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).