WAR

by Sebastian Junger

Given that quarter-second cutoff, the distance at which you might literally be able to “dodge a bullet” is around 800 yards. You’d need a quarter second to register the tracer coming toward you—at this point the bullet has traveled 200 yards—a quarter second to instruct your muscles to react—the bullet has now traveled 400 yards—and half a second to actually move out of the way. The bullet you dodge will pass you with a distinctive snap. That’s the sound of a small object breaking the sound barrier inches from your head.

When something scary and unexpected happens, every person does exactly the same thing: they blink, crouch, bend their arms, and clench their fists. The face also sets itself into what is known as a “fear grimace”: the pupils dilate, the eyes widen, the brow goes up, and the mouth pulls back and down.

In those moments their higher brain functions decided that the threat required action rather than immobility and ramped everything up: pulse and blood pressure to heart-attack levels, epinephrine and norepinephrine levels through the roof, blood draining out of the organs and flooding the heart, brain, and major muscle groups.

It’s an adrenaline rush like you can’t imagine.”

Complex motor skills start to diminish at 145 beats per minute, which wouldn’t matter much in a swordfight but could definitely ruin your aim with a rifle. At 170 beats per minute you start to experience tunnel vision, loss of depth perception, and restricted hearing. And at 180 beats per minute you enter a netherworld where rational thought decays, bowel and bladder control are lost, and you start to exhibit the crudest sorts of survival behaviors: freezing, fleeing, and submission.

“The members of this Special Forces team demonstrated an overwhelming emphasis on self-reliance, often to the point of omnipotence,” they wrote. “These subjects were action-oriented individuals who characteristically spent little time in introspection. Their response to any environmental threat was to engage in a furor of activity which rapidly dissipated the developing tension.”

It’s only on rear bases that you hear any belligerent talk about patriotism or religion and it’s only on rear bases where, as a journalist, you might catch any flak for your profession.

Human terrain and physical terrain interact in such complex ways that commanders have a hard time calculating the effect of their actions more than a few moves out.

It has been suggested that one Taliban strategy is to lure NATO forces into accidentally killing so many civilians that they lose the fight for the human terrain. The physical terrain would inevitably follow.

The Korengal Valley is ten kilometers long and ten kilometers wide—about half the size of Staten Island—and military control ends at Kilometer Sixty-two. The six-two gridline, as it is known, bisects the valley at Aliabad; north of there you’re more or less safe, south of there you’re almost guaranteed to get shot

The other major division is lengthwise, with the enemy more or less controlling the eastern side of the valley and the Americans controlling the west. The Americans, in other words, control about one-quarter of the Korengal.

Most Korengalis have never left their village and have almost no understanding of the world beyond the mouth of the valley.

The valley had enormous symbolic meaning because of the loss of nineteen American commandos there, and some soldiers suspected that their presence in the valley was the U.S. military’s way of punishing locals for what had happened on the Abas Ghar. For both sides, the battle for the Korengal developed a logic of its own that sucked in more and more resources and lives until neither side could afford to walk away.

For every technological advantage held by the Americans, the Taliban seemed to have an equivalent or a countermeasure. Apache helicopters have thermal imaging that reveals body heat on the mountainside, so Taliban fighters disappear by covering themselves in a blanket on a warm rock. The Americans use unmanned drones to pinpoint the enemy, but the Taliban can do the same thing by watching the flocks of crows that circle American soldiers, looking for scraps of food. The Americans have virtually unlimited firepower, so the Taliban send only one guy to take on an entire firebase. Whether or not he gets killed, he will have succeeded in gumming up the machine for yet one more day.

It sounds dishonorable only if you imagine that modern war is about honor; it’s not.

War is a lot of things and it’s useless to pretend that exciting isn’t one of them. It’s insanely exciting. The machinery of war and the sound it makes and the urgency of its use and the consequences of almost everything about it are the most exciting things anyone engaged in war will ever know.

There’s so much human energy involved—so much courage, so much honor, so much blood —you could easily go a year here without questioning whether any of this needs to be happening in the first place.

It’s all very simple and straightforward, and it’s around this time that killing begins to make a kind of sense to me. It’s tempting to view killing as a political act because that’s where the repercussions play out, but that misses the point: a man behind a rock touched two wires to a battery and tried to kill me—to kill us. There are other ways to understand what he did, but none of them overrides the raw fact that this man wanted to negate everything I’d ever done in my life or might ever do. It felt malicious and personal in a way that combat didn’t.

Fighting another human being is not as hard as you think when they’re trying to kill you. People think we were cheering because we just shot someone, but we were cheering because we just stopped someone from killing us. That person will no longer shoot at us anymore.

Society can give its young men almost any job and they’ll figure how to do it. They’ll suffer for it and die for it and watch their friends die for it, but in the end, it will get done. That only means that society should be careful about what it asks for.

Soldiers themselves are reluctant to evaluate the costs of war (for some reason, the closer you are to combat the less inclined you are to question it), but someone must.

“I like the firefights,” O’Byrne admitted to me once. We’d been talking about going home and whether he was going to get bored. “I know,” he added, probably realizing how that sounded. “Saddest thing in the world.”

There was no such thing as personal safety out there; what happened to you happened to everyone.

In a study of bravery conducted by the U.S. military in the forties, the author, Samuel Stouffer, had this to say about personal responsibility: “Any individual’s action which had conceivable bearing on the safety of others became a matter of public concern for the group as a whole. Isolated as he was from contact with the rest of the world, the combat man was thrown back on his outfit to meet the various affectional needs… that he would normally satisfy with his family and friends. The group was thus in a favored position to enforce its standards on the individual.”

Soldiers see it the other way around: either you’re doing your duty or you’re a coward. There’s no other place to go.

Collective defense can be so compelling—so addictive, in fact—that eventually it becomes the rationale for why the group exists in the first place.

Combat infantry carry the most, eat the worst, die the fastest, sleep the least, and have the most to fear. But they’re the real soldiers, the only ones conducting what can be considered “war” in the most classic sense, and everyone knows it.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The cause doesn’t have to be righteous and battle doesn’t have to be winnable; but over and over again throughout history, men have chosen to die in battle with their friends rather than to flee on their own and survive.

A soldier needs to have his basic physical needs met and needs to feel valued and loved by others.

The men know Pakistan is the root of the entire war, and that is just about the only topic they get political about.