Facing Death (with Sebastian Junger)

Sebastian Junger: Yeah, thank you. Well, just very briefly, my father was a wartime refugee. He fled Germany, fled Spain when the Fascists came, and then fled France. And, so, as my father, he brought a lot of awareness of war into my world when I was young, and that clearly implanted itself in my mind.

My dad married an American woman. I grew up in Boston in a very safe, lovely, and wildly boring suburb called Belmont. And, I was a very anxious kid. And so, what I went on to do, I now realize with the benefit of hindsight and good counsel by people who loved me, I realized I was basically my whole life sort of wildly compensating for an upbringing that felt overly safe and not–I’ll put it very bluntly–when I was a teenager, I wanted to become a man, and I didn’t know how to do that in the environment I grew up in. And so, I wound up as a war reporter for many years and eventually stopped doing that and had a family, two young children. And, that’s when I nearly lost my life–at home.

Sebastian Junger: Oh, yeah. So, my first war, self-assigned, self-funded, and really accountable to nobody, was Bosnia. It was Sarajevo, the Seige of Sarajevo in 1993, 1994. And, I came home from that and wrote my first book called The Perfect Storm. And, I literally turned the manuscript in–I was dying to go back overseas–I turned the manuscript in. I did not have high hopes for it. It felt like an odd book that people might not necessarily plug into.

And, I went overseas to Afghanistan. So, this is 1996, when the Taliban were just taking over Afghanistan. I saw them on the outskirts of Kabul. I saw them in Jalalabad, and I’d come under some suspicion from them. I left; and then I was in Kosovo in 1998 and Sierra Leone, Liberia–the Civil War in Liberia–as well. Nigeria, the Niger Delta with men–rebels–who actually took me captive for a little while. That was very, very, very unpleasant.

And then, eventually I was with American soldiers in Afghanistan. I’d been in Afghanistan many times. I was there in 2000 with Ahmad Shah Massoud, who was just fighting in the Northern Alliance. Then 2001, when Massoud’s commanders took Kabul after 9/11. And then eventually with American soldiers. And, ironically, in some ways, I’m probably best known for the work I did with American soldiers, even though I’d been to Afghanistan many times and really adore that country.

And, I really hope in my lifetime, I can go back safely with my family. That would be kind of a dream for me.

Sebastian Junger: Yes, I have. Yep.

Sebastian Junger: Yeah. When I was a kid and didn’t know any better, I was surfing in midwinter off the coast of Massachusetts by myself. Yeah, I almost drowned. I was in very, very big seas, and I almost drowned.

And, I also was a climber for tree companies. So, I did the aerial work. I worked 60, 70, 80, 100 feet in the air, hanging on a line with a running chainsaw, taking trees down in pieces, which looks, I’m sure from the ground, it looks terrifying and dangerous and all that other stuff. And, it’s definitely terrifying. But, what I realized up there in the treetops–I made good money for a young man, a young person, I made good money doing it; I loved the job–but, what I realized is that if I was going to get hurt or killed up there, it would only be because I made a mistake, because I was simply dealing with the laws of physics. And, if you top out a pine tree and you do it wrong and it comes back on you and crushes you, which can happen, it’s because you did it wrong, right? You didn’t make the cuts right, you didn’t account for wind direction, etc., etc. So, I realized it’s the laws of physics, which are knowable. And, so, if I’m just super-careful, I’m probably safer than I am driving down the road where there’s a random element, other drivers that don’t obey the laws of physics. They can’t be predicted.

And, so, I actually came to feel quite comfortable up there, even though I was also very scared of heights and learned to do the work simply by literally not looking down. I completely compartmentalized my fear so that I could be functional. And then, there’s an equivalent process in combat where you can be functional and scared by compartmentalizing what’s happening.

Sebastian Junger: Oh no, you’re never fighting. I mean, if you’re fighting, you’re not a journalist: you’re a participant. So, I had a video–with American soldiers, I had a video camera. In other situations earlier in my career, I just had a notebook and pen. I was writing down what I was seeing and hearing, what people were saying, and the sense I could make of everything. With a video camera, you’re recording events in the moment for later use, which is very different from distilling information into a notebook. They’re both crucial to journalism.

And, so, with American soldiers, when I used a video camera most, I had it on me constantly. I mean, literally constantly. I slept with it. Just, you never knew when something was going to happen. Or, you never knew when there was a conversation between two soldiers that was just somehow evocative or interesting and that you wanted to record that. It wasn’t all combat. It was everything about life at this small outpost called Restrepo. I’m shooting video, I’m taking notes, I’m imitating everyone else very, very closely. Are they taking a knee and drinking some water on a long patrol? I’m doing that. Are we behind? Are we getting behind cover? I’m doing that. Are we getting low? I’m doing that.

Everything that they did, I did because that was safer, and I lived in terror of becoming a problem, somehow causing a–even being wounded would be causing a problem, right? They’re out here on a combat mission. God forbid, I make that harder or God forbid, endanger someone or get someone hurt, right? So, I never asked for anything, not even, ‘Hey, could we just detour to that little hilltop so I can get a photograph?’ What happens if someone gets hit on that little hilltop? How do you live with yourself, right? So, I just never asked for anything. I wouldn’t even ask someone to bring me my coffee mug from across the whatever.

I just, like, God forbid, God forbid. And, I say ‘God forbid’: I’m an atheist, so I understand the secular context, but I think you get my meaning about–it’s unthinkable. And so, I was very, very careful about what I asked for.

Sebastian Junger: Well, one was in Sierra Leone. I was coming back from a frontline fight with a couple of Sierra Leonean soldiers and a couple of journalists in the open Jeep, and the rebels that we were fighting, a group of them, stepped out from the jungle and stopped us with their guns leveled and seemed to be having a screaming argument about whether to kill us all. It was in Creole, and I couldn’t follow it, but at one point, a guy racked his gun and leveled it, and another guy grabbed the barrel and jerked it upwards. It was my first experience with going kind of hollow inside, which is a fear response.

And, another time I was told by rebels in Nigeria after they detained me, they thought I was a spy. And one guy walked up to me and said–he had a machine–very muscular young man with a machine gun. He was an Ijaw warrior [River-dwelling people indigenous to the Niger Delta–Econlib Ed.], and he came up to me, he said, ‘When we kill you later, I’ll be the one to do it,’ just sort of by way of introduction. Very, very scary moments for me.

And, with American soldiers, we were in a lot of combat. The only time that I sort of froze, which is another classic fear response, is sort of freezing for a moment, was when I had nothing to do because my video camera, the firefight started very suddenly. I almost got hit by the first round. It hit a sandbag right next to my forehead, and I couldn’t get to my video camera so I didn’t have a job to do. I had nothing to do. And, the only thing that insulates you from your fear is having a responsibility. Right? And I couldn’t get to my camera. It was 10 feet away, and between me and the camera, the sand was moving on bullet impacts. And, because I didn’t have a task, a mission, a purpose, I froze.

And then, Tim–my colleague, Tim, very brave, wonderful, beautiful Tim Hetherington–he jumped across that gap, threw me my camera, and then started throwing ammo to the soldiers who were separated from their ammo as well. He was extremely brave in that moment.

But, of course, I’ve also seen him in moments when he was paralyzed and I was fine. So, fear is a weird thing, right? I should just add that Tim was killed in combat in Libya in 2011. We’re coming up on 15 years now.

Sebastian Junger: Sure. Yeah. So, it was June of 2020, and my wife and I have taken our little girls–who were at that point, like, three months old, six months old, and three years old–taking them out of New York City. We own a property in Massachusetts. It’s deep in the woods at the end of a dead-end dirt road. There’s no cell phone coverage there. When it rains, the landlines go out because they’re old. It’s basically paradise–right?–in its remoteness and its beauty. Which is great until you have a health crisis. I mean, I’m a lifelong athlete. I’m not a walking heart attack. I was a really good long-distance runner when I was young and carried that foundation of health my whole life.

So, it never occurred to me that I would ever go to the ER [Emergency Room] for anything except a car accident or a chainsaw accident. And, just as sort of background.

So, in mid-sentence–we had a little bit of babysitting from some teenage girls who lived up the road aways, which was rare during COVID [Coronavirus Disease]. So, the girls came over, and my wife and I went out to this cabin that I’d built even deeper in the woods, like, completely off the grid. Like, no electricity, just kerosene lamps and a wood stove. And, we went out there just to sort of relax a bit. And, in mid-sentence, while we’re out there just enjoying this beautiful place of tranquility and peace and connection, in mid-sentence I felt this sort of jolt of pain in my abdomen.

And, I was, like, ‘Oh, what was that?’ And, I thought it was some crazy indigestion, and I sort of stood up to breathe and walk out, and I almost fell over.

What I didn’t know, obviously, is that I had an undiagnosed aneurysm in my pancreatic artery. It’s a very rare condition. An aneurysm is an unnatural ballooning of the artery wall. Again, this isn’t heart attack territory. It’s not arteries filled with cholesterol, whatever it is, whatever clogs arteries. I can’t remember the word.

Sebastian Junger: Plaque, that’s it. Plaque. Thank you.

It was a structural problem. And, aneurysms can grow for years, decades, undetectable, unnoticed. And then, when they rupture, you are bleeding out into your own abdomen. You are bleeding out just as much as if someone stabbed you in the abdomen and severed an artery.

Except, it’s into your own artery so you don’t know what’s happening. There’s no blood on the kitchen floor.

And, within a minute, I was too lightheaded to keep my feet. My blood pressure was plummeting. I was losing a pint of blood every 10 or 15 minutes into my own abdomen. And, there’s 10 pints of blood in the human body: you can lose about half of them before you die. And, we lived an hour from the nearest hospital, which was a little regional hospital.

So, I was literally a human hourglass.

I couldn’t walk. My wife literally dragged me out of the woods and put me in the passenger seat of the car in the driveway, and I was going in and out of consciousness. And, every time I lost consciousness, she thought, ‘That’s it. He’s not coming back.’ And, terrible experience for her.

I had no idea I was dying. I didn’t even know I was losing consciousness. I was syncopic. and someone who is syncopic–in and out of consciousness–they don’t know. It’s seamless for them. They don’t know they’re losing consciousness, right?

And then, I knew something was really bad because the sky turned blinding white and everything turned white, and this just awful whiteness just eclipsed everything and I was blind. Another symptom of blood loss.

So, at any rate, they got me to the hospital just in time. I was in end-stage hemorrhagic shock. I’d lost half of my blood, two thirds of my blood. I was in conditions that for most people are not survivable. Particularly at my age–I was in my late 1950s. But I have an athlete’s heart. My heart kept slugging away in my chest. I gave the doctor something to work with, and they brought me into the ER and started trying to save my life.

Sebastian Junger: Yeah. Well, that was a little later in the evening actually. Yeah, it was at night. It was a little later in the process. When they brought me into the ER, they put me in a trauma bay. The doctors immediately knew what was going on. The medics in the ambulance didn’t immediately know what was going on. They started to transfuse me with a large-gauge needle through my neck into my jugular to give me blood, right? Blood keeps you alive, the blood of other people, right? So, here’s my brief pitch. Please donate blood, right? I’m alive because 10 people donated blood. You will keep alive someone’s father, someone’s daughter, someone’s spouse. It’s very important.

At any rate, they were working on me–and I was in incredible pain. And the first extraordinary thing that happened was a nurse came–they couldn’t give me sedatives. My blood pressure was 60/40. I mean, I was running on fumes. I was 10 minutes from dead. Right? I was in incredible pain from all the blood in my abdomen. And, this nurse came up to me and said–held my hand–she said, ‘Look at me and breathe with me. I’m here.’ And, I did. And, magically, the pain went away. In my mind, I’m like, ‘That’s not going to work. That’s some 1960s Lamaze stuff. Like, I want some drugs.’ Right? It worked.

And, that human connection, literally, I believe, helped save my life. Along with incredible doctors. But it was absolutely crucial. Doctors don’t have time to hold your hand. It falls on someone else, and thank God–thank God–for them.

So, they started working on my neck. And, let me just say briefly: I’m an atheist. My father was an atheist and a physicist. He’s dead. He was an atheist and a physicist, which is like atheist-squared, right?

And, so, I’m lying there. I have no idea I’m dying. Absolutely none. I’m in for belly pain. I’m very confused. And under me, the universe sort of cracks open. There’s this infinite darkness, and I’m getting pulled into it, and I’m terrified of this infinitely black pit, basically.

I don’t know I’m dying, but I know I don’t want to go in there. I’m terrified of it.

And then, suddenly, my dead father appears above me to my left on the ceiling, just above me. And, he’s there in his sort of essence, this sort of energy form. It’s my father. He’s right there. I’m shocked. Right? And, basically he communicates to me, ‘Look, you don’t have to fight it. It’s okay. You can come with me. I’ll take care of you. You don’t have to hang on. You’re good. Come with me.’ Right?

I was horrified. I was, like, ‘Go with you? You’re dead. The party’s over here. Get out of here. We’ll talk a lot later.’ And, so, I said to the doctor, because I’m still conscious, I’m still conversant–right?–when I had this vision.

So I said to the doctor, ‘You got to hurry. I’m going. I’m going away.’ And, I didn’t know where I was going, but I knew I wasn’t coming back from there.

And then, much, much later they transfused me. They got me into the interventional radiology suite–which is basically you lie on something called a fluoroscope. It’s like an x-ray machine, but it takes video so they can x-ray you in real time. They put fluorescent dye in your veins. They can see which tube is leaking inside your body. They can see where the catheter is going as they thread it through your vasculature to get the catheter to the rupture, and they embolize it, they plug it, and save your life. That’s what happens there.

And, while I’m there, they work and work and work on me for hours. And they can’t get the catheter to the rupture. And I’m in incredible pain, and I’m confused, and I’m having hallucinations. And I see monsters everywhere–very, very frightening monsters in the machinery. And, at one point the doctor–I watched the doctor shrug his shoulders and say, ‘Oh well, we tried.’ Like, ‘There’s nothing more we can do.’ And, that was the first time–like, usually, you’re sedated for moments like this, right? I couldn’t be sedated, right? Very, very lightly. So, that was the moment that I realized, ‘Oh my God, I might die. I might not make it home.’ And, that was a moment of devastating loneliness and isolation.

And, that’s again where this nurse appeared and said, ‘Keep your eyes open so we know you’re still here. I’m with you. We’re going through this together.’ Just extraordinary, extraordinary experience for me.

Sebastian Junger: Yeah. So, he was a product of a mixed marriage. His mom was a Austrian Catholic, and she married a Sephardic Jew, an Ashkenazi Jew, who grew up partly in Spain, spoke fluent Spanish, and was a journalist. And, he was posted to Dresden when they met. They met at a dinner party in Salzburg. And, they fell in love with each other immediately. They were both very smart, good-looking, charming people. And, they fell in love and got married extremely quickly–as people did back in the day, in 1900.

And they moved to Dresden; and 10 years later, the Reichstag Fire, 1933; things started to get ugly.

He took the family–my father grew up speaking Spanish and German–took his family out, went to Germany, and were there until the Fascists came in 1936. They left. They went to Paris. They were there until the Fascists arrived a few years later in the form of the Nazis; and they went to Portugal, and then eventually the United States, where he met my mother and fell in love and had a family. So, as he liked to say, because of the Fascists, he got married and had a family and speaks five languages fluently, because they just kept learning everything. Every country he passed through, he learned the language.

And, he became a physicist. He was a very, very, very smart man, extraordinary mind, and extraordinarily limited in some important ways as well. I now realize he was what we would now call ‘on the spectrum,’–like, very, very clearly on the spectrum [autism spectrum–Econlib Ed]. A very, very sweet man, and oblivious and hard to connect to emotionally and somewhat childlike in his emotions and his feelings, but a brilliant physicist.

And, so, we had a complicated relationship. But I loved him, and he died holding my hand, talking to his dead sister who was in the room. Right? I mean, clearly, to him, she was in the room. It was my first experience with this sort of odd phenomenon that dying people see the dead: that the dead show up to receive the dying.

And, I didn’t know anything about it. I was, like, ‘Wow, it’s so strange.’ He’s quite convinced she’s here. I’m a total rationalist, right? I’ve got no time for any of that nonsense.

Sebastian Junger: As was he, yes. No time for any of that nonsense, right?

But, we can get to this if you like, but there’s quite a lot of evidence–there’s quite a lot of testimony–thousands and thousands of people, and hospice nurses and doctors who the dead showing up in the rooms of the dying is a well, well-known thing, and it’s been going on forever. So, make what you will of it. I try to make sense of it in my little book.

I’ll end with this. Him showing up for me–as mortified as I was, right? I didn’t know I was dying. I certainly didn’t want to die. I wasn’t going to go willingly. Right? It was in some ways the closest connection I’ve ever had with him. He was not an easy man to connect with emotionally. You know–intellectually, yes; not emotionally. He was there for me completely when I needed him most: just a beautiful, bighearted father who was going to take care of his son, his 58-year-old son. And, I have to say, it in some ways changed my internal relationship with him.

Sebastian Junger: Yeah. So, first of all, I say in the book, the problem with being a rationalist–and rationality is an enormously powerful tool, right?

Sebastian Junger: Right? I mean, planes stay aloft because of the rational process, right? Medicine exists. Everything exists because of a rational thought process. And, so, don’t dismiss it.

But, the problem with rationality, as I say in the book, is that things keep happening that don’t make any sense, right? So, the sort of line between a visionary seeing the truth and a crazy person is very, very thin. It always has been. The great prophets of religion are very, very close to just being schizophrenics, right? And, maybe there’s some overlap once in a while.

So, if someone came to you and said: This is the deal. The universe is 93 billion light years across. It came from nothing to everything in an amount of time that’s too small to measure. And, we now live in a situation where mineral dust can organize itself in such a way that it’s self-aware, can think about itself, humans and probably other beings on other planets. And, not only that, when you’re smart enough, when the human race is smart enough to look at the quantum level–in other words, the subatomic level–what it finds is this weird apparent contradiction that particles at the subatomic level, if you observe them, if there’s a conscious observer, they can only be in one place at one time. If you don’t observe them, they are in all places at one time. The act of observation at the quantum level creates the reality that it is observing.

Now, if a person was saying all this on a street corner into a megaphone, you’d be, like, ‘Well, where’s social services? He’s clearly insane.’ That is exactly what physicists have found. And, interestingly, the physicists–supremely rational men and women–have concluded that there’s many odd possibilities, one of which is that consciousness is a universal quality like the force of gravity. And, actually, it’s a universal quality that is part of the physical universe and gives it form that creates the universe that we ourselves see. And, these are rational people suggesting this because they seem to be at their wits’ end to explain these contradictions that we know we can prove exist.

As Sir Arthur Eddington, a great physicist of about a hundred years ago, as he said, ‘Something that we don’t understand is doing we know not what.’ And, that was his ultimate pronouncement about the state of human knowledge.

Sebastian Junger: Yeah. So, the three groups of criticisms of the book–which was really well-received–but of the sort of reader-reviewers, some people are upset that I’m still an atheist.

Sebastian Junger: Yeah. And also, what I say in my quote, “defense,” is: ‘Look, I saw my dad. If I’d seen God, you might have an argument to make–but I saw my father, right?’ And, another criticism: It’s really a disappointment that I just didn’t come out and say, ‘Great news, everybody. There’s an afterlife. I’m here to tell you, don’t worry about dying because we’re just going to keep on going just as we were with our loved ones.’

And, there’s no responsible way scientifically or journalistically to make that assertion, right? It’s just: you cannot do it. It’s an act of faith, not an act of rationality.

And, I was looking for answers. And, there are two sort of main groupings in my mind of things that need to be talked about.

There are stories, and there are explanations. And the stories are crucial to our psychological survival, right? And they often involve God. And, I have children, and I now understand why people believe in heaven–because, God forbid something happens to your child, you need to feel that they’re going someplace good. As a father, I get it, right? Those are stories.

Explanations explain how the world works, right? And, you can tell the difference because explanations can be tested. You don’t want to test the stories because you’ll embarrass them. You need them, right? The explanations have to be tested because if the explanation for why airplanes fly, if that explanation has holes in it, people are going to die. Right?

So, what I was trying to do was explain–not come up with a story about my father’s appearance above me in the hospital–but explain what it was I was seeing. And, so, yes, there’s near-death experiences–NDEs–are sort of a now-common term. They’re very common. There’s thousands of testimonies about it, all very, very similar.

And, if you look into the literature, of course, there’s two camps, right? There’s the believers and there’s the rationalists. And, the rationalists have always been my baseball team. I like watching them defeat the other team over and over and over again, right? It’s one of my most pleasurable experiences, watching that process, right?

But, here’s the thing.

So, the rationalists convincingly explained to me–and I read all the papers–that a lot of the visions that people have, a lot of experiences that are hovering above the body, those can be explained through neurological processes–neurochemicals, the stress on the dying brain, etc., etc., etc. Except for one thing–and I’m continuing to be a rationalist here, because if you’re a rationalist, a proper rationalist, you will apply rationality even to the rational process. I mean, you are skeptical of everything, and you even inquire into your own skepticism–skeptically, right? You really must.

So, the thing that doesn’t quite work for me: Yes, if you give a roomful of people LSD [lysergic acid diethylamide], they will all hallucinate. We know how that works. When people die, they have low blood oxygen, etc., etc.: it stresses the brain. They may see things. They may have a hovering feeling about the out-of-body experience. All these things can be explained. They put pilots in the human centrifuge–fighter pilots–to see how many Gs–forces of gravity–will make them pass out. They have out of body experiences. We can reproduce all of these things. Right?

What does not make sense–what does not happen in the roomful of people who have just taken LSD–is that they all have the same vision. Not the same experience like hovering above your body. They see the dead. They don’t see fire trucks and flamingos and swimming pools. They see the dead. And, sometimes there are cases–multiple cases–of dying people seeing someone show up in their room who they didn’t know had died. Like, ‘What’s David doing here?’ And, they didn’t know he had died, and there he is, and no one else can see him.

So, is that probative? No. But it certainly arouses some questions in me.

So, where I came with this is that not that there’s a God: you can have an afterlife and no God, or a God and no afterlife. They’re not necessarily paired. They don’t need each other. People just assume they go together. But it is possible–and, again, I read a lot of physics that there is a post-death continuation of individual consciousness at the quantum level that we’re incapable of understanding. Our brains are for the macroscopic world. They’re not designed to understand the sub-atomic world. And, at the quantum level, consciousness, which seems to affect everything in the universe, that that continues in some form; and that some of these mysteries like telepathy and the dying seeing the dead, and ghosts, and this and that–all sort of memories from former lives and all these sort of strange–and in my opinion, sort of often flaky–testimonies and experiences–it’s possible that they actually are united under a very simple idea that we do not ultimately understand the true nature of reality, of time, of life, and of death. And, that might explain some of these phenomena. And I’m totally open to it.

Sebastian Junger: Oh, yes.

Sebastian Junger: Well, I’ll tell you what, when I was recovering from–I had half my blood in my abdomen, and it takes a while to recover from that. Your body has to reabsorb it, and you don’t feel very well until it does. So, I was spending my time with a little light reading about near-death experiences, and I eventually wound up reading about physics, right? And, I realized this is the path. Either you take the story path and go for the story of religion and God, which I wasn’t going to do, or you take the explanation path, and ultimately all explanations lie in physics.

So, I’m reading these physics papers about quantum reality and all that stuff. And, I remember thinking, ‘God–Dad, if only you could hover above me again and just help me here, because this isn’t making any sense.’

Sebastian Junger: Yeah. So, I called up his colleague–two of his colleagues–who I knew when he was alive; he was very close to them. I invited them over for lunch. I told them–I wanted to tell them what had happened. They adored my father, right? And, I wanted to tell them what had happened and ask them, ‘What do you think my father would make of this?’ Right? And, so we had a great conversation, but keep in mind they’re physicists. They’re extremely literal, right? So, at one point I said, ‘Okay, so what are the odds that my father could wind up after he died, years after he died, hovering above me in a corner of the room? What are the odds? I mean, there’s odds for everything. What are the odds?’ Right?

And, it was sort of a rhetorical question, right? Forgive me, I’m just human, right? But, he took it literally, and–Rudolph was his name, Rudolfo. He sort of looked up like that, and I could see him running the numbers, right? And, he said, ‘I would say the odds are about 10 to the minus 63.’ I was like, ‘What? There’s a number for this? Are you kidding?’ He’s, like, ‘There’s a number for everything.’

Sebastian Junger: A very small number, but it’s not infinitely small. It’s not infinity.

Sebastian Junger: It’s not absolute zero.

Sebastian Junger: Right? And so, he said, ‘Yeah, the molecules, the atoms that have once made up his body, they’re still out there in the universe and sort of random motion would have to place them all coherently together in the corner of the room for you to see him. It’s not impossible. It’s just unbelievably so unlikely that it will probably never happen.’ I’m, like, ‘Oh my God, that’s the physicist’s brain.’ That was the brain I was dealing with my whole childhood with my father. You ask a rhetorical question, and then he looks up at the ceiling and starts running numbers.

And, so, yeah, that physics was a serious inquiry for me and recall me to my childhood when what he did for me was sort of a kind of magic.

Sebastian Junger: She actually called an ambulance.

Sebastian Junger: She called an ambulance. Yep.

Sebastian Junger: No, I mean, I kind of knew life was finite. What I didn’t realize is that you could be dead by dinner. Without being in a war zone or without driving, and being in good health. I had no idea that the world worked that way, right?

And, that’s terrifying; but as I say in the book, the flip side of terror is reverence. And, if you do understand that life really is that temporary, moment by moment, it makes the moment you’re in inflate–like the universe inflated in the Big Bang–it inflates in meaning to encompass everything, right?

That’s all you get is this moment, and it now encompasses everything, and it’s simply a matter of keeping that foremost in mind while you go through the travails and tribulations of your life–right?–which have to be dealt with.

Sebastian Junger: Piece of cake. Yeah, exactly. Yeah.

Sebastian Junger: Thank you.

Sebastian Junger: It’s been six years. Yeah. I have easier access to reverence. I mean, you can’t entirely live in that place because there are tasks that need to be done where you have to focus on a lot of mundane details. And I have young children. Like, you know, whatever. Like, ou can’t stay in that place constantly, but if you can’t access it, you’re not living. And, if you allow yourself to be overwhelmed by frustration and anger and emotions like that, really overwhelmed by them, they are eclipsing the miracle of the fact that you’re alive. Right? That you exist, that you can hold your children, that you can see a tree. It all starts to sound very trite, but it’s quite true.

This makes me think of something that happened when I woke up in the ICU [Intensive Care Unit]. So, they eventually–after the doctors gave up, they tried another approach. It worked: they saved my life. And, the next thing I knew, it was morning in the ICU and I woke up to the sound of nurses talking about me, two ICU nurses. And, my eyes opened, and one of them said, ‘Congratulations, Mr. Junger, you made it. We almost lost you last night. In fact, it’s kind of a miracle. No one can believe you’re alive.’ And, indeed, I’d survived something where the odds of survival are incredibly small, right? And, I was shocked. I had no idea.

And then, immediately, I remember seeing my father, my dead father, and the black pit, right?

And then, the nurse walked away and she came back an hour later. I’m just lying there. I’m throwing up blood. I got tubes sticking out all over me. I’m in pain. I’m thinking about this terrible thing. And, she comes back and says, ‘Hey, how are you doing?’ And, I said, ‘Well, not that great. What you told me is terrifying, and I can’t stop thinking about it.’ And, she said, ‘Try this. Instead of thinking about it like something scary, try thinking about it like something sacred.’ And, she walked away. So, in my mind, as a non-religious person, as a secular person, the word ‘sacred’ is a beautiful word. It’s a necessary word. And, I hold it to mean any process, any information, anything that protects, upholds human dignity. That’s what sacred means.

So, sometimes school teachers are performing sacred work, sometimes shrinks are, sometimes doctors, sometimes ministers. We are all capable of sacred work, by my definition of the word. So, as a journalist, I’ve gone to frontlines over and over again and came back with information about what’s happening in Afghanistan or Sierra Leone or whatever it may be, now Liberia, Gaza, etc., Iran–like, information that’s sacred because it will help the world, it may help the world make wiser choices and protect human dignity. Without that–wherever you fall politically–without that information–it doesn’t matter to me–wWithout that information, no good choices are possible. So, journalists on their best day are potentially doing sacred work in the sense that I mean it.

So, my question to myself was: I just went to the ultimate frontline. I almost died. I looked over the edge and was allowed to return to life. Did I come back with sacred information? In other words, with information that might help others face their own mortality with more dignity, with more love, with less fear? Did I? Yes or no? And, that was the challenge I gave myself in writing my book, which took me two years to start because I was so avoidant. I’d been so traumatized by this. I was so avoidant of the topic I just really couldn’t bear for a while.

And, one of the odd things about almost dying–and it’s very common, I didn’t know this–is that often people who almost died, whether a medical emergency or a car accident or what have you, often they’re seized with a terror that they actually did die and they just don’t realize it and that they’re in a kind of dying hallucination and they are the only ones who don’t know.

There’s an amazing movie from 30 years ago called Jacob’s Ladder about a soldier in Vietnam who thinks he’s returning home to his girlfriend, etc. He’s actually dying in the battlefield and he doesn’t know it. And, his flashbacks to the battlefield are actually what’s actually happening, and everything else is the fantasy, the hallucination. Devastating idea.

So, apparently that’s really common. It’s an effect of trauma. And, so, I got very crazy, right? I became the most neurotic person I’d ever met. I got very depressed, very anxious. After I came home from the hospital, I couldn’t be alone. I was agoraphobic. I mean, I was really a mess, way more so than combat had ever done to me. And, at one point, I went up to my wife and I said, ‘Listen, can you just tell me you see me and that I’m here and that I made it? Can you just tell me?’

I mean, no one wants to hear that from their spouse, that question. A bad sign, right? And, she said, ‘Yes, of course you’re here. Etc., etc.’ And, in my mind, I’m like, ‘Yeah, that’s exactly the kind of thing a hallucination would say.’ Right? It’s actually a profound philosophical question: How do you know that you’re here?

And, finally–and I’ll end with this–but I think it’s a good point to make along these lines. My wife said to me this amazing thing, she said, ‘Sebastian, do you feel lucky or unlucky that this happened to you? I mean, not that you survived, but that it happened at all. If you could push a button and have it not happen, would you push the button?’

Boy, I didn’t know what to say, because on the one hand, I felt really like this was the most terrible thing that I’d ever experienced. On the other hand, I was privileged. I was special. I got to look over the edge and then come back, right? And, I was sort of chosen to see the truth. I phrased it even in grandiose terms to myself about what had happened to me, right? And, I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t have an answer.

And then, eventually I looked up the word–I thought, okay, in sort of more mythic terms, she’s saying, ‘Am I blessed or cursed?’ Right? So, I looked up the word ‘blessing,’ curious what the origin was. And, it’s from the Anglo-Saxon word bleczyan, which means blood. And, the idea is that there is no blessing without a wounding, right? There is no blessing without some kind of cost, some kind of consequence, without some kind of diminishment; and that they’re twins and that you really can’t have one without the other.

And, of course, life is both, right? Life is painful and horrible and a miracle and all at the same time: it’s a blessing and a curse. And, once I saw it like that, it kind of released me from this sort of moral paralysis about who was I and what was happening to me.

Sebastian Junger: Yeah. Thank you. Thank you very much for that. And, I am sort of conscious of having been extraordinarily lucky in the circumstances that I was born into and grew up in. Having been in many wars. The idea that I had a childhood where I didn’t have any reasonable fear for my safety, for my life. No reasonable concern that there’d be food for dinner. That, I might not be able to grow up in the house we were living in, that we have to move as refugees. So, lucky that those thoughts weren’t even in my mind as possibilities.

And, as I got older, I wouldn’t say I felt guilty about those good circumstances, but it did make me think that something was left undeveloped in me. And something human–something essentially human–was left underdeveloped in me because I never had to worry about, like: What was going to happen to me? I mean, when–when?–have humans ever had that luxury? Right? I mean, it just started. Look, they only invented antibiotics a few decades ago, right? When my father was born, infection could have easily killed him, because they didn’t have antibiotics. Now, so, even within my lifetime, there are things that protect people from, as doctors say, bad outcomes, unimaginable to even our grandparents.

And so, that precipitated in me a desire, I’m going to say test myself. It’s not quite the right word–but, to not prioritize safety and convenience and comfort in the decisions that I make in my life. I wanted to prioritize experiences and challenges and human connection. I wanted to be in places where humans connect in a very immediate, visceral way, often because they’re in difficult circumstances and they have to connect in order to survive. And those situations, as stressful as they can be, for me have also been the sort of food my soul has subsisted on and made up for the moral vacuum of a safe American suburb in the 1970s.

Sebastian Junger: Thank you.

Sebastian Junger: Well, it’s like one’s children. You sort of love them equally, but in different ways. All my books, I love equally, but in different ways. And this book was particularly meaningful because it was about me, and it was about mortality. I mean, I’d never really written about myself before. And, as a journalist, that always seemed like unseemly, right? You might see an occasional mention here and there and a few references in my book War. But, yeah, this one felt different and it felt like it easily could be the book I end my career on. Like, how do you go beyond this one? The Great Railroad Disaster of 1883?

Where do you go from here? I didn’t know. And, I still don’t have an answer to that question.

So, the experience of writing it–I love my words. Right? I love the process of arranging words in just the right way so that they communicate essential information, sacred information in a way that readers can’t help themselves. They just want to keep reading. That’s my vision, that’s my goal, right? And, I love that process of doing that with words. I absolutely adore it. And, this book was that process in some ways times a thousand because it was about the most abstract ideas, the most elusive concepts, right?

And, could I keep it grounded in a reality that was compelling, even though we’re talking about quantum physics? God help me, right? And, I feel like I did it. I flatter myself that I did it. Some people think it was too much science, but I think I would have lost them anyway. They said that about The Perfect Storm as well: ‘What’s with all the physics of wave motion?’ ‘Well, look, a hundred-foot wave sank the boat. You might want to know how that works, right?’ So, you’re not going to please everybody.

But so, I finished it, and it was an extremely emotional process and a lot of trauma comes with sorrow and trauma comes with grief and a loss of innocence and pain.

And, I’m not embarrassed to admit: I cried my way through any number of sections as I was writing it. And then it stopped; and then I was sort of okay. And, I was actually–under my wife, my poor wife–under her request, she said, ‘Can you go talk to someone? You need some help.’ And, so I did. I found a counselor to talk to. And, between writing the book and talking to a really good therapist, I actually got to a good place. But I got to tell you, it took a couple years. It was way worse than combat, way worse, right? Life is terrifying when you really understand what life is. It’s terrifying; and in equal measure, it’s magical. That’s the deal. It’s the only deal you’re ever going to get.

Sebastian Junger: My pleasure. I really enjoyed it. Thank you.