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So I am a big fan of this guy. So my opinion is skewed. However this is a good article that is worth reading. I will copy and paste the entire thing in spoiler tags and link it, so those with net nanny at work can still read it. He says what alot of us have been saying, but still seems to not be heard. We are not broken, just bent.
"Tribe," Sebastian Junger’s latest book, attributes vets’ loss of purpose when they return home to modern society.
Sometime after I returned from a deployment in Afghanistan in 2010, Sebastian Junger and the late Tim Hetherington’s documentary film “Restrepo” was released. Many service members anticipated the documentary, and having gone through a U.S. Army leadership school with many of the film’s enlisted soldiers a year prior and my former mentor being a public affairs liaison to the unit, I was among the curious. A year later in 2011, my unit was tasked to close the door on operations in Iraq. As resources became limited and mail service stopped, Junger’s “War” was passed around and read throughout our offices.
It seems fitting that the release of Junger’s latest book, “Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging,” coincides a couple years into my own struggle with leaving my military community and placement in society.
“Tribe” picks up where “War” left off: exploring history, psychology, and tribal communities to grasp how people respond to and survive calamity and catastrophe.
“Tribe” isn’t solely about war or soldiers. Rather, it pinpoints events in history and examines the human condition throughout war-torn and disaster-stricken communities where group loyalty and cohesion in the face of hardship was the key to survival. As advances in modern society flourish, allowing for more individualistic choices and self-reliance away from communal groups, Junger asks why — despite such miraculous advances — we can be surrounded by people and yet feel dangerously alone. He uses these advances in society, varying degrees of affluence, government fraud, financial industry scams, and economic injustice as a vehicle to discuss mental health, suicide, and the isolation of a divided society. Multiple cross-cultural studies show, “rather than buffering people from clinical depression, increased wealth in a society seems to foster it.”
RELATED: SEBASTIAN JUNGER: OVER-VALORIZING VETS DOES MORE HARM THAN GOOD »
While society tends to view war as the main cause for post-traumatic stress disorder, Junger argues that modern society itself — with its inherent isolation — is partially to blame.
The dynamic, despair, and devastation of post-traumatic stress disorder is well-researched from a wide range of cultures and circumstances. Junger reviews his own post-traumatic stress disorder from years of conflict reporting and the way all humans react to trauma — whether it be battlefield, witnessing harm to others, or physical assault.
Through “Tribe,” Junger challenges the narratives that have been hammered into our national dialogue and passed on as fact: the deceptive, incorrect estimate that 22 veterans a day commit suicide; the unfounded assumption that suicide is a direct result of post-traumatic stress disorder and combat; and the subsequent victimhood a society projects onto its veterans and service members.
For many veterans, radically accepting and understanding the symptoms and root of post-traumatic stress can be aggravating. As one doctor in the book says, “For most people in combat, their experiences range from the best of times to the worst of times. It’s the most important thing someone has ever done — especially since these people are so young when they go in. … They’re going to miss being entrenched in this defining world.”
For all the paradoxes combat and deployments engender — destruction and loss of life, unity, selflessness, and loyalty — Junger perfectly captures how it can be, “utterly intoxicating to the people who experience them.” People miss the close-knit group and sense of community, not the actual war or danger of the shared experience. That sense of loss when service members return home and leave the service is powerful.
If understanding the bonds developed by hardship and sacrifice were any indication of how our current society receives its veterans, the proof isn’t exactly in its patriotic parades or mainstream media’s common portrayal and hero worship of veterans. While well-intended, parades and hero worship often feel more like a band-aid or fashionable community service hour logged rather than a deeper understanding of what real sacrifice yields for a community.
As an anthropologist describes in the book, “We are not good to each other. Our tribalism is to an extremely narrow group of people: our children, our spouse, maybe our parents. Our society is alienating, technical, cold, and mystifying. Our fundamental desire, as human beings, is to be close to others, and our society doesn’t allow for that.”
It could even be said that due to valorizing our veterans, our profoundly disconnected culture and society often romanticizes veterans to the point of blindly accepting valor when it’s borrowed or stolen, yet simultaneously assumes every veteran is suffering from severe post-traumatic stress disorder and therefore is viewed as a victim or ticking time bomb. Veterans, mental health issues, and suicide have all become dangerously inseparable from one another.
“Tribe” challenges conversation and narrative of how Western society receives those who’ve experienced trauma, loss of a close-knit community, and purpose in recovery. It asks what makes us good and what it will take for a de-tribalized society to return to the old truths and virtues that embrace and practice sacrifice for the collective good.
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Sebastian Junger's new book, "Tribe," looks at soldiers returning home from war. He tells NPR's Scott Simon that veterans often don't feel like they belong to the society they fought for.
SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
War is appalling, destructive and dehumanizing. Even warriors, maybe - especially warriors - would say that. But war can also inspire unprecedented acts of courage, genius and humanity. Sebastian Junger, who has covered so many conflicts around the globe and written best-sellers, including "The Perfect Storm," has a book that looks at why the bitter experience of war can also cause people - citizens, not just soldiers - to feel extraordinary closeness, purpose and meaning in their lives.
He writes about it in "Tribe: On Homecoming And Belonging." Sebastian Junger joins us now from our studios in New York. Thanks so much for being with us.
SEBASTIAN JUNGER: My pleasure.
SIMON: As you can attest, often the real anxieties come after the war and battles are over, don't they?
JUNGER: Yes. I mean, the odd thing about war - one of the many odd things about war is that the experience of combat produces an incredible human closeness between the soldiers involved. And when soldiers come home, there's this sort of existential loss of community. You're not in a platoon. You're not sleeping shoulder-to-shoulder with other people that you would die for. And that transition is at the root of a lot of what we erroneously, I think, call PTSD.
SIMON: That term PTSD - you don't like it. And yet, you use it. But tell us why it makes you uncomfortable.
JUNGER: Well, it has its use. It's an important word. It describes the long-term reactions to trauma that some people get. Around 20 percent of people exposed to deep trauma wind up struggling with their reaction for many months or years. Keep in mind - only 10 percent of U.S. military is engaged in any kind of combat at all.
But roughly half the U.S. military has applied for some form of disability based on PTSD. So there's 40 percent in there who really weren't traumatized, who come home and are - feel deeply alienating and out of place. The only language they have for it is PTSD. I actually don't think that's what is. And by definition, it can't be.
What they're experiencing is the very real trauma of reintegration into modern society. People who serve two years in the Peace Corps have the same problem. The depression rates after people come home from the Peace Corps is astronomically high.
SIMON: We both spent time in Sarajevo during the siege. And I want to get you talk about a young woman - a teenager then - who's a journalist in Bosnia now, who has no problem when saying that's when we were the happiest.
JUNGER: That was in Sarajevo in '93, '94. It was a very traumatized city. Something like 20 percent of the population was killed or wounded. I didn't go back there until last summer - 2015. And I met this extraordinary woman, Nidzara Ahmetasevic, who was wounded at age 17 by a Serb tank round that hit her parents' apartment. They almost had to cut off her leg.
They saved the leg, but they operated on her for reconstructive surgery without anesthesia because there was just nothing in Sarajevo at the time. And when I met her last summer, she said - almost embarrassed - she said, you know, the seige was so terrible. It was so hard. But, you know what? We all kind of miss it.
And she literally lowered her voice because she was embarrassed by the thought. And I asked her about that. And she said, we were better people during the siege. We helped each other. We lived more closely. We would have died for each other. And now, you know, it's peaceful. It's - we're a wealthy society. And everyone just lives for themselves. And everyone's depressed.
SIMON: Yeah. One thing I remember noticing is - when artillery and sniper fire were at their worst, people would struggle to stay alive. And then there'd be, like, the rare period of five-day cease-fire or something. And they'd come out and raise their heads - see the world they knew was in shambles. And that's when you hear about people throwing themselves off the tops of buildings.
JUNGER: Yeah. Emile Durkheim, the great sociologist, found that in Europe in the 1800s, countries that were at war experienced a decline in their suicide rate. After 9/11 in New York, the suicide rate went down. The murder rate - violent crime rate - went down. Even Vietnam vets who struggled with PTSD reported that as soon as 9/11 happened, their PTSD symptoms improved. In Sarajevo, Nidzara said that during the war, very few people killed themselves because they knew that their families needed them.
SIMON: Israel has more or less been constantly at war for decades. And you say their universal service might make a difference.
JUNGER: Yes. The idea for the book started with my background in anthropology. I studied anthropology in college. I did my fieldwork on the Navajo reservation. And at one point a year or two ago, I had this idea. I was like, I bet the Navajo, the Apache, the Comanche, the Cheyenne, the Sioux, the Kiowa - very, very warlike societies. I bet they weren't getting PTSD. I bet they weren't coming home to their community and feeling alienated and out of place and unconnected. I bet the transition was fine.
And so I had this idea. Maybe the rate of long-term trauma that combatants experience - maybe that's a function not of the trauma - not of what happens on the battlefield - but the kind of society you come home to. And if you come home to a cohesive tribal society, maybe you recover quite quickly from trauma.
So I looked at Israel. Now, most of the Israeli population serves in the military. They don't all see combat, but they've all been in the military. When the fight - when the combat takes place in that kind of societal context, it makes much greater moral sense. When you have to fly 10,000 miles to fight in another country, and everyone back home is continuing as if everything the same, the moral context is sort of more suspect.
When you're defending - literally defending your house, there is very little trauma because it's so clearly something that has to be done. So the PTSD rate in Israel is something like 1 percent. In the U.S. military, it's around 20 percent. Very similar kinds of military, similar kind of society, similar kind of fight - but a different societal context. And that seems to make the whole difference.
SIMON: Yeah, you found some differences with the World War II generation, too.
JUNGER: Yes. I mean, one of the interesting statistics that I found was that with every war, you know, going back to the American Civil War, the percentage of casualties has gone down. But the disability rate has gone up. That's both psychological disability and physical disability. The only thing I could think to explain this is that soldiers coming back to a society - that every generation is increasingly alienated from itself - increasingly conflicted - experience higher rates of trauma.
I'm talking about - you come back to your neighborhood and most of the men in that neighborhood also served. Your parents live down the street. Your three brothers live a block away. I mean, that kind of rich communal connection - it's the thing that creates mental health in a society.
SIMON: So the answer isn't just to give every veteran a slot with a psychiatrist and a welcome home parade.
JUNGER: I think psychological counseling is very important for people who have been traumatized. But what do you do with the people who weren't traumatized, who don't feel like they should be home? They no longer feel like they belong to the society they fought for.
SIMON: Sebastian Junger - his book "Tribe: On Homecoming And Belonging." Thanks so much for being with us.
JUNGER: Thank you.
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I haven't read the book, but the theme of it strikes home to me. I've been apart of the military community my entire life, all 31 years of it. Whether as a dependent during my fathers service, or as active duty for my own, I've never known any other life then the military life.
I'll be 37 when I retire, and it scares the ever living hell out of me.
djones520 wrote: I haven't read the book, but the theme of it strikes home to me. I've been apart of the military community my entire life, all 31 years of it. Whether as a dependent during my fathers service, or as active duty for my own, I've never known any other life then the military life.
I'll be 37 when I retire, and it scares the ever living hell out of me.
Do you have to retire? Isn't their some kind of less active "desk job" you could do for the military?
I'm 37, and I've spent most of my adult life as a builder. This year I transferred from the working with the tools and site management to estimating projects. It's much easier on the back.
We were once so close to heaven, St. Peter came out and gave us medals; declaring us "The nicest of the damned".
“Anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.'”
djones520 wrote: I haven't read the book, but the theme of it strikes home to me. I've been apart of the military community my entire life, all 31 years of it. Whether as a dependent during my fathers service, or as active duty for my own, I've never known any other life then the military life.
I'll be 37 when I retire, and it scares the ever living hell out of me.
Do you have to retire? Isn't their some kind of less active "desk job" you could do for the military?
I'm 37, and I've spent most of my adult life as a builder. This year I transferred from the working with the tools and site management to estimating projects. It's much easier on the back.
The answer is no, not while in uniform. However civil service is taking over more administrative tasks every year. I myself will retire in 9ish months and should be able to hop into a civil service job doing something similar to what I am doing now, as the "green suiters" are being pulled to the line units more and more, leaving instructing jobs for civilians.
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My understanding is that the military is pretty bad about having a "promote or get out" culture, although that might be more on the officer side of things.
d-usa wrote: My understanding is that the military is pretty bad about having a "promote or get out" culture, although that might be more on the officer side of things.
Nah, I'm seeing on articles from the Army side that they are tightening down the Retention Control Points even further, since they are still under mandate to downsize some more.
When I left, E-4s had 8 years, or 10 if they were promotable. Now, they have 8. Period. While it doesn't sound that serious, for jobs like mine where the promotion points were "seven ninety never," that means you are losing a decent chunk of people each year, simply because there's no place for them to move up to.... I mean, sure, in theory they should be moving up, because those above have the same constraints to move up as well, but the pyramid structure of my MOS was such that each step up was a drastically smaller number of people.... For instance, when I left, there was ONE E-9 (the absolute highest enlisted rank) slot in the entire army, and IIRC, there were only four E-8 slots in the entire army..... And while I was in, we sort of floated around 900-1000 people holding this one MOS.
d-usa wrote: My understanding is that the military is pretty bad about having a "promote or get out" culture, although that might be more on the officer side of things.
You would have to understand the senior enlisted promotion system, but that is a true statement given current drawdowns. A SSG used to be able to retire at 20yrs. Although they still can, they are pushing them out at 18 to prevent paying retirement. The army is brutal right now. Everything good I saw happen to the enlisted corps over 15 years is reverting back to the cut throat me me me way of thinking in order to continue trying to get ahead. But that's another issue completely.
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You would have to understand the senior enlisted promotion system, but that is a true statement given current drawdowns. A SSG used to be able to retire at 20yrs. Although they still can, they are pushing them out at 18 to prevent paying retirement. The army is brutal right now. Everything good I saw happen to the enlisted corps over 15 years is reverting back to the cut throat me me me way of thinking in order to continue trying to get ahead. But that's another issue completely.
You can look at the SMA for the perfect model of that. My second deployment, he was the BDE sergeant major, and holy feth, was he ever ate the feth up. I obviously respected the rank, but absolutely do NOT respect his "do as I say, not as I do" mentality.
djones520 wrote: I haven't read the book, but the theme of it strikes home to me. I've been apart of the military community my entire life, all 31 years of it. Whether as a dependent during my fathers service, or as active duty for my own, I've never known any other life then the military life.
I'll be 37 when I retire, and it scares the ever living hell out of me.
Do you have to retire? Isn't their some kind of less active "desk job" you could do for the military?
I'm 37, and I've spent most of my adult life as a builder. This year I transferred from the working with the tools and site management to estimating projects. It's much easier on the back.
I "could" but I have no intention to. I'm tired of the military. The only reason I'm sticking it out now is because I've given to much of my life to not get that retirement. Feb 19, 2022 will be the last day I serve the military, in any capacity.
djones520 wrote: I haven't read the book, but the theme of it strikes home to me. I've been apart of the military community my entire life, all 31 years of it. Whether as a dependent during my fathers service, or as active duty for my own, I've never known any other life then the military life.
I'll be 37 when I retire, and it scares the ever living hell out of me.
Do you have to retire? Isn't their some kind of less active "desk job" you could do for the military?
I'm 37, and I've spent most of my adult life as a builder. This year I transferred from the working with the tools and site management to estimating projects. It's much easier on the back.
I "could" but I have no intention to. I'm tired of the military. The only reason I'm sticking it out now is because I've given to much of my life to not get that retirement. Feb 19, 2022 will be the last day I serve the military, in any capacity.
1 July 2017 I am 9 months out from terminal leave, and I am not ever looking back.
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