00:00:17
Speaker 1: Pushkin. I'm Malcolm Glabel and I'm back this week for a special bonus episode of Medal of Honor, Stories of Courage. We're sitting down with Sebastian Younger. Younger is the author of many books, but the one we're going to be talking about today is Tribe on Homecoming and Belonging, which came out ten years ago but seems more relevant than ever. Younger spent years embedded with American soldiers during the Afghan War, and in Tribe, he explores what happened to those soldiers when they were in Afghanistan and also what happened when they came home. I should point out that I am a huge fan of Sebastian Younger's I think he's easily one of the greatest nonfiction writers of my generation. And this conversation was everything I had hoped it would be. Enjoy Hi, Sebastian, how you doing.

00:01:14
Speaker 2: Hey good, it's nice to meet you.

00:01:15
Speaker 1: I'm looking forward to this. Thank you for doing this.

00:01:18
Speaker 2: Oh it's a honor. Thank you. I'm really looking forward to it.

00:01:21
Speaker 1: So we want to talk about Tribe, which is your book from what almost ten years ago. I loved that book. I thought it was. I'm a big fan of yours in general, but that was I thought that book was something special.

00:01:32
Speaker 2: Thank you so much. It's still selling, which means people are so lonely.

00:01:37
Speaker 1: I was just curious how you came to write that book, what was your what led you into that subject.

00:01:44
Speaker 2: You know. I'd been a war reporter for a long time, starting in Bosnia in nineteen ninety three, a bunch of civil wars West Africa, and I was very very compelled by Afghanistan. Had been going there for years since the mid nineties, and eventually I was with American forces in eastern Afghanistan at a little outpost called Rastreppo. I was out at Ristreppo with a wonderful photographer named Tim Heatherington. I was out there off and on for a year. Was the forty man position. It was all men out there on this ridge. We were getting shot at just about every day. There was a lot of combat, a lot of casualties. Totally cut off from the outside world, very very hard place. When the guys got back, they all got really depressed. All the things they interest young men, right, young women, television, cars, sports, all this stuff that civilization has to offer for them. They weren't interested, and they started to talk about how they wanted to go back to Afghanistan, and I was asked about that in an interview. Basically the question was like, what's wrong with these guys, Like what's their problem? And just intuitively I said, you know, I don't think they have the problem. I think they're coming back to a society, our society, which is sort of socially desolate and very hard to find a meaningful connection, meaningful community, to make sacrifices for it to be part of, to depend on. They have all that in spades out at Ristrepo, and they wanted to go back to the real thing. And I said, actually, their desire to go back in somebody shows their mental health rather than some kind of psychological struggle. And then, as an anthropologist I started to think about that question of what are people drawn to, and over and over again the answer is community, and that clearly reflects our evolutionary reality as social primates, and that we survive in groups, not by ourselves. And that began the sort of central thesis of tribe, which is really, in some ways the worst trauma, the worst hardship, is to be unconnected to others I.

00:03:48
Speaker 1: Want to go back to when you were in Afghanistan with that group of guys on that ridge. Were the things that you observed afterwards, the fact that these men longed for community. Did you see evidence of that when you were actually in combat in Afghanistan?

00:04:05
Speaker 2: Well, I mean structurally, yes, we were stuck on a hilltop and everyone dependent on everyone to sort of do their jobs, including me as a journalist, and my job was basically to not like screw up and cause a problem that they had to fix. Right, And I'd been in a lot of combat. I was in good shape, you know. I felt confident I could do my job in that sense. Emotionally, yeah, I mean it's really interesting to be in a situation where you're never away from the people in your community, even for a minute. Like I mean where we slept in these little plywood hooches that they knocked together. They had these sort of like rickety bunks that they built, and I could reach out with my arm and touch three other men. I mean, we're like we're on a submarine. The level of familiarity, you know, it's all men, right, So the love is expressed in extremely rough ways, but love it is, and you could see that in combat for their concern for each other, and they're concerned that completely at times when needed, eclipsed their own fear, their own self interest. And you know, the young men they get in a fight, into conflicts like it's not like it was all wonderful, but it didn't matter. The thing about brotherhood, as eyewitnessed it out, there was unlike friendship. Brotherhood was totally independent of how you felt about the other person had nothing to do with it. You might like the guy, you might not like the guy, you might not be able to stand the guy, but he's your brother. You will do anything for him because he would do anything for you. As the end of the sentence, do.

00:05:37
Speaker 1: You have any specific memories of that time that kind of illustrate that. Do you see anything that you're like, Oh, in retrospect, that's what brotherhood looks like.

00:05:46
Speaker 2: I mean, in combat, the guys were largely utterly un self concerned. They did their jobs, and by their jobs, I don't mean their roles that were sort of like handed down by the military, their jobs as they themselves understood their jobs to be, which meant being an effective combatant and ignoring the incoming rounds. I can't tell you how hard it is to ignore bullets they're going past your head. It's almost impossible. But if you don't ignore them and stick your head up above the sandbag and shoot back, everyone's gonna die. You cannot just cower. And doing that is an incredible act of sort of self negation. And if everyone does that, then there's a much greater chance that everyone's gonna be okay. Chosen company one valot to the north. They got mauled several times. They had one firefight where they took one hundred percent casualties. First platoon walked into an L shaped ambush and took six casualties in the first few seconds, I think it was. And one of those young men was named sal Junta, and he was the first living Medal of Honor recipient since Vietnam. I mean. Junta ran forward, throwing hand grenades because they were dragging off his wounded Fred. They the Taliban down a hillside into the darkness, and Shutta had bullets impacting his body armor, and he ran forward. He killed the guys who were dragging away his brother and administered first aid until more soldiers got there. You know, dragging your wounded friend out of the line of fire. I mean, that's a powerful, powerful relationship, and I think an ancient one that only arises in the circumstances that require it for survival. That's an act of loyalty that is hard to find in the civilian world, and that if you experience it, it's missed, even though the things that make those acts necessary are horrific beyond description. This one guy said to me, Brendan o'bern, who's still a good, good friend of mine. He said, you know, Sebastian is strange. There's guys in the platoon who straight up hate each other, but we would all die for each other. Later, I kept thinking about that sentence, and I thought, Wow, no matter how nice life is back in the United States, if you're one of those young men, you are no longer in a group that you can say that about.

00:08:20
Speaker 1: It's a passion. When you were in Afghanistan, what impact did it have on you to be in that environment? Did you develop the same kind of bonds to the soldiers as they were developing to each other.

00:08:32
Speaker 2: I did, and it was interesting because it wasn't immediate. How could it be, You know, you're the new kid in high school and it takes a while to make friends. And we're twice their age. We're journalists, we're not soldiers. Are we going to be a liability? Can we keep up on the You know it was brutal. It was all foot movement, right, it was all on foot. That guys were carrying eighty ninety one hundred and twenty pounds of gear at eight thousand feet in one hundred degree heat, you know, in combat. Just insane Olympic level performance from these guys. And we're joining that group, Like, are we going to be a drag on them? Trip after trip, we of all got to know each other, and I start to feel this thing that I never felt before, which was a kind of love and loyalty for a group. And we've all felt love and loyalty to family members, to a partner, to a lover, to a friend maybe of course, but to a group. I realized, Wow, if I took a round, these guys would do whatever it took to help me, even exposing themselves to danger. I felt that feeling in me of like, wow, I'm ready to do that. I'm not going to curl up behind a tree while some guy that I care about that's in this group takes fire. That was never required of me. But I got to say that. The feeling of the certainty that I would do that, and the sort of pride I felt knowing that I would do that, there's a real pride in that, Like, Wow, I have that selflessness. I have it in me too. Who knew? This culture doesn't bring that out in people very easily, So we all walk around thinking we're selfish bastards. Were not, but the circumstances don't ask for that. Suddenly I'm in circumstances that were somewhat reproducing of our evolutionary past. I mean, humans evolved in groups of thirty forty to fifty people in a threatening environment where they had to depend on each other. That's our sweet spot, right. This was the first time I was in that kind of situation and I realized, Wow, I'm a good group member.

00:10:37
Speaker 1: It surprised you to think that you are a good group member.

00:10:41
Speaker 2: It surprised me because I was forty five and I'd never had to be before. And now I was like I became a father at fifty five, and it's a little bit of the same surprise, Like, Wow, who knew I'm a good dad and it's the most thrilling thing to feel. It was for me. And so, you know, at one point, Chosen Company, you know, like I said, they were ambush. It was a three hundred and sixty degree ambush. They took one hundred percent casualties. Tim and I talked about it, and I said, you know that could easily have been us. What are we going to do if that happens to And I said, I think we should learn first aid from the platoon medic and I think we need to be trained on all the weapons just in case, God forbid, we're in a Chosen Company kind of situation. And you know, that felt a little uncomfortable in terms of journalistic ethics, but I'm like, listen, if we're in a situation where everyone's wounded and we're all going to die, journalistic ethics are actually no longer. No, we're longer really get to vote, right, You're in survival mode. So we were trained up on all that stuff, and then I really felt like, all right, I'm in I'm really part of this. One of the things that helped is that I was not trying to write an objective analysis of the War on Terror in Afghanistan. I was trying to be as subjective as possible about what it feels like to be an American soldier. So me allowing myself the subjectivity of even arms length participation, like being trained on the weapons. You know, that sort of felt okay. But on a human level, I felt like, Oh, I'm finally a human being. I'm part of something that I would give my life for and that's been a human norm for hundreds of thousands of years. We're the only animal that does that in that sense, and it changed me forever.

00:12:25
Speaker 1: You know what this reminds me of. This is at a much lesser level. I've always wondered why rock musicians. This is a dumb example, but bear with me, why do they keep touring? Sometimes? They tour for years. I was watching The Last Waltz. The band tours for like seven years on the road. And then I was very briefly part of this little traveling show with a band, and we're on the bus and you'd sleep on the bus, right, and you'd drive from Indianapolis to Lexington or something right right right, And I was like, oh, like I suddenly got it, like close proximity, No, there's no your life is not a mistake, but you are in a collective enterprise where you're all depending on each other for the performance at the end of the Yeah, and it's there is something incredibly powerful about that feeling. No, if you add to that threat of life and limb, I can see you've turbocharged it and made it impossibly powerful.

00:13:23
Speaker 2: Absolutely, yeah, you've exactly identified it. You know. One of the things about combat about bravery, I mean as the one quality, the one virtue, the one value that you have to have out there, or you're not a member in good standing of a combat unit, you have to be selfless in your courage. The great thing about that is that you're completely self determining in that sense. Anyone can be courageous. You can be five foot two or six foot two, you can be good looking or not good looking. Your dad could be in prison or your dad can be a billionaire. It doesn't matter. You can choose to be unself concerned and courageous on behalf of others. And there is something liberating in that, and it's an amazing thing to see these young people step into that role. Think, Wow, I can just choose who I want to be. I have full access to honor and to the admiration of others.

00:14:20
Speaker 1: I love that that phrase full access to honor. It's a fantastic phrase.

00:14:25
Speaker 2: Thank you. Yeah, And it's essential because that was our evolutionary past as well. The loss of brotherhood, of connection of community, the tragic loss of adversity, I'll even put it that way. That happens when soldiers come home is extremely hard on them. Most people in the military are not getting directly traumatized by bullets going past their head or by killing people themselves.

00:14:47
Speaker 1: Right.

00:14:48
Speaker 2: You can take a platoon that was not in combat. There was like fixing stuff on an aircraft carrier, oh, whatever, right, and they will have some of the same struggles when they go home, and you know, the sort of army shrinks and the VA and all the experts are to misdiagnose things in some ways. In my humble opinion, I'm not a psychologist, but they oh, you were on a deployment and now you're struggling when you can back. You have PTSD. How do you have PTSD if you weren't in combat. How does that work. One of the traumas of the many that are on offer in a warzone is later being stripped of that human affiliation that you came to need and love. One of the traumas is actually having to leave and go home. The human norm is to be together. Now you're not because you're living in your air conditioned house in the end of a cul de sac in a suburb. One of the problems with treating this is that if you insist that it's trauma from combat, the soldiers themselves, some of them who were in combat, are going to sort of have to fabricate things that explain how alienated and depressed they now are back home.

00:15:52
Speaker 1: It means it's just a fascinating insight, and the notion of PTSD has been constructed in the absence of an understanding of what happens in war. I mean, obviously there's a category of people who are genuinely psychologically impaired by what they went through. But we're incapable of seeing what is beautiful and powerful in something that extreme and dangerous.

00:16:17
Speaker 2: And part of the problem, I think is this idea that many people have in this society, a kind of default idea that this is the best possible society. What do you mean, We've got blenders and cars et cetera, et cetera. I mean all these sort of material benefits which are indisputable, and many of them a great blessing in terms of human comfort, human dignity, human life. So it's that this is the best possible society in some ways that you know, people think that. So if the soldiers are coming back and unhappy and self destructive, they must be really messed up, and they must be really messed up by combat, because I think there's an unwillingness in our society to say, oh, maybe we are all unhappy too, And if you look at the mental health statistics, we're not doing great right, like depression, suicide, addiction, anxiety. I mean, the levels are insane for a society that is this comfortable and affluent and safe.

00:17:13
Speaker 1: Maybe what you mean to say is those levels are paradoxically appropriate for a society of this level of comfort and affluence, and maybe those are the disorders that arise out of a world that's been stripped of any There's that lovely phrase that psychologis use desirable difficulty.

00:17:31
Speaker 2: Right right, Yeah, they're entirely appropriate, but they seem to stand in conflict and contradiction to our idea of ourselves.

00:17:38
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, I.

00:17:39
Speaker 2: Mean soldiers on frontlines almost never kill themselves. If they commit suicide, it's when they come back. And it's not even necessarily related to the amount of combat they we're in. It's related to other things. And so then you're not going to fix it because you won't be looking at the deep alienation of our society that makes people vulnerable to suicidal impulses. There's an amazing film that was shot, I think in the late forties or right after World War Two, called The Best Years of Our Lives. It's about four or five soldiers from different units coming back on a transport plane and landing in some airfield in the Midwest. Their families don't even know they're coming home, and the first thing they do is go to a bar. So then they get into taxi and they're going to drop each other off at house after house.

00:18:23
Speaker 1: It's the fourth house from there.

00:18:25
Speaker 2: They pull up to the first guy's house and you could see the family in the windows. He hasn't seen his family in a year or two or whatever, and he doesn't want to get out of the taxi. Say how about the three of us going back to Butcher's place.

00:18:37
Speaker 1: They'll have a couple of drinks and then we can go home.

00:18:40
Speaker 2: You're home, no kid, He said, what about one more drink? And You're like, come on, man, you gotta go, and he goes.

00:18:46
Speaker 1: Those if I were going in to hit a beach.

00:18:49
Speaker 2: I feel like I'm about to hit a beach, meaning land under machine gun fire and an atoll in the South Pacific. That's what coming home to his family felt like. One of the things that people do when they're facing something hard, painful, dangerous is they consolidate into a group for protection. There was a woman I spoke with who barely survived cancer, very lucky to survive, and she said, you know what, cancer was horrible. I'm lucky to be alive. But I do miss one thing about it, the cancer ward all of us who were together in the fight of our lives and we stuck together. And she said, I miss those people. I think she missed who she was in that moment, because again she was like rising above herself and having concern for others, and they were all doing that.

00:19:44
Speaker 1: It's like a drug, it's a passion. How old are your children.

00:20:03
Speaker 2: They're nine and six, two little girls.

00:20:06
Speaker 1: I also an older dad. I have four and two two little girls. Congratulates since I think and gracious and to you as well, we're in the same position. So I'm curious the things that you have explored in books like this, How does that change the way you parents your daughters. Have you thought about? How can you give them this thing that you've identified as being so important, which is this sense of community and desirable difficulty and finding meaning and adversity. How do you give them that?

00:20:37
Speaker 2: You know, the first thing we did was not have them grow up in an upper middle class community. I grew up in a pretty affluent suburb of Boston where we didn't know our neighbors particularly well. They're all perfectly nice people. We certainly didn't depend on them for anything existential, like can you help us fix the roof we got a leak, right, And certainly we weren't joining together to fight the rebels that were coming down the road and pick up drugs. All those forms of human adversity that people have bonded together to overcome utterly absent from the community that I grew up in. So we live in a mixed income but mostly lower income neighborhood and out of Manhattan. The building's mostly Spanish speaking is a five story tenement and we live on the four of us in five hundred square feet. So they're part of the community. They are part of that social fabric which is so crucial. You know, is it the Sioux nation on the northern Great Plains in eighteen eighty No, it's not right, but it's for our world in context. It's sort of as close as we can get. They have extremely limited access to screens. They have no use of an iPhone. It's they get a little bit of time on the laptop to watch some child programming or do du a lingo or what have you. But the interactive touchscreen, they're completely separated from it. And we also we co sleep right. We have a big pad on the floor and they have little bunk beds too in a different room and they can sleep there when they want. Sometimes they do, but mostly we sort of sleep in a big pile. And I've been sort of questioned about this by my sort of if I may say, bougie friends, They're like, what are you talking about. You need a bigger apartment. Every kid needs their own room. I'm like, look, Americans are the first mammal ever to not sleep with their young like, I'm sorry. And if you were going camping the Bob Marshall Wilderness in Montana with your like five year old and your three year old, you know what, they'd be in the same tent with you, which is the human norm, It's the primate norm. So why would you, as was done to me on day one, put them in a different room and close the door and make them cry it out in the dark. It's just insane.

00:22:38
Speaker 1: Yeah, But I was thinking about something like if your daughters came to you and said I want to go to West Point.

00:22:45
Speaker 2: I would say why, and I'd be very curious about the answer, and she said, well, it's the only way to fulfill your patriotic duty. I would say, okay, well what do you mean by duty and patriotism? I have some questions. Yeah, but the idea that they would join the military, knowing what I know about the military, both its flaws and its incredible strikes, I mean, like, you know what, you might be a lot happier in the military than as a freelance writer.

00:23:14
Speaker 1: My sister in law grew up on an army base in New Jersey and describes it as paradise and for precisely the reasons you're talking about. By the way, that to be a child in a close knit community of people with a shared purpose was just magic. And when her dad retired from the Army, she was bereft. She was like, why are we leaving Paradise. When I did my book Bomber Mafia, and I spent all this time with these Air Force guys, I've never been more impressed with a group of people, not just in terms of their intelligence and their dedication, but it's just there's something about that experience which just you could feel the kind of character they had as human beings.

00:23:55
Speaker 2: And the loyalty to each other is it's extraordinary. My first in bed was two thousand and five, embedded with US Forces and it was the same unit I was with two years later, and they a lot of complicated things happened. We had to cross a mountain pass that was, you know, probably nine thousand feet and it was in the middle of the winter. The temperature was sub zero, and the guys were carrying the mortar teams were carrying one hundred and twenty pounds on their back, one hundred and forty pounds on their back, righty, and these aren't big dudes either, just people, right, They're just normal people.

00:24:28
Speaker 1: You know.

00:24:28
Speaker 2: We walked from sunset to sunrise in those temperatures at those elevations, carrying that kind of weight, and they were all in T shirts because they were sweating so hard. But I thought, boy, I can't think of a single dude I went to college with that would do that for another person or another country or their own country. I can't think of a single guy, you know what. I wasn't that guy in college either. But had I joined the military, I would have been. We all would have been. That's the extraordinary thing about it.

00:25:03
Speaker 1: Especially. That's a lovely way too, to end our conversation. I think this has been so much fun.

00:25:09
Speaker 2: Thank you. A real pleasure for me as well.

00:25:20
Speaker 1: Sebastian Younger is the author of Tribe on Homecoming and Belonging but he's an excellent writer. His other books include The Perfect Storm, War and most recently, In My Time of Dying. He also has a substat called Tribe with Sebastian Younger. Links to all of those are in the show notes. This episode was produced by Ryan Schweikert, edited by Lydia Jane Kott. Sound designed by Jake Gorski. Our executive producer is Costanza Guyardo. Original music by Eric Phillips. I'm Malcolm Gladwell. Thanks, as always for listening.