War

by Sebastian Junger

The offers of weapons started on my first trip and continued throughout the entire year. Sometimes it was a hand grenade “just in case.” Other times it was an offer to jump on the 240 during the next contact. (“We’ll just show you where to shoot.”) Once I told Moreno that if I weren’t married I’d have been out there the full fifteen months, and he laughed and said that in that case, they’d definitely have me carrying a weapon. The idea of spending long stretches in the Korengal without shooting anything made as little sense to the soldiers as, say, going to a Vicenza whorehouse and just hanging out in the lobby. Guns were the point, the one entirely good thing of the whole shitty year, and the fact that reporters don’t carry them, shoot them, or accept the very generous offers to “go ahead and get some” on the .50 just made soldiers shake their heads. It was a hard thing to explain to them that maybe you could pass someone a box of ammo during a firefight or sneak 100 rounds on a SAW down at the firing range, but as a journalist the one thing you absolutely could not do was carry a weapon. It would make you a combatant rather than an observer, and you’d lose the right to comment on the war later with any kind of objectivity.