Sebastian Junger

“War is a lot of things and it's useless to pretend that exciting isn't one of them. (pg. 144)”

“I think, politically, I'm pretty left-wing, and I try to be very neutral in my work.”

“I've stopped war reporting. I realized that I'd answered all of my questions about war and about myself.”

“Well, the fact that the news industry doesn't have enough money to only send salaried staff to war zones means there is an enormous, wide-open opportunity for young people who want to be on staff and don't know how to get there.”

“The negative effects of combat were nightmares, and I'd get jumpy around certain noises and stuff, but you'd have that after a car accident or a bad divorce. Life's filled with trauma. You don't need to go to war to find it; it's going to find you. We all deal with it, and the effects go away after awhile. At least they did for me.”

“There are no journalistic ethics that transcend the value of human life. There are none. In a situation where you can save a human life, you must. There isn't any conflict in my mind.”

“I had grown up during Vietnam. I had no connections to the U.S. military, and I had a pretty cynical default opinion about the U.S. military.”

“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.”

“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.”

“I think human society for tens of thousands of years has sent young men out in small groups to do things that are necessary but very dangerous. And they've always gotten killed doing it. And they've always turned it into a matter of honor and a way of gaining acceptance back into society if they survived.”

“Modern society has perfected the art of making people not feel necessary.”

“I think objectivity is like this strange myth that people think you're supposed to achieve, but actually, the dirty little secret is that it's not attainable any more than pure justice is attainable by the courts.”

“They had not yet started out across a continent of grief that a lifetime of walking could not cover.”

“No matter how many people you kill, using a machine gun in battle is not a war crime because it does not cause unnecessary suffering; it simply performs its job horrifyingly well.”

“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.”

“War is life multiplied by some number that no one has ever heard of.”

“...much of modern military tactics is geared toward maneuvering the enemy into a position where they can essentially be massacred from safety. (pg. 140)”

“The only thing that makes battle psychologically tolerable is the brotherhood among soldiers. You need each other to get by.”

“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.”

“It's fun to have money, but the more money I get, the less interesting it becomes. If you don't have very much, you have to think about it. If you are starving, you become interested in food. If you are struggling to pay the bills, money becomes tragically important.”