Transcript: Sebastian Junger

An interview with the award-winning author, filmmaker and war reporter

In times of war, civilians run from combat. But war reporters have the opposite reaction — they run towards it, putting themselves in danger to bear witness to these armed conflicts, and to try to make sense of our broken world. My guest on this week’s program spent years going to the frontlines, until one day, in June of 2020, the frontlines came to him.

The near death experience that followed, he says, changed him forever. 

Sebastian Junger is an American journalist, the bestselling author of Tribe, Freedom, and The Perfect Storm, and an Oscar-nominated filmmaker. His latest book is In My Time of Dying: How I Came Face to Face With the Idea of An Afterlife — and it’s out this week.

This is an edited transcript for paid subscribers. You can stream the episode for free here.

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TH: As you know, I loved this book. So, it's a great treat to get to talk about it today. I want to start with the idea of danger. Something that is a thread that has moved through a lot of your work, putting yourself in harm's way to find meaning, to better understand humanity. From your early years as a high climber for a tree removal company, to walking the rail lines across America — the subject of your last book —  to your work as a war correspondent and a documentary filmmaker in Afghanistan. I want to read a quote from a piece from The New York Times that you wrote in 1997: “Society has a great use for young men who feel invincible. It throws them at projects that are so brutal or dangerous that no one in his right mind would go near them, much less relish them.” But in your latest book, danger finds you. As you have put it, you spent years going to the frontlines and now the frontlines came to you. It happened on an ordinary day, at your home in Cape Cod, in your driveway. And that feeling of invincibility was smashed. Now, before we get to that story, I want to give listeners a sense of your earlier life and work, and start with something you and I have spoken about in the past: Growing up in an affluent Boston suburb that lacked human connection. Why do you think this engendered in you this impulse to seek out danger and, ultimately, meaning?

SJ: Growing up the way I did, it felt like nothing was real. It felt like there were no real consequences for anything. It was a very safe, quiet, boring, predominantly white suburb of Boston in the 1970s. I don't know if this is a gendered thing — if it was a male thing, or just a youthful thing — but I felt like I wouldn't be an adult, I wouldn't be mature, until I had been tested in some serious and grave way. And had borne myself well, and had gotten through to the other side where I had proven myself and was now a mature adult. 

I loved anthropology, so I read a lot of anthropology. Joseph Campbell and all that stuff. I had a very clear sense that as a young man — and women have an equivalent thing that obviously I don't know about directly — but as a young man, I felt like until you prove yourself, why should society trust you? Why would a girl want to go out with you? Why anything? I just didn't know how to do that legally, without breaking the law. A lot of my twenties, and I think even thirties, was me trying to figure out how to go through that process that in most healthy societies just happens automatically, generation after generation, with its young men. 

TH: You write in Tribe about a surrogate uncle, Ellis, and what you learned from him. Can you talk about that relationship — and why that was so pivotal in your life?

SJ: Ellis was Native American and he grew up out west, in a very poor and very literary family, which is an interesting combination. When he came into my life, I was 18 and desperately in need of a surrogate Indian uncle. “Indian” was, of course, the word that he used about himself. I was very aware that I was very discontented, and very privileged to be from such a safe, affluent community. He said this amazing thing to me. He said, and again this is his language, “All throughout the history of the United States, you white people always ran off to join us Indians. And we Indians never ran off to join you white people.” 

That was even lamented by people at the time, like Benjamin Franklin. Like why is it that we're a “superior Christian society,” and people want to keep moving in with what they call the “savages”? Ellis provided me with an honourable explanation for my discontent. Later in life, when I wrote my book Tribe, I remembered that. Because a lot of the soldiers I've been with in Afghanistan — at this hellish small outpost called Restrepo, in eastern Afghanistan — when they got home, they missed that tremendously. I was like, “Oh my God, they want to be back with their tribe.” Everyone wants to go towards the tribal, and modern society does not have that. So, of course, there are incredible rates of depression, anxiety, suicide, and addiction in our society. So, the way Ellis reappeared, in a really important way, was giving me a tool for understanding a broad discontent in our society. A broad malaise, and real mental health issues.

TH: I remember when we met in New York, I guess six or seven years ago, we talked about the turning point for you in understanding that piece, when you were writing Tribe. It was in an interview with a reporter, who said, “Why do all these veterans return so messed up?” And you said, “Maybe we're the ones who are messed up.” Talk to me about that moment — and what insight that gave you.

SJ: It was a real light bulb moment for me, because the assumption was, “Oh, combat veterans are all messed up, and what's their problem, and why can't they just adjust back? They're lucky to make it home, why can't they just enjoy what they have?” At that moment, I remembered what Ellis had said. It occurred to me that maybe they are having a healthy reaction to an inhuman society, to a society that actually doesn't allow for the human norms of closeness, and community, and service, and connection. And also, obligation. Healthy human society obligates its members to work for it, to help it. If there's not enough food, everyone goes without. When the enemy appears on the ridgeline, everyone grabs a spear. Being part of a society has never been without obligation — until recently.

Now, all of a sudden, in modern America and many modern societies, you actually don't owe anything, except your taxes. Even that, you actually don't have to pay. The wealthier you are, the easier it is to get out of paying your taxes. Because you hire fancy accountants and all of a sudden you pay $10 in income tax.  

So, the light bulb just went off, and suddenly I realized, “Oh, we're looking through the wrong end of the telescope. No wonder everything looks small.” We can see, in the veterans, the canary in the coal mine. These are people who are psychologically vulnerable. They have been given a glimpse of a much more primordial human experience, that went on for hundreds of thousands of years, and then we're withdrawing that from them and putting them back down in this alienating society. Of course they're distressed. 

The only term we had for it was PTSD. But a lot of these people weren't even traumatized. Just because you’re in the military doesn't mean you were traumatized, right? A fairly small fraction of the military actually is engaged in combat, or even fires their weapons, or gets shot at. It's a fairly small fraction. But the reintegration problems were much broader than just the slice of veterans that were engaged in combat. I saw it all of a sudden: A certain amount of PTSD is actually a disorder of connection. Psychologists know that human connection, human community, buffers people from their psychological distress. You see that time and again in natural disasters and in wars. 

The Blitz in London was terrifying and extremely traumatic. Thousands of civilians were killed during six months of non-stop air raids by the German air force. Afterwards, a lot of people missed the Blitz, the terrible days of death, and fire, and destruction. Everyone banded together, and everyone was equal. That's a really important part of it. In times of disaster, rich, poor, beautiful, ugly, white, black, straight, gay, nothing matters, right? It's just: Are you participating in the common good or not? And if you're not, well, you can take a hike. That's surely something to be missed afterwards. During the Blitz in England, the government was prepared for mass psychiatric casualties. What they found was that once the air raids started, the admissions to psych wards went down, not up. They went down during the Blitz.

TH: My grandmother lived through the Blitz, and the way that she told me stories about it when I was young was just pure nostalgia. She talked about having dances late at night, with all the blinds down, and the euphoria of that comradery. Which your book Tribe captures so well. It is a book that I have recommended to a lot of people in my life, including a lot of young men, who have found a lot of meaning from it. I think this next book is going to resonate in a similar way, for different reasons. So, let's go now and talk about the day in June of 2020 that is at the centre of your new book In My Time of Dying. This is a day that a pancreatic aneurysm ruptured and you almost lost your life. You spent that morning clearing brush on the country road leading up to your house, which the ambulance would then later drive up. Leading up to that day, you had had a dream about your family. Tell us about that dream.

SJ: I should just from the outset say that I'm in no way mystical or spiritual or religious. I'm an atheist. I'm a stone-cold atheist. I'm a rationalist. My father was a physicist. I'm all but immune to magical thinking, and all that other stuff. The word “energy” drives me crazy. Just as a context for what I'm about to say. 

I was 58, but I'm a really healthy person, and that was actually part of my problem. I was a lifelong athlete. I have a resting heart rate of 50 or something. I'm not a walking heart attack. I don't have the things that drop middle-aged men in their tracks. I'd never been in an MRI, a cat scan. No one had ever imaged my abdomen. So, I didn't know that this thing was growing in me, this aneurysm, which I'll talk about in a moment. 

But two days prior to almost dying, I had this crazy dream that I had died. That I was a ghost. I was a spirit, and I was floating above my family. They were fully in grief. My wife, Barbara, and two little girls, who at the time were three years old and six months old. I was trying to communicate with them. I was waving my arms and shouting, “I'm here, I'm here. It's okay.” They couldn't hear me. They couldn't see me. And I was made to understand, “You moron. You died. And you died through a kind of oversight. You didn't take care of yourself. Now it's too late, you can't go back.” I was just frantic with grief and anguish. My anguish woke me up, and I woke up in bed. We co-sleep as a family. I was next to my eldest daughter, and then my wife and my youngest daughter — we were all there together. I was like, “Oh, thank God. That was just a dream.” 

It was the most horrifying dream I've ever had. And then I dismissed it. I didn't think that dreams were portents of anything, and I just didn't think about it. Late afternoon of the next day, we had a little bit of babysitting — this was during Covid — from teenage girls who lived up the road. I was in a cabin that was even deeper into the woods from the house. No cell service anywhere on the property. If it rained, the landlines would short out. So, the landlines didn't work. And it was quite a long drive up a dirt road to get to the house. Rough country. 

Suddenly, in mid-sentence, I felt a stab of pain in my abdomen. I thought it was indigestion. I stood up to try to walk it out, and I almost fell over. My blood pressure was plummeting. I didn't know that I was bleeding out. I'd had an undiagnosed aneurysm, which is a ballooning of an artery. It's not clogged arteries. It's not a product of a lifetime of dietary sins. It's a complete abnormality. It was this weak spot in an artery that ballooned and ballooned, and finally ruptured. It was in one of the arteries that go to your pancreas. I was losing a unit of blood every 10 or 15 minutes. There’s around 10 units of blood in the human body. Once you lose two thirds of your blood, you're pretty much a goner.

The hospital was a good hour's drive away. So you can do the math, right? I was in grave danger and I had no idea. But I said to my wife, “I'm going to need help. I don't know what's happening.” Words I had never thought I'd say. She dragged me out of the woods, and got me to the driveway, and put me in the passenger seat of the car. One of the teenage girls, who were babysitting, got one bar of signal on her phone and called 911. They took me to the hospital and I was holding my own for the trip. Then, right when we got to the ER, I went off a cliff. I was going from compensatory shock, which is a last ditch attempt to keep your body stable, to end stage hemorrhagic shock, where I maybe had 10 or 15 minutes left of life.

I was convulsing. I was in the last stages, my body was desperately trying to stave off the inevitable. My blood pressure was 60 over 40. I had lost two thirds of my blood, the magic number. The doctors knew immediately that I had to have an abdominal haemorrhage. Which are widowmakers, right? Those just kill people. They're incredibly deadly, partly because they're hard to find. Your abdomen is basically this big bowl of spaghetti and there's a leak in there somewhere. Your abdomen fills with blood, and how do you find it? That's part of the problem. They started putting a large gauge needle through my neck, into my jugular, to transfuse me. And while they're doing that, I'm spiralling towards death very quickly. I'm still conscious, and I become aware of a black pit — an infinitely dark pit, underneath me to my left. I'm getting pulled into it, and there's no stopping this. I'm headed into the pit.

I had no idea I was dying, but I had this animal sense that I didn't want to go into the pit. I knew I'd never come back. As I panicked, my dead father appeared above me — and I'm going to use the word I've always hated — in this weird sort of “energy” form above me. He communicated to me, “It's okay. You don't have to fight it. You can come with me. I'll take care of you.” I was horrified. I was like, “You're dead. I'm not going anywhere with you. This conversation is over, we have nothing to talk about. How dare you? I'm alive. We have nothing in common.” 

I loved my father. He was on the spectrum. He was a physicist. He was sometimes hard to reach emotionally, but an absolutely lovely man. And I miss him enormously. I was still conscious and conversant while my father was up there. I said to the doctor, “You have got to hurry. You're losing me right now, I'm going.” I didn't know where I was going, but I knew I was going. The short version of this is eventually they managed to save me. They put 10 units of blood in me. Ultimately, they brought me to the IR suite and they managed to get a catheter through my venous system to the rupture. They finally found it. They embolized it with a coil, plugged the leak, topped me off with blood, and hoped for the best.

I was still not out of the woods. I could have still died at that point from complications, but I had dodged the worst bullet, basically. I woke up in the ICU the next morning, very confused, “Where am I? What happened?” The nurse said to me, “Mr. Junger, you're very, very lucky. You almost died last night. In fact, no one can believe you're alive. It’s sort of a miracle.” I was absolutely shocked. Then she walked out of the room. Immediately, I remembered the pit and my father. Like, “Oh my God. I remember being on the threshold of death.” It all came back to me. She returned to the room an hour later and said, “How are you doing?” I said, “Well, I'm okay, but what you told me is terrifying. I had no idea I almost died. It's so scary.” 

She was a very pragmatic woman. Classic tough, middle-aged ICU nurse, right? Wonderful lady. She said, “Try thinking about it like this. Instead of thinking about it like something scary, try thinking about it like something sacred.” And she walked out of the room. I've been trying to follow that advice ever since.

I mean sacred not in a religious sense; I'm still an atheist. But for me, the word “sacred” means any information, any process, that helps people live with more dignity, with less fear. With more courage, with more love, with more connection. Those are sacred things. As a journalist, I like to think that occasionally I have touched that. I have done those things with my work. Now, here I am, I went to the ultimate frontline, my own death, and managed to come back. What did I learn? Do I have any sacred knowledge at all that could be helpful to both me and other people?

TH: There's a sense of mystery that runs through the book, and I think you embrace that mystery. There's a humility of not necessarily knowing. You write at one point, “The problem with rationality is that things keep happening that you can't explain.” One of those things is this nurse. As you say in the book, you weren't able to locate her afterwards.