Sebastian Junger
Author
1962-01-17
Quotes by Sebastian Junger
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Modern society has perfected the art of making people not feel necessary.
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Women tend to act heroically within their own moral universe, regardless of whether anyone else knows about it - donating more kidneys to nonrelatives than men do, for example. Men, on the other hand, are far more likely to risk their lives at a moment's notice, and that reaction is particularly strong when others are watching, or when they are part of a group.
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The problem is that it's hard to aim a rifle when your heart is pounding, which points to an irony of modern combat: it does extraordinarily violent things to the human body but requires almost dead calm to execute well.
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Stripped to its essence, combat is a series of quick decisions and rather precise actions carried out in concert with ten or twelve other men. In that sense it's much more like football than, say, like a gang fight. The unit that choreographs their actions best usually wins. They might take casualties, but they win. That choreography— you lay down fire while I run forward, then I cover you while you move your team up— is so powerful that it can overcome enormous tactical deficits. There is choreography for storming Omaha Beach, for taking out a pillbox bunker, and for surviving an L-shaped ambush at night on the Gatigal. The choreography always requires that each man make decisions based not on what's best for him, but on what's best for the group. If everyone does that, most of the group survives. If no one does, most of the group dies. That, in essence, is combat.
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I know what coming back to America from a war zone is like because I've done it so many times. First, there's a kind of shock at the comfort and affluence that we enjoy, but that is followed by the dismal realization that we live in a society that is basically at war with itself. People speak with incredible contempt about, depending on their views: the rich, the poor, the educated, the foreign born, the President, or the entire US government. It is a level of contempt that is usually reserved for enemies in wartime except that now it is applied to our fellow citizens. Unlike criticism, contempt is particularly toxic because it assumes a moral superiority in the speaker. Contempt is often directed at people who have been excluded from a group or declared unworthy its benefits. Contempt is often used by governments to provide rhetorical cover for torture or abuse. Contempt is one of four behaviors that, statistically, can predict divorce in married couples. People who speak with contempt for one another will probably not remain united for long.
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Each Javelin round costs $80,000, and the idea that it's fired by a guy who doesn't make that in a year at a guy who doesn't make that in a lifetime is somehow so outrageous it almost makes the war seem winnable.
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...much of modern military tactics is geared toward maneuvering the enemy into a position where they can essentially be massacred from safety. (pg. 140)
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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, but someone must. That evaluation, ongoing and unadulterated by politics, may be the one thing a country absolutely owes the soldiers who defend its borders.
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War is a lot of things and it's useless to pretend that exciting isn't one of them. (pg. 144)
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The army consists of the first infantry division and eight million replacements.
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Maybe the ultimate wound is the one that makes you miss the war you got it in.
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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.
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War is life multiplied by some number that no one has ever heard of.
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The problem with fear, though, is that it isn't any one thing. Fear has a whole taxonomy— anxiety, dread, panic, foreboding— and you could be braced for one form and completely fall apart facing another.
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...much of modern military tactics is geared toward maneuvering the enemy into a position where they can essentially be massacred from safety. (pg. 140)
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War is life multiplied by some number that no one has ever heard of.
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The problem with fear, though, is that it isn't any one thing. Fear has a whole taxonomy— anxiety, dread, panic, foreboding— and you could be braced for one form and completely fall apart facing another.
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War is a lot of things and it's useless to pretend that exciting isn't one of them. (pg. 144)
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The problem is that it's hard to aim a rifle when your heart is pounding, which points to an irony of modern combat: it does extraordinarily violent things to the human body but requires almost dead calm to execute well.
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I know what coming back to America from a war zone is like because I've done it so many times. First, there's a kind of shock at the comfort and affluence that we enjoy, but that is followed by the dismal realization that we live in a society that is basically at war with itself. People speak with incredible contempt about, depending on their views: the rich, the poor, the educated, the foreign born, the President, or the entire US government. It is a level of contempt that is usually reserved for enemies in wartime except that now it is applied to our fellow citizens. Unlike criticism, contempt is particularly toxic because it assumes a moral superiority in the speaker. Contempt is often directed at people who have been excluded from a group or declared unworthy its benefits. Contempt is often used by governments to provide rhetorical cover for torture or abuse. Contempt is one of four behaviors that, statistically, can predict divorce in married couples. People who speak with contempt for one another will probably not remain united for long.
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