Our lonely society makes it hard to come home from war | Sebastian Junger
Sebastian Junger has seen war up close, and he knows the impact that battlefield trauma has on soldiers. But he suggests there's another major cause of pain for veterans when they come home:...
==========
I worked as a war reporter for 15 years before I realized that I really had a problem. There was something really wrong with me. This was about a year before 9/11, and America wasn't at war yet. We weren't talking about PTSD. We were not yet talking about the effect of trauma and war on the human psyche. I'd been in Afghanistan for a couple of months with the Northern Alliance as they were fighting the Taliban. And at that point the Taliban had an air force, they had fighter planes, they had tanks, they had artillery, and we really got hammered pretty badly a couple of times. We saw some very ugly things. But I didn't really think it affected me. I didn't think much about it. I came home to New York, where I live. Then one day I w...
==========
I worked as a war reporter for 15 years before I realized that I really had a problem. There was something really wrong with me. This was about a year before 9/11, and America wasn't at war yet. We weren't talking about PTSD. We were not yet talking about the effect of trauma and war on the human psyche. I'd been in Afghanistan for a couple of months with the Northern Alliance as they were fighting the Taliban. And at that point the Taliban had an air force, they had fighter planes, they had tanks, they had artillery, and we really got hammered pretty badly a couple of times. We saw some very ugly things. But I didn't really think it affected me. I didn't think much about it. I came home to New York, where I live. Then one day I w...
