the way humans have lived for 200,000s of years. There's a reason that this is attractive to me and frankly, to many people. So one of the things I understand about military, especially with those with combat experience,

which is though nobody sort of, quote unquote, likes combat, they have weirdly warm feelings towards their experience in combat, predominantly because of the relationships they form and the intense camaraderie, that you put your life in someone else's hands and you hold the lives of others in your hands. And that intensity, people have warm feelings towards. Now, as a journalist, you're not part of a unit. Did the journalists have that kind of protect you, protect me thing, or were you very much an island? Right. Well, you know, the human tendency is to affiliate with the people who are around you. And that happens to men in prison, and that happens to soldiers,

and it happens to journalists who are with combat forces in any war, right? You're dependent on them for mobility, for food, often for your own safety. And you very, very quickly affiliate with them. And so I would say that you, and certainly when I was with American soldiers in the Korangal Valley in Eastern Afghanistan, I made a documentary called Restrepo about that year. And I wrote a book called War. I know Restrepo. It's an incredible, incredible film.

Thank you. Thank you. That was recommended to me by a soldier back when it came out. Oh, good. Oh, nice. No, I was enormously affiliated with those guys, right? I mean, that just happens. It's what humans do. Humans don't survive by themselves in the world. They die almost immediately. You drop a human into the wilderness by himself, by herself. A week later, they're probably dead. But we thrive in groups. We're social primates. And when you put the group's efforts, the group's concerns ahead of your own, you would think that that would feel like a loss. It actually is kind of intoxicating to do that.

It means you're making yourself necessary to the group, which means that you're safe. Like the group's not going to help you if you don't make yourself necessary, if you're not helpful, if you're not altruistic. And when you have the opportunity to do that, it feels very, very good for some very ancient human reasons. And so that's why people, you know, after the Blitz in London, people were enormously nostalgic. I know after Hurricane Katrina, the coast of Mississippi, I have friends from there. They said after people really missed the terrible days after Katrina because everyone banded together. And and finally, let me just say a lot of the soldiers and a lot of the fighters in the wars that I've been in, in West Africa and in Afghanistan in the 90s and then with American soldiers, a lot of young men like combat enormously.

I mean, love combat. Right. And when I went back to Sarajevo a few years ago, it was, you know, during peacetime, it was night 2015. I was going to a film festival and I was picked up, you know, I got a taxi out of the airport and the taxi driver spoke a little English. And, you know, I said, oh, I haven't been here since the war. And, you know, and he punched the dashboard and he said, during the war, I was a special forces soldier. This is a Bosnian soldier. So special forces. And my job was to infiltrate the Serb front lines. And we were operating behind the enemy lines, right? We're special forces. And he punched the dashboard. He said, now I'm just a fucking taxi driver, right? He missed it. So it actually, there's a complicated relationship there for people who are in combat and an enormous number of young men are horrifyingly fond of fighting. Yeah. What you said, it's worth digging deeper in what you said is making yourself necessary, which is it's not so much the combat. It's that I felt necessary to the group and the group felt that I was necessary to them. And it's that sense of belonging and that sense of some higher calling that is the thing that I think they miss, not the fighting per se, but this idea

of making yourself necessary. And if we look at our society today, right, it seems that our nation, especially America, over the past 30, 40 years, we've sort of overemphasized rugged individualism at the expense of, as you put it, making yourself necessary to the group. You look at the sense of loneliness that people have now and people latching onto any kind of cause they can find to give them some sense of purpose. Given your remarkable experience of understanding people who become necessary to the group and feeling that feeling yourself, I'd love to hear you philosophize about the state

of the world now through this lens of, are we necessary to each other? Yeah. So modern society has been able to achieve this incredible triumph, which is it has liberated most people, most of its inhabitants from the daily needs of survival. We get our food from supermarkets, our securities is outsourced to the police, to the military. When our houses catch fire, the fire department comes to our rescue. And so these things have been outsourced. We don't actually depend on the people immediately around us for our survival and for our security and our safety. And that's new, right? That's a new occurrence in human affairs. But for most of human history, the survival group was 30 or 40 or 50

people. These groups were highly mobile. They were quite egalitarian in part because you just can't accumulate that much wealth and transport it, right? If you're a mobile society, it sort of keeps wealth accumulation to a minimum. The Sioux, the Sioux Nation in the Dakotas, they had a rule that you could not inherit anything that could be made smaller by division. In other words, any material goods that you could make smaller by dividing in two or dividing in four, you could not inherit that. that you could make smaller by dividing in two or dividing in four. You could not inherit that. You can only inherit the good name and the honor of your father or your mother or what have you, but not something that could be made smaller by division. And what that does is it creates a really kind of radical equality between people. And leaders are leaders because

people are willing to follow them, right? Not because the leaders have some kind of power and authority and extra rights, where they can impose their will on others. That doesn't work so well in a small survival group. And so in my book, Tribe, I looked at a situation in Italy, where this terrible earthquake struck in Abedzano around 19, I think, 15, something like that. Something like 95% of the population, the local population was killed in under a minute. It was like they'd been hit by a nuclear weapon. The people that survived this had to make it for many days until help could get there. And they depended on each other, right? They dug each other out of the rubble and salvaged food

and whatever they had to do. One of the men who survived this said, the earthquake produced what the law promises, but cannot in fact deliver, which is the equality of all men. Criminals, non-criminals, wealthy, poor, good looking, ugly, you know, whatever, none of those awful distinctions that we make in society mattered in this dire situation. And that once it was over, people really missed it. They missed being valued for who they can turn themselves into. Maybe I was a criminal, but I'm helping you right now. That's who I really am. So I spent a year off and on with a platoon of American soldiers in pretty intense combat in Eastern Afghanistan. They're up on a hilltop for

a year, basically, right? There was no internet. There was no communication with the outside world. There was no running water. There was no women. It was all men. There was no nothing, right? And for a while, there wasn't even electricity. They didn't even have a generator. They were in contact with the enemy virtually every day. They were sleeping in the dirt. I mean, it was as rough as it gets. Those guys missed it, by the way. Many of those guys missed it when they came home. But it was racially mixed. There were atheists. There were religious, the guys who were religious. There were Democrats and Republicans. Statistically, there were probably a couple of guys who were gay. No one cared, right? Those divisions did not matter because they all needed each other on that hilltop. And really, the way men were judged was by how willing you were to ignore risks to yourself

to help your brothers. Like that was the only metric for honor. And everyone had access to honor. Even me, and I wasn't carrying a weapon, but just in my conduct in that group, they were measuring me like, okay, is he one of us in terms of being willing to risk himself to help others? Yeah, we think so. Yeah, pretty much. I think he is. And so then I was accepted. So, I mean, if a bunch of grunts and a hilltop can do that with each other, why can't we pick up that core human value and place it back down in this country? It's a good question. Oh, but this is so good. This is so good, Sebastian, because basically,

I've always lamented the loss. For a while, I've been lamenting the loss of honor as a currency in our society. You can go back a few hundred years in the times of chivalry. Honor was the thing you had and your word was true because you didn't want to lose honor. And we have shame-based societies like in the East or in the Middle East where honor and family honor is a thing and you keep your word and you do things because of honor. We're not a shame-based society in the United States. We don't talk about honor. We don't do things for honor. We do things that are dishonorable every day.

It's one of the things I love about the military, which is somebody will introduce me to somebody and be like, hey, should I talk to this person? And they'll be like, yeah, totally honorable guy. It's a currency. So the question is, what's honor? The question is, what's honor? And I think what I'm learning from you is that honor is the willingness to be necessary. The choice, because you talked about choice before, that honor is the choice to be necessary and that people recognize that you are willing

to make the choice to be necessary. Yeah. I mean, you have moral standards that you're willing to make real sacrifices for, even sacrifice your life. One of those moral standards is the primacy of the group over yourself, which means you're making yourself necessary. You're subordinating your needs, your desires for the welfare of other people. Those are all forms of honor and they're very, very important. Sometimes I'm asked by, I do like lecture gigs and sometimes corporations will have me, companies will have me, will bring me in to give a sort of pep talk to the troops as it were, right? And the secret they all want to know is like, how do you make people loyal to the company, right? How do

you make the workers loyal to this thing where the benefit, the financial benefits, the vast majority of the financial benefits go to the leaders? Right. What's good leadership in that context? So there's a number of ways. And one of the ways I say, because I've studied like underdog groups that have won fights, wars with larger groups. And one of the commonalities is that leadership that is willing to sacrifice itself for the group, right? They're not hiding behind the group and letting the group take the bullets. They're in the front, like maybe literally in the front, self-sacrificing leadership, like a corporate leader that forgoes their Christmas bonus so that they don't have to fire people

in a downturn, that's leadership, right? Everything else is just management and it's not worth talking about. But one of the other things that is common to underdog groups that succeed, that prevail, is that there's equal access to honor, that honor is not dependent on rank. So in the US military, which is wise in many things, and remarkably stupid in a few things, but wise in many things, is that a private, a private who has been awarded the Medal of Honor is saluted by generals, right? There's equal access to honor within the military, and generals are not given honor just reflexively. They have to earn it. And the idea of a general saluting a private to me means that honor is a sort of democratic thing that all have access to, regardless of rank. And that's a very, very powerful thing in a group. Do you miss Restrepo? Do you miss combat?

Do you miss Restrepo? Do you miss combat? Oh, absolutely. Yeah. I missed it enormously when the deployment was finished. And I really struggled to come back to, quote, normal life where I wasn't part of a group like that and where the stakes seemed remarkably banal. Did you go through depression? Did you go through, did you find people intolerable because they were concerned about stupid things? Well, I wouldn't put it that harshly, but I felt unconnected to people around me, including to my wife, the woman I was married to. And my marriage broke up. I mean, it had its own internal problems, but one of the problems was that I didn't feel like my life back

home was my real life. It felt unreal. And it felt insubstantial and inconsequential. And the people that I loved, I felt like I couldn't reach them. I felt like I was encased in sort of bulletproof plexiglass. It was a very, it was, you know, classic post-trauma depression, actually. And then my buddy Tim that I was out at Restrepo Tim, that I was out at Restrepo with that I made, that I made the film Restrepo with, you know, he was killed in combat in Libya, right after we'd gone to the Academy Awards for Restrepo and, you know, an assignment that I was supposed to have been on with him. And the last moment I couldn't go and he got himself killed. And, you know, I went, I plunged into this like crisis of grief and guilt, enormous guilt

that he had died and that I hadn't died. And, you know, if he died in a car accident, I wouldn't have felt that. And had we never been in combat together and he died in combat, I wouldn't have felt that. But if you're in combat with another man and they die in combat, you are going to feel guilty for the rest of your life, even though you know it's irrational. And I hear this from the teams, the guys in the SEAL teams, which is they fear letting down their fellow team members more than they fear death. Absolutely. Death is a lower standard than letting somebody down.

And this idea of being necessary, like was I necessary to the last minute, is this intense sense of belonging to feel necessary. I find it's such a great framing for purpose, that to have purpose is to be necessary, not to myself, not to the company, but to a group of people who rely on me for their survival, not their profit, but their survival. That's important. I'm necessary to the wealth generation of the CEO. No, no, no, no, no. This is not shareholder bullshit rationalization. It's necessary to the survival. And you talked about it, which is great leadership, which is foregoing my bonus at Christmas so that others may not suffer. I'm becoming necessary to the survival of others. Yeah, that's right. And there's a great honor in that. And people find purpose when they have children because I become necessary to the survival of

another human being. Right. But understand that with children, you're perpetuating your own DNA. I mean, there's a very powerful evolutionary imperative to do that. Humans are the only species where an adult, I'll just say male because all the combat I've been in, I've been surrounded by men, we're the only species where an adult male will sacrifice himself for another man that he's not related to. Chimpanzees do not do that. No other animal do that. Animals will sacrifice themselves for their offspring

and sometimes their mate, but not a same-sex peer. Throwing yourself on the hand grenade to protect everyone else in the bunker means that your genetic line will die out, you will not have children, and everyone you save will have children, and you just lost the Darwinian competition. How does that work? Only in humans do we do that, and for some complex reasons. That is so true. You're right, it is counter-evolutionary because we want that person's DNA more than anybody else. Sebastian, I can't thank you enough. But one thing I know is that great honor comes from being necessary to the survival of others. And those are words to live by. Thank you so much for sharing your experiences with the world and your work. You're leaving us and the world in better shape than you found it. Thank you very much. I really enjoyed the conversation. If you enjoyed this podcast and would like to hear more, please subscribe wherever you like to listen to podcasts. And if you'd like even more optimism, check out my website,

simonsenic.com, for classes, videos, and more. Until then, take care of yourself, take care of each other.