Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging

Junger opens Chapter 3 with an account of his discovery that he suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) after returning from covering the war in Afghanistan. He describes having panic attacks when in confined spaces; when they passed, he would experience outpourings of emotion at things that would otherwise have been innocuous. This experience was followed by dreams that were not scary but nonetheless triggered “a catastrophic outpouring of sorrow” (75). He would wake up trying to figure out:

[…] why feelings that seemed to belong to other people kept spilling out of me. I wasn’t a soldier—though I’d spent plenty of time with soldiers—and at that point I hadn’t lost any close friends in combat. And yet when I went to sleep, it was like I became part of some larger human experience that was utterly heartbreaking. It was far too much to acknowledge when I was awake. […] The human concern for others would seem to be the one story that, adequately told, no person can fully bear to hear (75-76).

He came to understand these powerful conscious and subconscious experiences in two ways. First, war is not exclusively toxic; it also ennobles and empowers “ancient human virtues” that can be “utterly intoxicating” to the people who experience them as well as instrumental to the well-being of human societies (77). Second, Junger came to learn that his post-traumatic stress was manifesting in an entirely interior manner because, outside of the war theater, there was no context within which war as an experience could be held in common with other people.

Acute PTSD, as Junger explains, makes mammals reactive to danger and keeps them safe until a threat has passed. Almost everyone exposed to trauma has this short-term reaction, Junger says; long-term PTSD, on the other hand, is maladaptive and relatively uncommon, with at most 20% of traumatized people suffering from long-term PTSD (80). The difficulty with war as compared with other forms of trauma is that the horror of combat is interwoven with enriching experiences. The injury thus becomes hard to distinguish from the positive aspects that come with it. By comparison, most rape survivors experience significant decline in their PTSD symptoms within weeks or months of their assault—a far faster recovery rate than soldiers have exhibited in the recent wars America has fought.

Junger cites a number of studies that bring him to an unexpected conclusion. Researchers have found that a person’s chance of getting chronic PTSD is a function of their experiences before going to war; more than 80% of psychiatric casualties in the first Gulf War came from support units that experienced little to no combat, and disability claims and combat intensity move in an almost inverse relationship with one another—as combat intensity and deaths decline, psychiatric casualty rates have gone up. For Junger, the evidence suggests that the problem with PTSD lies not with battlefield trauma but rather with reentry into American society. What people are suffering from, Junger concludes, is not the lingering effects of violence or a longing for danger, but rather the stress of social isolation that exceeds even the stress of combat. The unity and social connectedness that common danger often engenders is precisely what is largely missing in modern peacetime Western society.