The bookshelf devoted to works on war expands infinitely, but at least now you can be certain which book goes on the far left and which, for the moment, you can slide into the other end. Mary Roach is the hugely popular science writer who has taken readers on breezy trips down the alimentary canal, inside cadavers, and into the process optimistically termed lovemaking; she retains the adolescent’s adoration of the gross-out and makes humorous hay with it. In Grunt she examines the state of the scientific art of preparing soldiers to go into battle. That’s why her book goes first.
At the far side of the long line of volumes describing heroism and tragedy throughout humanity’s history of belligerence, a.k.a. humanity’s history, Sebastian Junger’s Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging prescribes the requisite conditions for the return from combat that will ensure a soldier’s best chance for healing — which is as much as to say no longer being a soldier.
The vast difference in tone of these two books is appropriate to their respective before-and-after placement. Perennially chipper, finding the punch line in even the grimmest circumstances (the 45 percent amputation rate resulting from “deck slap,” or underbody explosions; the ongoing struggle against the serious depredations of dysentery), Roach is writing from a safe, preemptive spot: Stateside, among the ranks of scientists who, in their laboratories, investigate methods of killing first and better and receiving fewer casualties than the guys who are trying to do the same to you.
Her book could have been titled Everything You Always Wanted to Know About War but Were Afraid to Ask. (And it could have been made vastly better if someone had cautioned her about the wearying effect of reading footnote after footnote constructed on an identical plan: even more awe-inspiring fact followed by rimshot joke.) Junger writes soberly, at times with angry despair, about a fractured society ill equipped to restore the hearts and minds, the essential humanity, of those we’ve sent abroad armed with those superior adaptations.
Both authors write from an experiential standpoint. Roach tests her ability to withstand killing heat by treadmilling uphill wearing a thirty-pound pack in the “cook box” at the Consortium for Health and Military Performance; she stands by at a simulated casualty crisis management session, where fake blood spurts and scattered severed limbs demand triage from harried corpsmen. She learns from going to the source about how the government is working to devise an apparatus that can protect against hearing loss in the incredible din of war while at the same time — almost paradoxically — amplifying aural capacity, a lifesaving necessity in the field. She voyages in the military’s strange hierarchy of need, one that, for example, sets the best brains in the business to concocting the most noisome odor known to man. (Grunt stands as a concise explanation of those pie charts of federal spending in which, say, education is an anorexic sliver squeezed by the grotesque avoirdupois of the military budget.) But her primary aim is to entertain, to set us loose with a handful of ride tickets in a giant amusement park of thrilling facts. It is not to build an argument, although one hovers unsaid in the background: Stop and think. What is this expensive, amazing ingenuity for?
Sebastian Junger’s aim, on the other hand, is to militate, not against the military but against our fractured society. Good luck with that. Yet even though his case is brief — it contains elaborations loosely stitched onto a 2015 Vanity Fair article — it is persuasive. (He renders its gist in a recent TED talk.) That doesn’t mean it’s possible. He believes we must heal the rupture that represents modern capitalist society’s separation from our evolutionary past, in which groups of humans lived in small units marked by cooperation, mutual respect, and sharing. Our current valorization of individualism, in which the amassing of personal wealth and the notion of the family as an island has replaced the commonweal as the highest attainment, has left us a society marked by low “social resilience” — the amount of resource sharing endemic to its structure. Junger expends a fair amount of type describing Native American lifeways, a familiar and attractive ideal not likely to reappear anytime soon. The soldier who returns from war, where he has bonded to others of his unit as tightly as if in a nomadic tribe, finds himself alone, with only his disturbing memories and his status as a veteran — a person whose private agonies and wants can never be understood. The thank-you-for-your-service cant and 10 percent discounts reinforce his newly permanent status as outsider; true reintegration, Junger maintains, depends instead on the availability of meaningful work and deep connection to community.
Junger’s credentials for making such an argument result from his wartime experience; he was not a soldier but came very close, embedded with a platoon fighting in the dangerous Korengal Valley of Afghanistan. He chronicled it in his 2010 book War and the film Restrepo, made with the late photojournalist Tim Hetherington. Tribe is, in a way, a 168-page caption to the award-winning documentary, which powerfully brings to life Junger’s thesis that chaos and peril bind soldiers in a tightly knit – sometimes surprisingly happy — family in which every member, each a bulwark against death for the other, feels necessary, heightenedly alive. Then they come home. The “community of sufferers” (in the term of researcher Charles Fritz) they had formed at the front is disbanded. They long again for the closeness it seems only war can afford. Or at least not an America in which a handful of bankers can cause 9 million people to lose their jobs and go unpunished. (Junger similarly connects the shocking rise of rampage shootings — which have doubled in incidence since 2006, and this was written before Orlando — to the same ailing social system of which white-collar crime is also a symptom.)
The elemental joy that paradoxically arises when severe adversity calls upon people to set aside individual concerns and tend to communal needs was more thoroughly, and beautifully, detailed in Rebecca Solnit’s A Paradise Built in Hell. She, like Junger, uses the London Blitz as an example of a time when people were in mortal danger but upon which they later looked back with a sort of longing. Not that either author promotes the idea that we should incite more crises to bring us together, to permit us to be the people evolution engineered from out of the most cooperative primates. We can only comment on what has been lost and yearn quietly for its return. Or welcome the revolution when it comes.
Tribe is a sketch of a book. Its most important points are artillery rounds, coming in so rapidly there’s little time to do more than take cover. Each one could be the subject of a whole new treatise. “A society that doesn’t offer its members the chance to act selflessly . . . isn’t a society in any tribal sense of the word; it’s just a political entity that, lacking enemies, will probably fall apart on its own.” It is also possible that America is just fine with being such an entity. All it has to do is perennially source enemies, among potential friends if necessary.
What Roach suggests, and Junger upbraids us for, is that war is in some ways our highest calling, as human as it is inhuman. It is a notion unspeakable but one that, these two very different writers are at pains to prove, must somehow be spoken.
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Sig Nordal 