Sebastian Junger - Episode 7

Welcome to episode 7 of Behind the Shield. My name is James Gearing and I'm extremely excited to bring you this week's guest, Sebastian Junger. Sebastian is probably best known for his book The Perfect Storm which was written about the fishing boat, the Andrea Gale, and was consequently made into a movie featuring George Clooney. However, some of his other work I think is is really

what drew me to him as a first responder, as a firefighter. He's written two books, War and Tribe, that really resonated with me about the effects of trauma on a human basically and then what happens after they leave their group, their tribe. And then he's also the man that brought us Restrepo, the documentary about the 173rd Airborne guys that were on a remote outpost in the middle of the Korangal Valley in Afghanistan. And those men saw more combat than any other unit

in the conflict so far. And again, he sees what it's like to be a soldier in this crazy, crazy war and then the effects of their time served after

they leave the valley. The insight that he has on humans, on us as a species, on the fact that we fundamentally are supposed to be tribal, he talks about how when early settlers came to the US, many of them were fleeing to Native American tribes to be a part of something that they felt was was more organic and almost worthy than our quote-unquote civilized society that we

have. And his view on people banding together during tragedy like 9-11 and the London Blitz and then the effects of these men and women when they leave the conflict, they leave the tribe, they leave their army units, navy units and come back into suburban America or England or whatever country they they demob from. And the troubles that these men and women have and how this leaving the tribe affects them and now is when the PTSD and all these other afflictions

start to hit them. So I really wanted to get him on the show, I really wanted to pick his brains about some of his philosophies and in all honesty I also want to urge everyone listening to this podcast to go out and buy Tribe. I am not the kind of person that can pick up a book that is full of fluff and just fight my way through hundreds and hundreds of pages. He is described as a

very very lean writer and I can absolutely testify to that. I can't remember the exact page number, I haven't got it next to me but I believe it's sub 200 pages and it is absolutely jam-packed with just totally engaging stories that really get you hooked and make you kind of rethink about everything, about the way we're living at the moment, about gyms where we walk in and we hook into our iPhones and don't talk to another person,

suburban communities where even though we're surrounded by each other we barely know our neighbors and how that is so different from the way that we were I wouldn't say raised but the way our species has evolved for generations and generations. So I was so happy when he agreed to be on the show, I reached out to him and when he found out it was to help the first responders of the world he jumped at the chance and responded immediately and said that he

would come on the show. So I think this will be eye-opening for a lot of people, I think it really will reprogram the way a lot of you guys think after you hear some of his philosophy and he doesn't even claim to own it, it's his observations of modern combat, of the Native American culture, of the New Yorkers during 9-11 and all these different things that he's observed and when people have stepped up and become the best versions of themselves and

the strongest communities. So I am not gonna ramble anymore, I really want to get you listening to him as soon as possible and when we're done with this if you leave with one thing I urge you to go on Amazon or your local bookshop

and buy a copy of his book, Tribe. It really should be in every firehouse, every police station, every EMT or paramedic station because it really pertains to anyone that puts their life on the line, that chooses to serve others and then sees these horrendous things and is exposed to these terrible things and then is one day taken away from that whether it's injury, retirement, promotion, whatever it is and I think that all of you are gonna be

able to relate in your own special way. So I am gonna stop yabbering and get right on to this interview and I hope you all enjoy it, I'd love to hear your feedback. So without further ado I give you Sebastian Junger. Music Sebastian welcome to the show. Thank you very much. Okay I'm gonna jump straight in now because I know your time is extremely valuable. You are known for writing about the working man, the viewers of this show are in the same

category, working men and women. I'm assuming that you wanted to be an author since you were pretty young but how did you transition to finding an interest in

the working person? I don't know, it's an interesting question. I grew up in a middle-class suburb and I had a good education and I didn't know that honestly that many people in those kinds of sort of labor type jobs but my adopted uncle Ellis who was in my book Tribe, he had done a lot of work in the 50s with labor rights and he sort of opened my mind to that issue and then later I

had a job as a climber for tree companies. I was an arborist and I worked 70-80 feet in the air with a chainsaw and a rope and I taking trees down and I got hurt pretty badly doing it and that actually, I for a long time wanted to become a professional writer and I was writing occasionally for newspapers and magazines but that sort of galvanized my interest in work related issues and I started writing about dangerous jobs and the first one that I really focused on

was commercial fishing because I was living in the fishing town of Gloucester in Massachusetts when a huge storm hit and sank a local boat named the Andrea Gale and then that story that I investigated became you know eventually became the perfect my first book The Perfect Storm. Yeah which was an

incredible book they made into a movie became a smash hit I know that. So the one of your other books that you wrote was a book called Fire which is a collection of your short stories and the first couple you featured smoke jumpers out West so how did you get involved with that and what were your experiences

there? Well I had a whole list of dangerous jobs I wanted to look at and I never was able to write the book that I envisioned which was a whole collection on series on dangerous jobs one of those jobs was forest firefighting wildland fire and so I did the research for that and wrote a magazine piece for it but it never became part of a book and so that was it was also a book that came out around then called Young Men in Fire by Norman McClain that was a you

know really what I think one of the best nonfiction books in the sort of canon of American literature and I was a huge admirer of that book as well and I think that sort of like inspired me I can't quite remember the timing of all that but it was around then. Right and you actually were embedded with those smoke

jumpers for a small while is that correct? Well no I mean they jump out airplanes on their fires so I was able to interview them I was I spent some time on the hotshot crews that are that get to the fire you know on foot usually but I didn't jump out of any airplanes I mean you you you're written that's not actually really allowed. Okay yeah I know you were out out there in the wildland with them for a little bit okay so transitioning then so what steered you

towards becoming a military journalist? Well I you know war reporting was one of the things that interested me as a dangerous job and in the early 90s there was a war in Bosnia obviously long before the US got there it was a civil war and Sarajevo was under siege by Bosnian armed forces and like a lot of other freelancers I got into Sarajevo with on a UN relief flight and started my you know in a very sort of like clumsy and uninformed way I started my fledgling

career as a war reporter freelance war reporter. Right and as a civilian up to that point what was that initial experience like going from living in you

know urban or suburban America to being in the middle of a war zone? You know life was more normal than I expected I mean people still do everything they do when there's no war is everything's a little bit harder you know water doesn't come out of the pipes in your kitchen you have to go get it at a pump there's no electricity you're burning candles you can't go to the supermarket to get food you have to grow food in your backyard what have you I mean it

reduced life to a kind of communal very sort of primitive communalism that actually I found really appealing in some ways I mean the closeness of the society the closeness of these neighborhoods of these families was really you know incredibly appealing and and why later much later I went back to Sarajevo you know a year and a half ago 20 years after the war ended and you know this one person I talked to I talk about this in my book but one woman I

talked to said that everyone really missed the war precisely because people

were so close and so collaborative during those difficult days. Right yeah and that's pretty much one of the main topics in your latest book Tribe that publication that that book I think is gonna resonate so so deeply as it did with me in First Responders as well as military that haven't read it yet the the different ways of looking not only at war itself but but at how people are when they come back from war and then looking at our own country as well so

you in in the book talked about that very thing about how communities that maybe weren't as strong initially were brought together during times of trouble for example the London Blitz and 9-11 Yeah I mean human society reacts to to trauma and hardship and threat by unifying those circumstances don't bring out bad behavior in you in people they bring out typically pro-social behavior in people group-oriented behavior where

you know we are we're social humans are social primates we survive and even thrive in the natural world because we function in groups and when we're under threat we cohere into those groups even more strongly than we do ordinarily modern society because it is so safe so protected so stable we don't really need to function in terms of groups in order to get by until there's a crisis until there's a threat until there's an attack or an earthquake or what-have-you and

then people do that very very naturally it clearly feels good to do that because people often say that they missed you know the worst events of their lives 9-11 the Blitz in London why would anyone miss those terrible days but in fact that's exactly what people do because they like the feeling of being needed by their group they like the feeling of acting well actor-militaristically we enjoy those experiences they make us feel good about ourselves even though

that there are very unfortunate sad circumstances that require them absolutely another another thing that you discussed during the book which I found was fascinating was the number of reported depression cases and PTSD cases during these times of tragedy now these are people that had these symptoms before actually declined during these tragic events yeah I mean the British government was prepared for mass psychiatric casualties during the Blitz

and to their surprise emissions to psych wards went down during the Blitz psychologists that I found an Irish psychologist that I found did some really interesting research about depression levels during the what are called the troubles in Northern Ireland the violence and the murders of the fighting that happened in 1969 1970 and what he found was that the more violent the district they lower the depression levels in the society and the only

district that found where he found depression levels to go up was County Derry where there was no violence whatsoever oh really yeah I it's interesting talking about Ireland I grew up in a town in England that was next to an army base and during that whole time in my childhood I had to check under my car for bombs and that kind of thing because it would be a perfect place to put one to kind of hit the base from the outside and then when I came to the US

there was a lot of kind of pro IRA feeling until we had some terrorist attacks on our doorstep and people really kind of were introduced to what terrorism was really like and realized that there was not some Hollywood version of a freedom fighter but the same kind of murderous you know horrible character that exists in all these terrorist organizations around the world yeah yeah no that's right that's right you know it's really interesting the the role of

stress on a community and how it affects people I was in El Paso Texas and I talked to a student at the University of El Paso who grew up across the river and in a very very very violent neighborhood during these outrageous drug wars that were raging in northern Mexico you know some years ago and I mean there was such so much gunfire on the Mexican side that the bullets would land on the campus of the University of El Paso on the American side at any rate this kid

that I was talking to said that he grew up during that time in northern Mexico and and that he you know he's living the dream right he's a he's got a scholarship or whatever it was he gained entry the United States he's a student at an American University having come from the from the very violent neighborhoods across the river and he said that he really missed that he missed those days that he was incredibly lonely and he knew he was sort of living the

dream but actually he was much much happier during those days of violence and and the community that violence forces people to engage in in order to survive and he really missed that yeah yeah and I think that's I guess what we're seeing now in the same kind of thing in the first responders I'm gonna kind of come back to this topic more but you have these these paramedics you have these policemen and women and then even more so I think the fire department because

we live you know for 24 hours at a time with each other some sometimes even more and it is a band of brothers and then when people leave that group whether it's retirement whether it's injury or as I would realize even recently it could even be promotion we've lost two chiefs in this central Florida area in the last two months to PTSD so being removed from that that tribal environment it appears like their world comes crumbling down then that that support structure

was there keeping them up when they were in it but when they were taken from it you know it everything changed yeah I mean we're clearly wired to survive adversity in groups and we can obviously do that quite well and if we couldn't the human race wouldn't exist so we can just take that as a sort of base assumption that we are highly adapted to deal with trauma successfully and that we do that best in groups groups of people that were very close to not a

random group of strangers on a subway car but people that were close to possibly related to possibly not but have a really powerful emotional connections to and that in that kind of circumstance we can survive almost anything and again if that were not so we wouldn't exist or another way to put it is that we're the descendants of individuals in our evolutionary past who were able to survive trauma fairly effectively within their groups so it

stands to reason that if you take a group of people like firemen first responders who go through incredibly dangerous difficult things together and rely on each other psychologically and physically in order to be able to do those things that you take an individual out of that the residual trauma that they have that they experienced as a group with people they care about people they love that residual trauma they're now dealing with completely by

themselves or surrounded by people who really didn't have those experiences and don't understand like their wife their children their neighbors that that would be psychologically extremely hard and that's what veterans face when they come home but you don't even need to be traumatized something like 25 percent of Peace Corps volunteers you know we spent two years in a closed communal environment in the developing world which is its own hardship but it's not

necessarily dangerous around 25 percent of Peace Corps volunteers slip into a significant depression when they come back it's that loss of communality which is so hard on the human psyche yeah and now you you talk about that in a lot of detail in the book and I've already read it twice and I'm gonna read it a third time because I absolutely love it so let's take it right right back to the very beginning you're welcome and all the other ones as well

I'm halfway through war and I'm gonna be getting fire next and then I just recently watched Restrepo and Korongal again and you know the look in those young men eyes the men's eyes you can see in the policeman the fireman it's the same in a thousand yards there but I want to go back to kind of the basis of human culture so that we can kind of look at our ancestors and learn from them and then fast forward to where we are now and understand more about you

know why people are going through this so you your your view on humans as a nomadic but tribal society could you expand on that a little bit more I mean it's not my view it's the consensus among archaeologists and anthropologists that that was our evolutionary past from about 2 million years ago the advent of toolmaking the use of fire all the way on up through the recent ice age in Europe and right on up till about 10,000 years ago with the advent of agriculture

in the Middle East that the typical human group was 30 40 50 individuals and that they were highly highly mobile they married outside of their groups they subsisted on obviously on hunting and gathering and that they were completely dependent on the group for their own survival humans virtually no primates actually survive in nature by themselves if you find yourself alone in nature you are dead you are a dead primate and so that those those human relations are

important not just to our emotional welfare our psychological welfare but to our physical survival absolutely and now the the example you use which I found amazing again was the European settlers in early Western American history being snatched from you know where their villages were by Native Americans and then when they were being quote-unquote rescued them actually resisting and wanting to go back to the Native American tribes that had taken

them could you tell the people more about that story yeah it was this strange phenomenon I mean strange in a sense that the people at the time were puzzled by that here you have a quote superior Western Christian civilization bordered by and this is one of the few times in history this has happened bordered by basically stone age level nomadic or semi nomadic groups and what was interesting and people noticed it at the time was that as Benjamin Franklin said

we have thousands of examples of of young people fleeing the colonies fleeing the settlements and absconding to the Indians and taking up with the Native tribes and he said we don't have one example of a native person going the other direction and choosing voluntarily to be part of Western society and how could that you know really confounded people like we're we're a superior Christian society like why why are the people should be going the other

direction they should be coming towards us not the other way around but even as you say even people who were captured in it by an Indian race along the frontier are brought back to these tribal communities very often when given the chance to be repatriated during a peace treaty or an incursion by colonial military forces or American military forces that these people who had been abducted and adopted adopted these tribes would go into hiding would have

what would avoid being found would do everything they can to not be repatriated and again that really could have founded the white Christian sense of superiority that they fell towards what they called the savages and what do you think was the driving force behind them returning to the Native American culture you know I think the the basic broad and fundamental egalitarianism that existed in these in these societies was very appealing I I think hunting is more fun

than plowing fields I think the sexual liberty enjoyed by these people was was much greater and more satisfying than the you know incredibly burdensome puritanical norms in colonial society and you know and finally I think just the experience of a close communal society where people were literally and figuratively sort of gathered around the campfire that that you know that's extremely appealing to our evolutionary wiring and and when when given the

possibility many people quote go native we don't interestingly we don't have a phrase in English to go civilized like doesn't know what apparently no one really wants to do it if they have the choice I agree with that statement like you said in one of your other interviews you get to walk around almost naked and hunt and have sex a lot versus the alternative I definitely go there too so touching on on the the Native American concept for the moment another

thing you talk about is the art of the masculine role and also the art of storytelling now I think this is very pertinent right now we as a culture in in I think any first responders telling telling stories of course that we've been on is a great way of decompressing and again sharing with that quote-unquote tribe PTSD as it stands has almost been shamed in our culture which I'm hoping we're gonna start to try and reverse because it's just ridiculous the

military's already way ahead of us with with that but the storytelling you're talking about in the Native Americans was it was a kind of a way of boasting but also a way of showing the physical prowess of what you did and a humanitarian side what you did for your culture yeah I mean I imagine the same thing happens in firehouses and emergency rooms and police precincts and all kinds of other places that there is a kind of recounting of one's ordeals

and exploits before you're the most important community that you're part of and so in a lot of Native American societies after combat the warriors were given the chance to through dancing and storytelling and singing sort of recreate their their feats their exploits on the battlefield and that provided presumably that provided a kind of cathartic experience for the warrior it also allowed the community to to morally participate in the violent actions that

were done for them on their behalf which of course is very helpful I think one of the very difficult things for soldiers is and I guess firemen don't get this but first responders may not get this but for soldiers they're sent thousands of miles away outside of their communities outside of their country to do something that most Americans feel is morally suspect which is killing other human beings and then they come back and there's it's not really clear like who

they did this for and why and that leaves them in a really profound emotional distress that's not something I suppose that the fire department has to deal with although occasionally of course the police might have to yeah now we're definitely fortunate in fire and EMS where we're viewed more as the the hero I guess of the community so we're not we're not normally having to make the same kind of decisions that the military and the police do that that leads me to

a good question though and you've I know I've heard you answer this before when people say they're against war you what's your view on that well I would just ask what you know I would ask about World War two I would ask if it was okay for them to in their opinion would it have been okay for the United States to stand back and watch the German military machine having killed six million Jews continue its it's a rampage through the world imposing fascism on virtually all

of our allies would that be all right yeah and if it's not okay then you're not completely against war what you're against is human suffering and human misery and killing and that's a different matter altogether absolutely I spoke to Tim Kennedy the UFC fighter in Green Beret and he had this the same kind of thing as you know once you're out there you've got a job to do and I know you've you've said the same thing you know that the soldiers didn't start

the war the politicians did but when you see the suffering by these you know insane murderers in these different countries now your your goal is to to stop them from causing more suffering and obviously that the sad byproduct is civilian loss of life in the process yeah that's correct that's right okay now touching again on the on the the tribal part of the Native American culture which kind of relates to this you explained how one of the tribes I think it was in

Navajo you said had the two leaders the peacetime leader and the military leader although that was fascinating concept your quite yeah there is your quite yeah there were there were war leaders and peace leaders and the war leaders immediately took over when there was a declared conflict and as soon as a peace agreement was arranged between the warring parties the agreement was okayed by the peacetime leaders and as soon as they okayed as soon as they give their

approval of the treaty the war leaders immediately stepped down and were replaced by the peacetime leaders peacetime leaders who were occasionally women and often elected by women as well as men okay that sounds like something we should maybe try in this country once yeah well speaking of that so so the other thing is about gender roles you talked about that in times of crisis too yeah I mean the genders are different and they respond to circumstances in

very different ways and obviously are used by society in very different ways because of their different capacities if you look at statistics the vast majority I mean you know 97 98 percent something like that's on that order of people whose bystanders who spring into action to save someone from an imminent physical threat a fire in a building someone who's fallen onto the subway tracks with a train bearing down that kind of thing the vast majority of the people who

spontaneously do that are male young male and they're superbly adapted for it men are on average 20 percent stronger than women in their upper bodies they we know that they have quicker reflexes all kinds of adaptations that make them skilled at hunting and at war and it dealing with in a sort of abrupt muscular way with emergencies and crises well what women are really good at is a kind of moral courage and this was found during World War two the decision to

hide Jewish families in one's basement if you were not Jewish if you're a Gentile in northern Europe during the beginning and during World War two the decision to hide a Jewish family in your basement if you were discovered by the by the Nazis to have done so met immediate death and so the decision to do that doesn't require muscular physical action but it potentially is just as deadly as running into a burning building to save someone else's children

and women were more likely than men to make that decision that's again as a kind of moral courage it's an equal form of bravery but it requires different actions right because you I remember you said that the the gender roles weren't necessarily filled by those specific genders as well because I identify both of those roles within areas of first responders for example you know the fireman that kicks in the door and drags a person out would be probably assigned

more to the the masculine type of those two gender roles but then if that same person then has to take off their gear and then take care of them medically now you're almost slipping into the more compassionate female side of the gender role but within the same human being yeah that's right I looked at a coal mine disaster in in Canada in the 1950s and these people were these it was all men they were trapped who my two miles underground by a collapse of the mine

shafts because of an explosion and the first leaders that emerged from these this group of you know a dozen or so maybe 18 I can't remember 18 men were these sort of proactive unemotional on on empathic action-oriented individuals who literally started trying to dig their way past the blockage to to freedom they did that for a few days and it didn't work and then they had this the group had to settle into a different kind of survival mode which was waiting

to see if they could be rescued and when that happened a different leader emerged the first kind of leaders the the more typically male in some ways leaders took a backseat step back and what emerged were leaders who were very empathic they were good at keeping the morale of the group up and you know this is in complete darkness while they're starving and dying of thirst never knowing if they'll be rescued or even if their bodies will be recovered and

in that horrible horrible circumstance there were men who who emerged who were they were compassionate and they were caretaking emotionally caretaking they they wanted people to function collectively in the group they cared very much what other people thought of their actions and that was a classically more female role my point was that there are these two gender roles they need to be filled and it doesn't matter if they're filled by males or females it

doesn't matter at all if a group of women were trapped in a coal mine some women would step forward as the sort in the sort of classically male role the sort of action-oriented role and others would fill the other the other more compassionate role and likewise if for a group of men it really doesn't matter what sex fills those roles as long as those roles get filled yeah yeah because I think what they look at the kind of the stereotypical fireman policeman

paramedic as in a very two-dimensional way instead of looking at that we need you know a spectrum of people because depending on events you know you might need a door kicker like they refer to him in the seals or you might need the person to to be the compassionate one in a giant disaster where you've got all kinds of people you know extremely upset so yeah that could be fit may excuse me fit by male or female but I think emotionally you need that spectrum if if

you're gonna function well as a group absolutely yep absolutely okay so getting back to you actually in the Korangal Valley you were assigned to Rastrepro which was named after Juan Rastrepro who was Navy corpsman is that correct no he was he was in the airborne airborne infantry he was a he was the platoon medic I was a platoon medic I'm sorry so I knew he was a medic okay so he was the platoon medic so when you were there you that group was the saw more action than

anyone else in Afghanistan at the time is that right yeah for a while most of the majority of the combat in in Afghanistan was in that immediate area okay and what made you decide to go from writing as your main source of media to filmmaking oh you know I started shooting video a few years earlier it just seemed like a good way to capture situations that were moving too quickly for me to write you know right keep track of in a notebook with a pen and

then I decided if I was going to spend you know a year off and on with a platoon I wanted to write a book about about a platoon in combat I thought if I was going to spend a year off and on with a platoon I might as well shoot a lot of video and see if I could not only would that help in my reporting but maybe I could make a documentary right and then the documentary focus is not so much on on the actual events I think the event set the scene but it's more really

that the the guys once they've come home so what were your initial observations when you first saw those soldiers back in the civilian lifestyle well we I mean you know Sim and I spent most of a year out there we had one chance to interview them after their deployment but they weren't home they were in Vicenza Italy where the one 70 30 space and we had a couple of days to interview all those guys about about their experience of the prior year they were they were pretty

messed up actually they were having a lot of a lot of psychological problems right yeah cuz I you could see that I mean being a first responder and seeing you know my peers like I said we've lost several in the last 12 months that that look in their eyes and that that look of being lost once removed from which most people look at the most dangerous place you think you'd want to run you know run for the hills from that that yearning to be back there and I know several of them

say that exactly that almost with tears in their eyes they wish they were back with their their brothers in in the Korangal yeah absolutely there was a real longing to go back I think it felt the proximity of the other men made them feel safe even though that there were bullets flying overhead and the idea of being without their brothers alone even in a physically safe environment like their hometown was a really dreadful prospect and very few of them wanted to

face it yeah now it's interesting yeah the observation of how house quote-unquote civilization is now because I know what when I've come back from calls before no problem you know where I've literally had you know child fatalities and come back to a neighbor bitching at me about allegedly my cat crapping on his yard or something and it's taking every ounce of strength not to lay him out there in the driveway so I can't imagine a year's worth of trauma and then coming back to

in my opinion a very selfish society at the moment I can imagine that would really enhance the the effects of being just dropped back in and removed from your guys yeah I think it's very hard I mean most of them actually didn't come back they you know they stayed within the milit in the military and deployed again and those were the guys who did the best the ones who actually got out of the military were the ones who suffered immediate consequences

psychologically and really struggled yeah the the observation you made again forgive me if this is a Navajo or the Iroquois you you said about the egalitarian system how the selfish I guess cancer that we have at the moment the kind of I want everything mentality how in a lot of native cultures that just a nomadically isn't isn't possible because you can't carry all this wealth with you and be any greed is punished because you're taken away from from the

rest of the tribe yeah I mean if you think I mean forget about the Native Americans if you just think about our evolutionary past the with it was it was nomadic we came out of Africa we spread throughout the world as a nomadic species living in groups of 30 40 50 people and there's no possibility to accumulate wealth because you have to carry everything that you own so there were no meaningful economic distinctions between people in those small groups and

certainly wealth could not be passed on to wealth and power could not be passed on to generations the people who had authority within the group had that authority they had earned it and they were and it was by and their authority came at the permission of the group and if you didn't like the way someone was running your little band of hunter-gatherers you were free to get up and go and maybe join your wife's clan or whatever whatever it might have been

so what that all changed at the advent of agriculture once you invest years of time and labor in digging irrigation dishes and you own you own now you only have claimed your property you invest your resources in planting that property at that point you can accumulate wealth there are distinctions of income between people of wealth between people and you can be taxed by leaders you could be oppressed by leaders because you know there's no way

you there's no way for you to leave you're too invested in your own property you can then also have authority structures and armies and police and that kind of thing they impose the will of a leader on the populace so it all starts to sort of fall apart with agriculture that that brought a galatarianism so so when you have a modern society like the United States in the eight seventeen hundred eighteen hundreds butting up right right up against

a stone-age culture that was way more egalitarian than we even are today it's an it's undeniably appealing and individuals will choose to to flee and and take up in these quote primitive societies that are actually in human terms you know extremely evolved yeah I mean we definitely devolved socially in that respect there's no question about that I think that's again the the yearning to be back in that group whether it's military or fire or police

or EMS is when you are I'll take my example if you're a fireman and you're lazy then you will be ostracized you know you'll be known throughout the apartment as the excuse my language but a piece of shit and you know if you don't quit then you'll you'll end up you know bouncing around from crew to crew and never really being happy and so having that bar set high and expecting other humans to act a certain way and then you retire you get hurt you you whatever

happens and you're in a quote-unquote regular world and you see the selfishness and the greed I think it is amplified and it makes I know it makes me extremely angry when when I see that kind of behavior yeah well listen to you there are very good evolutionary reasons for your anger someone who does not carry their weight who depends on the work of others and doesn't doesn't put into the welfare of the group is not only a drag on the group they can even

be an actual danger to the group and it's you know typically dealt with very very harshly yeah and they can definitely be a danger in those professions too I mean that's the person that supposed to be dragging you out if you go down or you know protecting you with their weapon if if you get shot well speaking of that actually that trans excuse me it transitions well to the other question you had a great example of an incident I think it was in

Vietnam where you had two group you had a I'm excuse me you had a special forces group and a lieutenant who was a regular lieutenant and they measured the stress levels of them when there was an impending attack yeah that's right that was in my book war and so what happened was when they heard that there was an attack coming the stress levels as measured by levels of cortisol and in urine I believe it was urine samples I believe it was the stress levels in the

lieutenant went up in the special forces soldiers that were that he was commanding stress levels went down he's all of a sudden they had a good they had enormous confidence in in their skills and they knew what they had to do and as soon as they got word that an attack was coming they started filling sandbags and cleaning their weapons and arranging their ammunition and whatever else they had to do stringing the claymores and the barbed wire and all that stuff they

got busy right and the stress levels went down because they were busy because they had something to do and then that the window for the attack came and it went and it became clear that the attack there was false information or that the plan said the enemy's plans had changed and things quieted down and then the lieutenant stress levels dropped and the menu was commanding their stress levels climbed back up to sort of ordinary high levels where they never knew what was

going to happen and so they were continually on edge but there was not much they could do about it yeah now it's finally very interesting because I think that really leans towards the importance of training in in any of the the first responder professions if you have drilled and drilled and drilled and you're prepared then when the time comes you get that clarity and like you said the there was almost an anxiety of wanting a fire wanting you know to to

get in a gunfight whatever your your thing is but when when the time occurs then you're ready and you're focused and in that Zen moment really that's right that's right now there's a lot of wiring a lot of adaptation for the for us to be highly functional in those moments and very very anxious when nothing's going on absolutely so yourself you obviously saw a huge amount of combat you you know were reporting so you weren't even carrying a weapon you were there getting

shot at and then having to take it when you came back did you have any incidents of PTSD yourself yeah I I think probably the first time I had problems was after Sierra Leone in 19 what was it 1999 I think it was yeah I I had some tough experiences there and I came back pretty rattled in 2000 I was in northern Afghanistan with Afad Shama suit who was killed right before 9-eleven I was there a year before a year prior and you know back then the Taliban had you know they

had Migs they had an Air Force they had tanks they had everything and we got hammered pretty hard a couple of times and I came back not knowing that I had been affected by it but I kept having panic attacks panic attacks in in in situations where I was felt for about a control like a crowded subway station that kind of thing I didn't connect it to combat because there there were no subway stations in Afghanistan in the fall of 2000 like I you know I just I

didn't it didn't I didn't think it was combat related because the situation was so different but I later found out that that's pretty typical that that people have panic attacks in unrelated situations where they don't feel like they're in control in combat you're not in control you feel like you could be killed without getting much of a vote in the matter and that feeling of helplessness is extremely traumatizing and so anything else that makes you feel

helpless I was in the ski gondola once and I completely freaked out and I'm not a particularly neurotic person but you know that I just completely freaked out in the ski gondola and then on the subway and it kept happening and that was I know you know years later I realized oh my god that was PTSD well yeah it definitely manifests itself in the most crazy ways from from you know just a mild feeling of sadness all the way through to such darkness that people

are taking their lives so I'm trying to trying to bring that out to the forefront I want to touch on something or a couple of things firstly the the incident that happened that took you away from journalism within the military itself yeah my my friend and colleague Tim Hetherington that I made restrepo with he was killed in combat in Libya he went over to cover the Libyan Civil War we were supposed to be there together at the last moment I couldn't go and he got

killed and so I got out of war recording you know within about an hour of finding out that he had died over there you know you know it gave me a lot of you know I felt very guilty about his death I felt like I should have been with him that I could have protected him that it should have been me a lot of classic feelings that I remember hearing from soldiers that I knew that I never quite understood why they felt that way and that's something I kind of got it

because I had those same reactions to Tim's death yeah and you said you you saw the effects of the people that were left behind as well yeah but I got out of war reporting because I saw the effect of Tim's death on everyone that he loved and I didn't want to risk the people that I loved I wanted to want to risk their their emotional welfare on you know a job that I that I was totally enamored of but it wasn't worth you know it wasn't worth other people's sacrifice

and so I stopped yeah and I think that's another area of PCSD that people don't recognize within the first responder groups is and I've had a I can remember a perfect example I had a young man literally dropped dead in a in a dog kennel and in a place that you drop off your dogs when you're going away for the day and he passed away we did everything we could and then we were writing the report after the call what and his family were about eight feet away just

you know absolutely in tears and beside themselves so being left with you know that the the fallout from the family and just being in this pain by their reaction of it I think that's another area that affects people they don't realize you couldn't save that person and that is so frustrating in itself but then seeing how that does radiate to everyone they love around them I think is even more heartbreaking yeah yeah you know I know combat men are

very very hard time because I don't like it are they getting traumatized are only early are they are they in combat are they firing firing their weapons potentially killing other people but they're also failing to save their their comrades and their brothers and then and that's extremely hard on them psychologically yeah that's it's you know it's a very hard thing to come to terms with because in the movies everyone survives and in real world not

so much now I just want to touch on something and please tell me if I'm stepping out of line here my darkest time I think during my career so far was when I was also going through a divorce and I know you were recently divorced did did the burden of what you'd seen up to that point magnify everything that happened there you know I think that my experiences in combat affected my marriage and I think the divorce affected my attempts to resolve the

emotional fallout from combat for sure they both affected each other I'm not sure in negative ways I mean I mean both things brought out an extreme emotionality in me and although he was unpleasant and sometimes awkward that outpouring of emotions I think ultimately was helpful for me it just didn't feel very good at the time but I think it was something it was a process that I kind of needed to do and I and I think only trauma was going to sort of

crack me open enough to have these feelings come out and know that the feelings were derived from my relationship with my wife were derived from my experiences in combat but of course for all of us there's a there are deep wells of sort of sadness and conflicted feelings and residual things from your family I mean you know it's a whole messy swamp inside all of us and you know we were you know very sensibly and wisely we wall that stuff off as well

as we can so it doesn't affect our daily lives but at the end of the day if something breaches those walls and this stuff comes gushing out you know in the sort of long term I think you're well served by that and both divorce and combat sort of served serve that purpose in my life and I really feel like I integrate it but at the end of the day I integrated what was deep inside me and what was sort of on my functional exterior like those two things got

connected and integrated in a way that right now it feels very very healthy and functional right and do you do you find your writing as a form of catharsis I did my first ever blog a couple weeks ago I did about PTSD and I did another one about sleep deprivation and both of them were rattling around my brain to the point I couldn't sleep and I literally you know vomited them out onto the keyboard and it felt pretty amazing after so do you have that same feedback

when you write about the the things you've seen I mean I mean sometimes the thing my writing process involves some pretty puzzling and intense emotions I guess that's a form of catharsis I never thought about it like that I wouldn't say that it catharsis to me is an emotional experience that kind of purges you of that emotion then you're free of it I wouldn't say it functions that way okay yeah that would be more of a temporary temporary version of okay well

I know that we're getting to the to the end of the time so I've got a couple of quick questions for you and I will let you get on your way thank you so much for the time you've already given us firstly so what is your next project after tribe you know I don't know I'm finishing up a documentary about the Syrian Civil War and about ISIS and I didn't shoot any of it but I'm acting in the capacity of director and and after that I'm not I'm actually not sure what

I'm gonna do next okay does that project have a title yet it's called hell on earth and it comes out with National Geographic this spring they are they have not announced their day yet okay fantastic and obviously you are a filmmaker and an author is there a book and a movie or documentary that you would recommend other than your own work oh my god I don't know how I could answer that in less than half an hour I mean there's so many amazing books out

there Peter Matheson is it was a longtime favorite author of mine Joan Didion John McPhee I mean any any books by any of those people are amazing Cormac McCarthy is a fiction writer he's just phenomenal dispatches by Michael Hare is a really fine book about war and I mean every year every year there are amazing documentaries come out I mean I can't even I can't even sort of think clearly enough to list the ones that have impressed me but you know there's

amazing there's really really good work being done and it's worth paying attention to I mean documentary film is a sort of very vibrant art form right now and we communicate a lot of important things that don't quite make it into the front pages of the newspaper through the two documentary film is a really important medium yeah yeah I agree completely as a 42 year old man it's crazy how you see the same story played out over and over again sometimes

subtly sometimes blatantly but they just remake the same damn fictional film so I think certainly after you've seen that story played out a few times the the documentary side really is a lot more satisfying than the fictional movies there's only so many you know Rambo style movies you can take before it just gets ridiculous yeah absolutely absolutely so and then what do you do to decompress or if you need a laugh what's your your outlet these days I you know

I've been athletic my whole life I run a lot I box I really like playing chess I play accordion and I read a lot right I wanted to touch on that cuz I knew you box and ran and that that's one of the things that I've guess let me rephrase that's one of the only things that they've really shown that that is good for that mental trauma is you know healthy body healthy mind and everyone that kind of really has an aggressive

exercise routine or love of sport seems to have a much better coping mechanism usually than than the ones that don't so I think that's an important thing to underline yeah I mean I think I mean I'm a doctor but I think you know intense exercise probably lowers cortisol levels and there's a whole hormonal response to to exercise that I think is probably really beneficial all the endorphins and all that stuff exercising increases your testosterone increases your adrenaline I

mean all that stuff feels really good in your bloodstream so I you know I'm not surprised that it's no that's part of a sort of healthy regimen yeah and I guess that also the tribal side I mean I think that's why things like CrossFit and mud runs things like that have gained in popularity because you're not putting in a head set of headphones and just sitting in the corner on your own I mean when you're boxing you're obviously interacting with all the other guys in

the gym too absolutely yeah exactly it's interesting you know like the boxing gym that I'm belong to it's an old old gym in New York and you know you have everything from like Wall Street guys who come in take off their suits and suit you know and work out to you know like kids from the ghetto in Brooklyn and but as soon as you walk in that door everyone's equal and the way you're seen by others is completely dependent on how you act in there and and that's a

very very healthy environment for everybody there's no prejudice in either direction no prejudice against the sort of like elevated Wall Street dudes and there's no prejudice against the poor people the sort of less fortunate to come in from poor parts of town like it's you were completely judged on your actions and that that to me is deeply is a sort of deeply tribal arrangement in the healthiest in the healthiest sense and probably reflects our evolutionary

past in a pretty accurate way yeah no I'd agree that completely I mean you know you put on a pair of shorts and a pair of gloves it's pretty uniform from there on now it's just about who can hit harder so all right well I'm gonna let you wrap up but if you wouldn't mind just tell people where they can find you and your work well my website is Sebastian younger calm and you can find all of my documentaries on my website or on iTunes or on Amazon Ristrepo

Corningal which way is the front line from here and the last patrol my books are the perfect storm and fire a death in Belmont war and my most recent book is called tribe about the community and yeah you know Amazon or Barnes and Noble whatever any any any bookstore has probably all of my books in them yeah Amazon definitely does because I've got them all on my Christmas list so the ones I haven't gotten so yeah I highly recommend anyone listening I think tribe

I put a post on Facebook today tribe basically should be read by every human being on the planet isn't already functioning as a tribe so I think I think everyone they took that on board I think right there we'd start making ourselves a more community-based civilization which I think we need to so on that note thank you so so much for taking time I know you're extremely busy and you lent your time to this very humble project of mine and I hope one

day we can touch base again in the future but for now I will let you go and thank you again from everyone the first responder community for you know a your book and be taking the time to talk to us hey well thank you I really enjoyed it good luck to you and to everybody who's listening you you