In a new book and film, the author of The Perfect Storm shows war from a soldier’s point of view.

Interview by Corey Seymour

Sebastian Junger first went into Afghanistan in 1996 to report for this magazine on a group of Americans taken hostage in nearby Kashmir. “There were rumors of Al Qaeda training camps outside of Jalalabad,” he says, “so I went there — what did I know? — and one of the local Afghans told me, ‘There are Arabs up in the hills training, and we don’t know what they’re training for, but even Afghans can’t go up there, or we’ll be killed.’ Obviously no one realized it was going to be what it became. Then 9/11 happened, and I started going back there more frequently.”

A lot more frequently: After a series of five monthlong embeds with the U.S. Army’s Battle Company stationed in the epicenter of Afghanistan’s combat operations, the Korengal Valley, he’s written a book (War) and, with photographer Tim Hetherington, directed a documentary (Restrepo, which won the Grand Jury Documentary prize at Sundance in January) about men in combat. We sat down with him at the Half King, his bar in Manhattan.

MJ: Neither your book nor your film is about strategy or politics or what the U.S. might do differently in Afghanistan. What made you decide to approach them this way?

SJ: I had this idea that combat is the same whether it’s a good war or a bad war, whether you’re winning or losing, whether it’s 2008 or 1968 or 1942. I’m never gonna be a soldier; I’m 48 years old. But what I could do is effectively join a platoon as a journalist. I didn’t try to get an interview with Admiral Mullen, because the soldiers can’t interview Mullen. I don’t need to know why we’re in the Koren-gal. Fact is, we are. What interested me was young men in combat, end of sentence.

MJ: Had any of the company read The Perfect Storm or seen the movie?

SJ: The youngest guy was seven years old when my book came out. I might as well have been Hemingway. They really didn’t give a shit. The fact that I owned a bar — that meant about a hundred times as much to them.

MJ: Did you do special training?

SJ: I was already in decent shape — I’ve run my whole life. But I tore my Achilles tendon over there. I didn’t write about that in the book.

MJ: Why not?

SJ: It wasn’t that interesting. It just sucked. I was out there for three weeks and I couldn’t walk right when I was going out on patrol. I was literally hopping for cover in firefights.

MJ: Did you plan for the movie to have the same point of view as the book, or was it more a case of working with the material you ended up with?

SJ: It has the same idea. Early on we made the decision: no interviews with family members, nothing about the context of what they’re doing. There’s no moral debate — no, are we winning or are we losing? All the stuff that liberal filmgoers expect in a documentary about war is not there. The only people you see in the film are men who are fighting in the Korengal. We wanted to give viewers a 90-minute deployment.

MJ: Was it a surreal experience showing the film amid the scene of Sundance?

SJ: In that whole weird world there was a core of seriousness. After every showing there were military families or soldiers who would come up to us, visibly emotional, a lot of them crying. One guy literally couldn’t talk. I said, “Do you have someone in the military?” All he could do was nod, and then he started sobbing and then he ran away.

MJ: You’re quite frank in the book about the growing incidence of post-traumatic stress disorder and other psychiatric fallout. Does war create damaged people?

SJ: If you get an infection, you get a fever; the fever is your body dealing with the infection. If you get traumatized, your mind and your brain have a reaction to that trauma. If you’re not dreaming about it, something’s probably wrong. So I wouldn’t say they’re damaged. I’d say they’re in some way trying to heal themselves.

MJ: Did you sustain any lasting effects — at least that you’re aware of?

SJ: I was in a Humvee that was blown up by a roadside bomb. It went off under the engine block instead of under us, and as a result we were all uninjured. Three weeks earlier a guy lost both his legs in the same kind of incident, and I became obsessed with the idea that 10 feet separated me from that guy. It messed me up. I had nightmares and got very short-tempered and depressed. I still jump at certain noises. A distant tapping sound can send me straight to the ground.

MJ: What does that sound mean to you?

SJ: A machine gun at a distance. A sound like bang-bang-bang right next to me doesn’t do anything at all, but that does.

MJ: In a 1998 essay for MJ, you wrote that you got into war reporting because you “wanted to be changed.” Has being so close to war changed you?

SJ: I’ve been covering war for a long time, and I knew it was exciting. It just is. It’s also a lot of other things, but the idea that it’s purely horrible is a kind of liberal fiction. I really liked the combat, and I got to see a strand of the fabric of human society. There were guys out there who at times couldn’t stand each other, but they’d all die for each other. The consequences of war are horrible, but the experience of war isn’t, necessarily.

MJ: How do you mean?

SJ: There were a number of situations where I didn’t know what was going to happen — nobody did. And it made me think about what I was risking. I have a wonderful life, and I was consciously betting that on a poker table I didn’t have control over. War made me think about these things in a way that I wouldn’t have otherwise. Maybe a spot on your lung in an X-ray would do the same thing. I haven’t had that experience. But this is my version of it.

MJ: And when you’re not betting your life in a war zone, where are you? I’m guessing you have better digs now than when you were working as a climber for a tree-removal company when we first met.

SJ: Actually, I still do a fair amount of tree work. My wife, Daniela, and I live in an old house from 1810 with three fireplaces at the end of a dead-end dirt road on Cape Cod, so I turn the trees into firewood for us and a friend of mine sells the rest. I was out on a job yesterday.

Restrepo opened June 25 in New York and Los Angeles, and starts Friday, July 2 in Boston, Chicago and San Francisco, among other cities. To see if it’s playing in your area, check the film’s website.

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Junger on War Movies

People ask me about The Hurt Locker a lot, and it’s an incredible piece of filmmaking — as are Band of Brothers and Platoon and Full Metal Jacket and Apocalypse Now. But they’re not necessarily true to war in a literal sense. What they are, really, are brilliant movies about Hollywood’s idea of war. I don’t mean that as a criticism, but it’s a distinction worth making.

Here’s an easy way to see if a war movie is being truthful: If you see an explosion on a faraway hillside and the sound of the explosion and the detonation of the bomb happen at the same time — if they’re putting the sound and the vision together in the same moment — they’re going toward our cultural understanding of war, not the reality of war. If you’ve been in combat, things like that make a huge impression on you.

The best film I’ve ever seen about war is an incredible documentary called The Anderson Platoon. It was shot by a French filmmaker who went into the Vietnam jungle with a 1st Air Cavalry Division recon unit for six weeks and came out with the most insane footage of war. It’s a very flawed movie — the narrative structure is a mess; there’s no organizing principle — but you don’t even care. It’s just incredible — American troops crawling around on the ground, pinned down by enemy fire; wounded lieutenants calling for airstrikes on the radio — it looks like D-Day. You can’t rent it on Netflix, but you can find old copies on the Web or watch parts of it on YouTube.

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This article originally appeared in the May 2010 issue of Men’s Journal.