Why "Us Against Them" Politics Is More Dangerous Than ISIS | Sebastian Junger | Big Think

Why "Us Against Them" Politics Is More Dangerous Than ISIS

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Posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) can strike almost anyone. It is the unwanted souvenir of experiences like car accidents, violence, witnessing death, tragic destruction, and all the things in between that most don’t want to think about. But perhaps its most common association is with war, where the condition is seen over and over again in soldiers to the point of cliche, although many of them don’t know what’s happening to them. The stigma of mental illness in America coupled with the thick-skin culture of the military means that many soldiers don’t talk about these things, and don’t share the pain of what they went through with family and friends.

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SEBASTIAN JUNGER:

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.

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TRANSCRIPT:

Sebastian Junger:  PTSD is a confusing phrase I think for a lot of people. I mean first of all it’s not just something that soldiers get. It’s not just something that happens at war. Life is traumatic. There are car accidents, children die of cancer. I mean all kinds of horrible things happen to civilians and they wind up with a long term traumatic reaction which is just as crippling as what could happen to soldiers in combat. So it’s important to remember this is just the human condition that we’re talking about. When I was covering war in the nineties I had never heard of the term PTSD. I didn’t know that there were long term psychological consequences to trauma. And so when I came back from Afghanistan in 2000, I was there a year before 9/11 with the Northern Alliance under Ahmad Shah Massoud. I spent two months in the north and back then the Taliban were a real military force. I mean they had fighter planes. They had an air force. They had tanks. They had everything. And so fighting the Taliban was a really daunting proposition and we got hammered a few times.

And I came back to New York pretty altered actually but I didn’t know it. I was a young man, I didn’t think anything really affected me. And I was fine until one day I went down into the subway and unexpectedly I had the first panic attack of my life. Everything was going to kill me. The trains were going too fast and were going to jump the rails and somehow plow into me. There were too many people on the platform and they were going to somehow turn on me and attack me. The lights were too bright. Everything was too loud. I knew I wasn’t in danger but it felt like I was in enormous danger and I was absolutely terrified. And I finally ran out of there...

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