Sebastian Junger

This short book is a series of essays that came about as the author hiked with various individuals from Washington, DC to the beginnings of the Ohio River. They hiked in a series of shorter trips along railroad lines and much of the trek was through rural Pennsylvania, an area quite familiar to me. The book is divided into three sections: Run, Fight, Think.

Much of the first section of the book takes place along the Juniata River, the name of which comes from the term Standing Stone from one show more of the Native languages of the area. This part also reflects upon the Native Americans and their cultures, who were here before the European settlers arrived. The Juniata once was the boundary of the wilderness area. It was the beginning of where European settlers would head to avoid colonial authority. In doing so, they were slowly imposing their own oppression upon each other as they sought to defend themselves in this wilderness from the people who were already here. There are pithy thoughts about the nature of freedom, such as "...but lots of things that look like freedom when you are with other people are just a form of exile when you're alone....But the inside joke about freedom....is that you're always trading obedience to one thing for obedience to another" And another profound statement relative to current events: "The idea that we can enjoy the benefits of society while owing nothing in return is literally infantile. Only children owe nothing."

The second section, "Fight" is summed up by his quote about the origins of the word freedom: "comes from vridom, which means 'beloved' in medieval German, and is thought to reflect the idea that only people in one's immediate group were considered worthy of having rights or protection." So this brings us to an understanding of the way that claims on freedom often assume an us vs. them mentality. Or tribalism where one group is pitted against another, hence "Fight".

The final secion, "Think" relates to the tension between freedom and oppression. "The central problem for human freedom is that groups that are well organized enough to defend themselves against others are well organized enough to oppress their own. Power is so readily abused that one could almost say that its concentration is antitheticl to freedom. Democracy --both in its modern form and in its original for --is an attempt to balance the two."

Without naming names or pointing fingers, the author presents some interesting thoughts that are reflective of the political climate in the US and the world today. I found it to be very thought provoking. Oh...and I liked that they actually stopped at a bar in the small town where I grew up. show less

Sebastian Junger is one of the best writers of nonfiction out there today. His ability to describe with crystal clarity the ordeals of men in extreme circumstances is unsurpassed. He has the ability to put the reader into the middle of the action, seeing and feeling what his subjects are experiencing. I can still clearly visualize dramatic events that he describes in 'The Perfect Storm' even though it has been over ten years since I read it.

I particularly enjoy anything that Junger as show more written about Afghanistan. He was on the ground with the Northern Alliance writing about this war before most Americans had even heard of Osama bin Ladin or the Taliban.

'War' does not disappoint. Junger's description of soldiers fighting an intractable enemy in this 'axle-breaking, helicopter-crashing, spirit-killing, mind-bending terrain that few military plans survive intact even for an hour' is magnificent. In 'War' we come to know the soldiers who serve, fight, and often die in the Korengal Valley. He also gives us insights into the enemy we are fighting there and the civilians who live in such isolation that some can't tell the difference between American soldiers and Russians. In their minds, invaders are invaders.

Junger does a very good job of keeping any opinions he may have about the war out of his narrative. His job is to tell the story of the men of Battle Company and their tour of duty in the Korengal Valley and he does it very well. In fact, he does it so well that I felt like I was on a see-saw. In one minute he describes the valley and I really want to be there to see it. In the next minute, he describes troops under fire in a devastating ambush and I'm glad I'm on the other side if the earth.

The third section ‘Love’ provides one of the most insightful psychological assessments I have read of men in combat and of the concept of unit cohesion. What those outside the unit consider heroism, a soldier simply considers his duty. To do less is to let down his brothers.

If you want a 'boots on the ground' description of life at the tip of the spear in Afghanistan, then this is the book you must read. Great job, Sebastian. show less

In this little book, Junger deftly summarizes a lot of themes about what humans need, how they cope, and how our modern world fails to acknowledge and/or provide them: psychological, sociological, political.

It's in no way unfair, he gives modernity props where they're due. It's just that, like all human endeavors, it's imperfect and because of its pace, we've gone down certain roads much more quickly than we can adapt to (culturally, but obviously evolutionarily too) and lost sight of how show more to be, for lack of a better way to put it, human to one another.

As the subtitle hints, he focuses on those returning home, which in this day and age, frequently means soldiers but also includes, for example, Peace Corps volunteers. However, the issues raised apply more broadly and anyone who cares about our modern discontents should take a couple hours to read this. show less

It doesn't take Sebastian Junger's quotations from Moby-Dick and the Bible, used to open some of his chapters in The Perfect Storm, to make you realise that the sea and the men who navigate it has long been fertile ground for literary endeavours. The true story recorded in Junger's breakout piece of narrative journalism would be innately fascinating told by any hand: a crew of six hardened fishermen aboard a small commercial fishing vessel find themselves at the mercy of a once-in-a-century show more "meteorological hell" (pg. 104) in the open Atlantic. A storm – the "perfect storm", in fact (pg. 150) – a confluence of various extreme weather fronts over our doomed everymen, including a hurricane, that ultimately sinks the Andrea Gail and its occupants without trace.

That the ship and its men are lost is not a spoiler, for want of a better term, for how could it be otherwise? Junger goes into great detail about the circumstances surrounding the loss of the Andrea Gail and its souls: how such a 'perfect' storm brewed; about so-called 'rogue' waves and how even top-of-the-line ships can have their backs broken by them; about how oil tankers and even aircraft carriers would be at risk faced with a single big wave, let alone a small fishing boat facing countless numbers of them, from all directions, relentlessly over the course of many hours.

A mere recitation of some of the facts Junger unpacks is mind-boggling: "the combined nuclear arsenals of the United States and the former Soviet Union don't contain enough energy to keep a hurricane going for one day" (pg. 102); on one large ship, the storm peeled shipping containers "open like sardine cans, forty feet above the surface" (pg. 114); during a rescue elsewhere in the storm, the waves took the man in the water thirty feet higher than the rescuers in a hovering helicopter (pg. 197). The waves in the Perfect Storm topped 100 feet, among the highest waves ever recorded (pg. 119). There may well have been higher ones throughout history, but they are so unpredictable and so devastating that those who likely encountered them did not live to tell it. I read part of Junger's book at work, in the break-room of my office building, and was stunned to realise, looking down, that the waves which struck the men of the Andrea Gail would be almost twice as high as from where I stood. I'm not of a mind to quit my desk job and join the fishing fleet, let me tell you.

I took my time reading the book, because even the contemplation of any single part of this scenario is frightening. To know that these people – real people, to those lives Junger devotes many pages – actually faced that, at their end, in the dark, is unimaginable. Junger, nevertheless, undertakes a number of strategies to bridge the imagination gap. His account of the final moments of the Andrea Gail, he freely admits, can only be conjecture, but he bases his conjecture on research and on the experiences of those who survived similar events, including fishermen who counted the men of the Andrea Gail among their friends. He supplements this with in-depth yet readable information on sword-fishing, search-and-rescue, and meteorology. By the time the reader finishes the book, Junger has given them so much relevant information that even the most complacent reader no longer wonders how mere water and wind could sink a modern sea-going vessel. In fact, the reader likely goes to the opposite extreme, and wonders how or why any man would ever choose to lose sight of shore. When we first read, on page 70, of how "more people are killed on fishing boats, per capita, than in any other job in the United States", we think of possible negligence and safety measures and technological advances. By the end, we look back on that quote and reach, like the fishermen often do, for superstition, fate, and a primal respect for the naked forces which brawl across the world.

Junger supplements his account of the men of the Andrea Gail with other "nightmarish, white-knuckle business" which took place during the Perfect Storm (pg. 182), not least the afore-mentioned helicopter rescue. Knowing that other men died during the storm helps provide some perspective: this is not a romance of the sea, a tragic tale that affected the Andrea Gail especially, the ship a unique icon marked out for some moral lesson about the hubris of man. Junger strips away pretensions, sentimentality and literary artifice; he soberly constructs an environment where the smallness of man and the arbitrariness of the ocean – a place where 70-foot waves roam "like surly giants" (pg. 138) – are the only possible conclusions. When the Andrea Gail goes down, there is no music playing, no nobility on display; only desperation and futile human struggle. This is one great advantage the book has over its movie adaptation of the same name. Not only does the movie have the music playing, but it feels obliged to add some counterfeit drama to the story: George Clooney's character is portrayed as having deliberately headed into the storm when he could have escaped it. Hollywood abhors a narrative vacuum; if those men had to die on screen there had to be a token moral lesson behind it, and the token they reached for was hubris, and perhaps greed.

Junger, in contrast – and to his great credit – has no qualms about facing the reality of the true story. The circumstances he has laid out show us clearly that the Andrea Gail had no time or ability to escape; not only were storms an occupational hazard for seasoned fishermen, but the boat steps into the Perfect Storm "the way one might step into a room" (pg. 105). Such turns of phrase are not infrequent in the book, and Junger's deployment of them does much to keep the reader anchored during the wild unfathomability of the events described. Nowhere is the depth and reality of the tragedy more apparent than in the sequence of pages where, with the Andrea Gail going down with all hands, Junger dissects, at torturous length, the sensations and the medical immediacy of drowning (pp140-6). Strange as it might sound, I mean the word 'torturous' positively; Junger's unavoidable forensic reality mimics the helplessness and the banal tragedy of these men in that moment. It's so potent it's unbearable.

And yet, strangely, it's not voyeuristic; Junger recognises a wound is healed by being touched with care, not by being ignored. The deaths are appalling – and they were real men – but it would be disrespectful if the story was told using euphemisms and polite evasions. This is great, mature writing, and throughout The Perfect Storm Junger achieves a balancing act of respect towards the dead, respect towards the sea, and respect towards what the reader can take in (emotionally and meteorologically). I mentioned at the start of my review that stories of the sea have long been fertile ground for our imagination, and the story of The Perfect Storm would have been arresting even if told by a second-rate writer. That Junger is able to add writing of real calibre to the piece makes it truly special. show less