Words matter. These are the best Sebastian Junger Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
I think, unfortunately, we live in a world where people attack other people and I think a legitimate rationale for war is the saving of human life, the saving of lives of people who cannot defend themselves.
A grenade launcher will easily take out a tank; a Molotov cocktail placed in its air intake will destroy one as well.
In some ways, risk-taking is the ultimate act of self-indulgence, an obscene insult to the preciousness of life. And yet, how can one dismiss something that persists despite every reasonable theory that it shouldn’t?
I’ve stopped war reporting. I realized that I’d answered all of my questions about war and about myself.
There are photographers who don’t really engage with their subject. It’s a really unfortunate phrase, but they take their photo and they leave with it. It works but I think it ultimately limits how profound the work can be.
No one will remember that President Obama supported the Arab Spring if it eventually fails and the region collapses back into the political Dark Ages. If we actively engage these movements with advice, with money, and, when necessary, with military force, then we get a vote in how it all turns out.
The Kosovars were granted autonomy at the end of World War II, but then aspiring president Milosevic had the autonomy revoked in 1989, and the Dayton Accords of 1995, which ended the recent war in Bosnia and Croatia, failed to address the issue of Kosovo’s status.
Well, the fact that the news industry doesn’t have enough money to only send salaried staff to war zones means there is an enormous, wide-open opportunity for young people who want to be on staff and don’t know how to get there.
I have been working since I was 20, and I’m 38. I actually once averaged out what I had made over my professional life. I think I could have made that much as a waiter or an insurance salesman. You know, I spent so many years in my 20’s making $10,000 a year.
People really in the meat grinder of the front lines are not, for the most part, insured or salaried network correspondents. They’re young freelancers. They’re kind of a cheap date for the news industry.
Of the primary emotions, fear is the one that bears most directly on survival. Children show fear. Adults try not to, maybe because it’s shameful, or, in some circumstances, dangerous. The fear response is automatic, though, and your body runs through its reflexes whether you want it to or not.
If you shell a military base and happen to kill civilians, you have not committed a war crime; if you deliberately target cities and towns, you have.
The only thing that makes battle psychologically tolerable is the brotherhood among soldiers. You need each other to get by.
I think human society for tens of thousands of years has sent young men out in small groups to do things that are necessary but very dangerous. And they’ve always gotten killed doing it. And they’ve always turned it into a matter of honor and a way of gaining acceptance back into society if they survived.
I had grown up during Vietnam. I had no connections to the U.S. military, and I had a pretty cynical default opinion about the U.S. military.
I hope I get married one day.
When you’re scared, you’re still hanging on to life. When you’re ready to die, you let it go. A sort of emptying out occurs, a giving up on the world that seems oddly familiar even if you’ve never done it before.
I decided to start a medical training program for freelancers, only freelancers. They’re the ones who are doing most of the combat reporting. They’re taking most of the risks. They’re absorbing most of the casualties. And they’re the most underserved and under-resourced of everyone in the entire news business.
I think objectivity is like this strange myth that people think you’re supposed to achieve, but actually, the dirty little secret is that it’s not attainable any more than pure justice is attainable by the courts.
I’m a good liberal, and I grew up in a very liberal family and had very strongly held beliefs.
I don’t think people would climb mountains or jump off bridges with parachutes or kayak Class V rapids if those things didn’t offer the brief and horrible illusion of imminent death. They would just be complicated, time-consuming endeavors that we’d steer well clear of because they got in the way of real life.
The attacks of 9/11 came out of Afghanistan. It was a failed state, a rogue nation. That’s why al Qaeda was there in the first place.
Traditional Albanian society was based on a clan system and was further divided into brotherhoods and bajraks. The bajrak system identified a local leader, called a bajrakar, who could be counted on to provide a certain number of men for military duty.
The combat environment has the effect of flattening out civilian identities. If you’re young or old, or a graduate from Harvard or the son of a farmer from Alabama, or if you’re gay or straight or good-looking or ugly: none of those things matters much in combat, as long as you can conform to the group expectations.
Who wants a life of ease? And who wants a life in the office that you hate, and who wants to play golf?
It’s fun to have money, but the more money I get, the less interesting it becomes. If you don’t have very much, you have to think about it. If you are starving, you become interested in food. If you are struggling to pay the bills, money becomes tragically important.
No matter how many people you kill, using a machine gun in battle is not a war crime because it does not cause unnecessary suffering; it simply performs its job horrifyingly well.
There are no journalistic ethics that transcend the value of human life. There are none. In a situation where you can save a human life, you must. There isn’t any conflict in my mind.
The American military generally counts on a kill ratio of 10 to 1 when fighting lightly armed insurgents: for every dead American, there are probably 10 dead enemy.
I went to Afghanistan in ’96 to write about terrorist training camps south of Jalalabad and Tora Bora, in the mountains. I was there right before the Taliban took over, literally a few weeks before they took Kabul. The frontline wasn’t terribly active, but it was definitely there. And they swept into power.
