Sebastian Junger: Why Soldiers Returning From War Have Trouble Adapting

hi there thank you for coming tonight it's a pleasure to be able to talk to you when I was young I had a uncle mentor figure in my life named Ellis he was half Lakota Sioux half Apache he was born on a wagon out west during the Depression and he was incredibly incredibly well-read and a real he had a tough life but he was a real fountain of wisdom and knowledge for me and at one point when I was young he said you know and this is the way he said it he said you know it's funny all throughout the history of this country along the frontier white people were always running off to join us Indians but we Indians never ran off to join the white people he said there was something about tribal society that even though it existed in the natural world that these were hunter-gatherers they lived tough lives there was something about tribal society that was incredibly appealing even to people from modern society that enjoyed the benefits of modern society that always stuck in my mind I like the idea of it I wondered if it was true I hoped it was true and I started to look into it and indeed even Benjamin Franklin wrote about this phenomenon that people kept absconding to the tribes and the reverse never happened I even found a letter from a woman who was kidnapped along the frontier adopted into a tribe and refused to be repatriated and she wrote a letter addressing the women of the colonies saying you women in your cities have none of the rights that I have I can marry when I want I can divorce what I want I can decide how my life is going to be and you can't there was a fund there seemed to be a fundamental egalitarianism in tribal society that really did not exist in the class-conscious Society of the colonies and of Amer and frankly of America today decades later I was a war reporter and I found myself at a remote outpost called risk uh PO in eastern Afghanistan I was with a platoon of combat infantry it was all men in this unit and there were 20 guys on this hilltop they were completely cut off from the world they had no internet they had no telephone lines back to their families back home that they had no electricity for a while they slept shoulder-to-shoulder in the dirt and they were injured an enormous amount of combat sometimes they didn't change their clothes for a month at a time it was Flies and tarantulas and combat and filth for 15 months with these guys and I was out there with them and when they came home back when they came back to Vicenza Italy where their base I caught up with him a few months later and as you can imagine they had some pretty good parties plans when they got back to Vicenza but after that wore off something else set in and they told me that as odd as this sounded they wanted to go back to Restrepo they did not want to come home to the United States and suddenly I remember Delos I remember what he said about the frontier and it occurred to me what is it about modern society which is so hard to come home to why do people who have been exposed to a different way of living not want to return to this way of living which clearly had so many enormous blessings and benefits I studied anthropology in college and I started to think about the problem in those terms and I realized a platoon in combat actually recreates our evolutionary past incredibly well when we know from archeology from anthropology that humans evolved where social species were social primates we evolved to live in groups of thirty or forty fifty people exactly the size of a platoon in a harsh environment completely dependent on one another for our safety that's the experience of a soldier in combat and so what they were experiencing was the incredible security of the communal experience primates do not survive in nature by themselves humans don't other primates don't if you're by yourself in the natural world you die our strengths are survival in some ways our greatness comes from the fact that we exist in groups we don't have claws we don't have big teeth but we can make tools and we band together we can communicate we can organize ourselves and in groups we survive what happens with soldiers is that they experience the communality of our past incredibly intensely and then we pick these people up and we drop them down in the great American suburb this is probably the first time in history that large numbers of people have the luxury if you want to call it that and the luxury of sleeping completely by themselves in their own air-conditioned bedroom that is not what we evolved for for hundreds of thousands of years humans have slept in groups their security came from the fact that they were in a group I slept I literally slept better I slept more peaceably in Afghanistan in an outpost that got attacked something like three or four hundred times during the deployment I literally slept better with in those close quarters with those men than the times I've gone camping by myself in the woods of New England nothing's going to kill me in the woods of ink New England but the wiring my brain does not know that and I feel in danger so when you look at modern society what you have is a society where the individual does not need a community in order to survive and the community does not need individuals in order to remain intact in order to get through life in order to get through the tasks that need to be done and because of that individualism in society we have enormous personal liberty which is a good thing but on the downside we suffer from a kind of chronic alienation so as wealth goes up in a society the suicide rate goes up as wealth and modernity go up in a society the depression rate tends to go up the US military has a PTSD rate estimated to be around 25% one in four soldiers are thought to suffer from PTSD that is odd because only around 10% of the military actually engages in combat there's a real possibility that some of the very real psychological troubles that our soldiers are facing when they come home isn't necessarily derived from trauma I mean obviously as a species were wired to overcome enormous hardship and trauma if that were not true we wouldn't exist we would not have survived it may be that they're suffering from a kind of transition disorder and if they are they're not alone Peace Corps volunteers when they come back from their service overseas typically in a small communal environment a village in the developing world experienced a depression rate of around 25% it used to be called culture shock it's very very hard to come back to modern society because you you you live you're stripped of the safety of communal existence I talked to a Vietnam vet who he was a l'heure long-range reconnaissance patrol incredibly intense job I dropped behind enemy lines three or four man teams out there for weeks at a time no air support no medic this guy did several tours and he came back to the United States he felt so alienated that he eventually returned to Vietnam and married the daughter of a Vietcong commander and he said in that in that woman's village he finally found his tribe he felt like he belongs somewhere and finally I talked to a young woman at one point who suffered from cancer and when she got sick her community her tribe her family gathered around her to support her as she went through the awful process of chemotherapy and she told me this story and she said you know she said I'd be I beat the odds I made it and she looked at me really sadly and said and now I miss being sick so if you have people who missed cancer who missed war who missed frankly the incredibly difficult day-to-day life of a poor African living in a poor African village if you have people who miss those things something is missing in their lives now I don't want you to think that we are somehow physically genetically different from people in tribal societies we have not changed in any significant way genetically physically as a species in about 20,000 years we haven't even beginning to make genetic changes to accommodate the change in diet when agriculture was invented 10,000 years ago we are just getting around to adapting to that so we are the same as our Stone Age ancestors so that means that the wiring that we have that that allows us to thrive in small small communal group communal groups that is still intact that's still there so when you when you take modern society and collapse it you don't see chaos right you see the interesting thing about humans is the worse things get the better people act pro-social behaviors come out when they're needed when human society as a whole or small communities are faced with catastro in hardship and danger the Blitz in London 30,000 Londoners were killed by German bombs over a six-month period you all know the stories horror show the authorities were worried that psychiatric disorders would would explode during the Blitz that that that there'd be mass psychiatric casualties during the Blitz and actually the opposite happened during the bombings in those six months admissions to psych wards went down during the Blitz because one surprise English officials said we have a neurotics driving ambulances my first war the first war that I covered was sorry Bo and in the Bosnians of civil war a besieged city that went through hell one-fifth of the population were killed or wounded by the enemy that surrounded the city and I recently talked to a woman who survived that she was badly wounded she survived it she went through hell and she said to me she literally lowered her voice and said to me you know the funny thing is we all missed the war because we were better people during the war we looked out for each other we were more generous we acted better the key to this is that when you act on behalf of a group you feel good you feel good for some very very strong evolutionary reasons because it means you're part of a group and therefore you're safe if you're needed and you're acting well in a group you are safe that is the basic evolutionary equation that you have to remember and then you have to look at modern society and ask um how much do we provide the opportunity for people to do that for people to act that way we're not going to burn down the suburbs we're not going to call living lean twos we are the society we are and there are enormous benefits that come with that and I think I will end with this I think there is one thing we can do to make a change a societal change that allows us all to feel like we're more part of a tribe if you use that word that we all have a shared interest in the future common concerns and that is no one in a community where everyone depends on each other speaks with contempt about other people in that community at at risk Rep oh I never heard a soldier speak with contempt about another soldier because none of they didn't know like each other but they never spoke with contempt you don't speak with contempt about someone you may need tomorrow to save your life or vice versa and I think one of the things honestly and I don't care what your politics are I think on either side it doesn't matter I think one of the things that is seriously affecting our sense of community our sense of belonging that something is the incredibly disrespectful rhetoric that is occurring at the top levels of government and of our society if it is a threat to our democracy in a way that Isis never will be because when people speak with contempt about a rival politician or about sections segments of our country when you do that you are basically saying listen there's no there there like there's no this is not a unity this is a division this is a is a collection of competing interests and some are more deserving than others that's what you're saying when you speak with contempt and that will be the ruin of the country we don't stop it and we the people have empowered very powerful people and we can withdraw that power and we have to remember that when we insist on certain standards of behavior in this amazing amazing country that we have thank you very much it's a pleasure talking to you [Applause]

Channel: Chicago Ideas

Views: 39,185

Rating: 4.9350915 out of 5

Keywords: veterans, va, sebastian junger, tribe

Id: agNwB5xR9H4

Length: 15min 21sec (921 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 27 2017