Sebastian Junger - War

Someone finally pointed out to Cortez that if he got hit, someone else was going to have to run through gunfire to save him, and the idea that he might get one of his brothers killed was enough to get him to knock it off. His reaction points to an irony of combat psychology, however — the logical downside of heroism. If you’re willing to lay down your life for another person, then their death is going to be more upsetting than the prospect of your own, and intense combat might incapacitate an entire unit through grief alone. Combat is such an urgent business, however, that most men simply defer the psychological issues until later. “A tired, cold, muddy rifleman goes forward with the bitter dryness of fear in his mouth into the mortar bursts and machine-gun fire of a determined enemy,” Stouffer wrote in The American Soldier . “A tremendous psychological mobilization is necessary to make an individual do this, not just once but many times. In combat, surely, if anywhere, we should be able to observe behavioral determinants of great significance.”

Some of those behavioral determinants — like a willingness to take risks — seem to figure disproportionately in the characters of young men. They are killed in accidents and homicides at a rate of 106 per 100,000 per year, roughly five times the rate of young women. Statistically, it’s six times as dangerous to spend a year as a young man in America than as a cop or a fireman, and vastly more dangerous than a one-year deployment at a big military base in Afghanistan. You’d have to go to a remote firebase like the KOP or Camp Blessing to find a level of risk that surpasses that of simply being an adolescent male back home.

Combat isn’t simply a matter of risk, though; it’s also a matter of mastery. The basic neurological mechanism that induces mammals to do things is called the dopamine reward system. Dopamine is a neurotransmitter that mimics the effect of cocaine in the brain, and it gets released when a person wins a game or solves a problem or succeeds at a difficult task. The dopamine reward system exists in both sexes but is stronger in men, and as a result, men are more likely to become obsessively involved in such things as hunting, gambling, computer games, and war. When the men of Second Platoon were moping around the outpost hoping for a firefight it was because, among other things, they weren’t getting their accustomed dose of endorphins and dopamine. They played video games instead. Women can master those skills without having pleasure centers in their brains — primarily the mesocorticolimbic center — light up as if they’d just done a line of coke.

One of the beguiling things about combat and other deep games is that they’re so complex, there’s no way to predict the outcome. That means that any ragtag militia, no matter how small and poorly equipped, might conceivably defeat a superior force if it fights well enough. Combat starts out as a fairly organized math problem involving trajectories and angles but quickly decays into a kind of violent farce, and the randomness of that farce can produce strange outcomes. “Every action produces a counteraction on the enemy’s part,” an American correspondent named Jack Belden wrote about combat during World War II. (Belden’s observations were so keen that he was quoted in The American Soldier .) “The thousands of interlocking actions throw up millions of little frictions, accidents and chances, from which there emanates an all-embracing fog of uncertainty.”

Combat fog obscures your fate — obscures when and where you might die — and from that unknown is born a desperate bond between the men. That bond is the core experience of combat and the only thing you can absolutely count on. The Army might screw you and your girlfriend might dump you and the enemy might kill you, but the shared commitment to safeguard one another’s lives is unnegotiable and only deepens with time. The willingness to die for another person is a form of love that even religions fail to inspire, and the experience of it changes a person profoundly. What the Army sociologists, with their clipboards and their questions and their endless meta-analyses, slowly came to understand was that courage was love. In war, neither could exist without the other, and that in a sense they were just different ways of saying the same thing. According to their questionnaires, the primary motivation in combat (other than “ending the task” — which meant they all could go home) was “solidarity with the group.” That far outweighed self-preservation or idealism as a motivator. The Army Research Branch cites cases of wounded men going AWOL after their hospitalization in order to get back to their unit faster than the military could get them there. A civilian might consider this an act of courage, but soldiers knew better. To them it was just an act of brotherhood, and there probably wasn’t much to say about it except, “Welcome back.”

Loyalty to the group drove men back into combat — and occasionally to their deaths — but the group also provided the only psychological refuge from the horror of what was going on. It was conceivably more reassuring to be under fire with men you trusted than to languish at some rear base with strangers who had no real understanding of war. It’s as if there was an intoxicating effect to group inclusion that more than compensated for the dangers the group had to face. A study conducted in the mid-1950s found that jumping out of a plane generated extreme anxiety in loosely bonded groups of paratroopers, but tightly bonded men mainly worried about living up to the standards of the group. Men were also found to be able to withstand more pain — in this case, electric shocks — when they were part of a close group than when they were alone.

In the early 1990s, an English anthropologist named Robin Dunbar theorized that the maximum size for any group of primates was determined by brain size — specifically, the size of the neocortex. The larger the neocortex, he reasoned, the more individuals with whom you could maintain personal relationships. Dunbar then compared primate brains to human brains and used the differential to predict the ideal size for a group of humans. The number he came up with was 147.8 people. Rounded up to 150, it became known as the Dunbar number, and it happened to pop up everywhere. A survey of ethnographic data found that precontact hunter-gatherers around the world lived in shifting communities that ranged from 90 to 221 people, with an average of 148. Neolithic villages in Mesopotamia were thought to have had around 150 people. The Roman army of the classical period used a formation of 130 men — called a maniple, or a double century — in combat. Hutterite communities in South Dakota split after reaching 150 people because, in their opinion, anything larger cannot be controlled by peer pressure alone.

Dunbar also found that the size of human hunter-gatherer communities was not spread evenly along a spectrum but tended to clump around certain numbers. The first group size that kept coming up in ethnographic data was thirty to fifty people — essentially a platoon. (Unlike hunter-gatherer communities, platoons are obviously single-sex, but the group identification may still function the same way.) Those communities were highly mobile but kept in close contact with three or four other communities for social and defensive purposes. The larger these groups were, the better they could defend themselves, up until the point where they got so big that they started to fracture and divide. Many such groups formed a tribe, and tribes either fought each other or formed confederacies against other tribes. The basic dichotomy of “us” versus “them” happened at the tribal level and was reinforced by differences in language and culture.