Sebastian Junger - War

It’s a stressful way to live but once it’s blown out your levels almost everything else looks boring. O’Byrne knows himself: when he gets bored he starts drinking and getting into fights, and then it’s only a matter of time until he’s back in the system. If that’s the case, he might as well stay in the system — a better one — and actually move upward. I suggest a few civilian jobs that offer a little adrenaline — wilderness trip guide, firefighter — but we both know it’s just not the same. We are at one of the most exposed outposts in the entire U.S. military, and he’s crawling out of his skin because there hasn’t been a good firefight in a week. How do you bring a guy like that back into the world?

Civilians balk at recognizing that one of the most traumatic things about combat is having to give it up. War is so obviously evil and wrong that the idea there could be anything good to it almost feels like a profanity. And yet throughout history, men like Mac and Rice and O’Byrne have come home to find themselves desperately missing what should have been the worst experience of their lives. To a combat vet, the civilian world can seem frivolous and dull, with very little at stake and all the wrong people in power. These men come home and quickly find themselves getting berated by a rear-base major who’s never seen combat or arguing with their girlfriend about some domestic issue they don’t even understand. When men say they miss combat, it’s not that they actually miss getting shot at — you’d have to be deranged — it’s that they miss being in a world where everything is important and nothing is taken for granted. They miss being in a world where human relations are entirely governed by whether you can trust the other person with your life.

It’s such a pure, clean standard that men can completely remake themselves in war. You could be anything back home — shy, ugly, rich, poor, unpopular — and it won’t matter because it’s of no consequence in a firefight, and therefore of no consequence, period. The only thing that matters is your level of dedication to the rest of the group, and that is almost impossible to fake. That is why the men say such impossibly vulgar things about each other’s sisters and mothers. It’s one more way to prove nothing can break the bond between them; it’s one more way to prove they’re not alone out there.

War is a big and sprawling word that brings a lot of human suffering into the conversation, but combat is a different matter. Combat is the smaller game that young men fall in love with, and any solution to the human problem of war will have to take into account the psyches of these young men. For some reason there is a profound and mysterious gratification to the reciprocal agreement to protect another person with your life, and combat is virtually the only situation in which that happens regularly. These hillsides of loose shale and holly trees are where the men feel not most alive — that you can get skydiving — but the most utilized. The most necessary. The most clear and certain and purposeful. If young men could get that feeling at home, no one would ever want to go to war again, but they can’t. So here sits Sergeant Brendan O’Byrne, one month before the end of deployment, seriously contemplating signing back up.

“I prayed only once in Afghanistan,” O’Byrne wrote me after it was all over. “It was when Restrepo got shot, and I prayed to god to let him live. But God, Allah, Jehovah, Zeus or whatever a person may call God wasn’t in that valley. Combat is the devil’s game. God wanted no part. That’s why our prayers weren’t answered: the only one listening was Satan.”

In November 1943, ten rifle companies from the First Infantry Division arrived in England to prepare for the invasion of Nazi-occupied France. The men had fought their way across North Africa and Italy and were now poised to spearhead the biggest and most decisive action of World War II. (The men had seen so much combat that a sour refrain had begun to make the rounds: “The Army consists of the First Infantry Division and eight million replacements.”) As these men prepared for the invasion, they were asked to fill out questionnaires prepared by a new entity known as the Army Research Branch. The goal of the study was to determine whether mental attitude among soldiers was any predictor of combat performance. Similar questionnaires were also given to new units who had just arrived from the United States — “cherries,” as they were already known back then.

Several months later these men sprinted into the artillery and machine-gun fire that was plowing up the beaches of Normandy, overran the German positions, and eventually went on to liberate Paris. Combat losses over the course of those two months were around 60 percent, and even higher for officers. What interested sociologists at the Research Branch, however, were non -combat losses — men who went mad from trauma and fear. For every four men felled by bullets there was, on average, one removed from the battlefield for psychological reasons. Such losses varied from unit to unit and were thought to closely reflect the fighting ability of those groups. The Army wanted to know whether that ability could be determined beforehand , simply by asking questions.

It could, as it turned out. The Research Branch — which went on to publish its findings in a classic volume called The American Soldier: Combat and Its Aftermath , edited by sociologist Samuel Stouffer — found that in ten out of twelve regiments, companies with poor attitudes were far more likely than others to suffer noncombat casualties. Stouffer calculated that the chance of that happening randomly, with no statistical connection between the two, was less than 2 percent. The study went on, questionnaire after questionnaire, to attempt to pry from the minds of thousands of soldiers what exactly enabled them to function in an environment as hellish and confusing as modern combat. All things being equal, some men make better soldiers than others, and some units perform better than others. The traits that distinguish those men, and those units, could be called the Holy Grail of combat psychology. They could be called the basis for what people loosely refer to as “courage.”

An Israeli study during the 1973 Yom Kippur War found that high-performing soldiers were more intelligent, more “masculine,” more socially mature, and more emotionally stable than average men. Moreover, attack divers who exhibited behavioral problems in tightly run kibbutz communities turned out to be far better fighters than “conformist” divers who never got in trouble. At the other end of the spectrum, eight out of ten men who suffered psychological collapse in combat had a problem at home: a pregnant wife, a financial crisis, a recent death in the family. Those collapses were most likely to be caused not by a near-death experience, as one might expect, but by the combat death of a close friend. That was certainly true at Restrepo as well. Nearly every man had missed death by a margin of inches, but those traumas were almost never discussed. Rather, it was the losses in the unit that lingered in men’s minds. The only time I saw a man cry up there was when I asked Pemble whether he was glad the outpost had been named after Doc Restrepo. Pemble nodded, tried to answer, and then his face just went into his hands.

Cortez was another man who struggled with the loss of Restrepo. “His death was a bit hard on us,” he told me, months later, with typical understatement. “We loved him like a brother. I actually saw him as an older brother, and after he went down, there was a time I didn’t care about anything. I didn’t care about getting shot or if I died over there. I’d run into the open and not care and I’d be getting chewed out by a team leader and not care. I wasn’t scared, honestly, but I just didn’t care. I didn’t care if I died or not.”