i'm going to
ask and try to answer some ways kind of
kind of an uncomfortable question
um both civilians obviously and soldiers
suffer in war
i don't think any civilian has ever
missed the war that they were subjected
to
i've been covering wars for almost 20
years and one of the remarkable things
for me is how many soldiers
find themselves missing it how is it
someone can
go through the worst experience
imaginable
and come home back to their home and
their family their country
and miss the war how does that work
what's it mean
we have to answer that question because
if we don't it'll be impossible to bring
soldiers back to the
to a place in society where they belong
and i think it'll also be impossible to
stop war if we don't understand how that
mechanism works
the problem is that war
does not have a simple neat
truth one simple neat truth
any sane person hates war hates the idea
of war
wouldn't want to have anything to do
with it doesn't want to be near it
doesn't want to know about it
that's a sane response to war but if i
asked all of you in this room
who here has paid money
to go to a cinema and be entertained
by a hollywood war movie most of you
would probably raise your hands
that's what's so complicated about war
and trust me if a room full of
peace-loving people
find something compelling about war
so do 20 year old soldiers who have been
trained in it
i promise you that's the thing that has
to be understood
i've covered war for about 20 years as i
said but my most intense experiences in
combat
were with american soldiers in
afghanistan
i've been in africa in the middle east
afghanistan in the 90s
but it was with american soldiers in
2007 2008
that i was confronted with uh very
intense
combat i was in a small valley called
the korengal valley in eastern
afghanistan
it was six miles long there were 150 men
of battle company in that valley
and for a while while i was there
almost 20 percent of all the combat in
all of afghanistan was happening in
those six miles
150 men were absorbing almost a fifth of
the combat
for all of nato forces in the country
for a couple months
it was very intense i spent most of my
time at a small outpost called restrepo
it was named after the platoon medic
that had been killed about two months
into the deployment
it was a few plywood bee huts
uh clinging to a side of a ridge
and sandbags bunkers gun positions
there were 20 men up there the second
platoon battle company
i spent most of my time up there there
was no running water there was no way to
bathe the guys were up there for a month
at a time
they never even got out of their clothes
they fought they worked they slept
in the same clothes they never took them
off and at the end of the month they
went back down to the company
headquarters
and by then their clothes were
unwearable they burned them and got a
new set
there was no internet there was no phone
there was no communication with the
outside world
up there there was no cooked food
there was nothing up there that young
men typically like
no cars no girls no television nothing
except combat combat they did learn to
like
i remember one one day it was very hot
day in the spring
and uh we hadn't been in a fight in a
couple of weeks maybe
usually the outpost was attacked and
that we hadn't seen any
combat in a couple weeks and everyone
was com just
stunned with boredom and heat and i
remember the
the uh the lieutenant walking past me
sort of stripped to the waist it was
incredibly hot
stripped to the waist walked past me
muttering oh god please someone attack
us today
that's how bored they were that's war
two
there's a lieutenant saying please
something make something happen
because we're going crazy to understand
that
you have to for a moment think about
combat not morally
that's an important job to do but for a
moment don't think about it morally
think about it
neurologically let's think about what
happens in your brain
when you're in combat first of all the
experience
is it's a very bizarre
it's a very bizarre one it's not what i
had expected
usually you're not scared i've been very
scared in combat
but most of the time when i was out
there i wasn't scared i was very scared
beforehand and incredibly scared
afterwards
and that fear that comes afterwards can
last years i haven't been
shot at in six years and i was woken up
very abruptly this morning
by a nightmare that i was being strafed
by aircraft
six years later i've never even been
strafed by aircraft and i was having
nightmares about it
time slows down you get this weird
tunnel vision
you notice some details very very very
accurately and other things drop out
it's almost a slightly altered state of
mind
what's happening in your brain is you
you're getting an enormous amount of
adrenaline
pumped through your system young men
will
go to great lengths to have that
experience
it's wired into us
it's hormonally supported
the mortality rate for young men in
society
is six times what it is for young women
from violence and from accidents just
the stupid stuff that young men do
jumping off of things they shouldn't
jump off of lighting things on fire they
shouldn't light on fire i mean you know
what i'm talking about
they die at six times the rate that
young women do
statistically you are safer as a teenage
boy
you are safe you would be safer in the
fire department or the police department
in most american cities
than just walking around the streets of
your hometown looking for something to
do
statistically you can imagine how that
plays out in combat
at restrepo every guy up there was
almost killed including me
including my good friend tim
hetherington who was later killed in
libya
there were guys walking around walking
around with bullet holes in their
uniforms
rounds that had cut through the fabric
and didn't touch their bodies
i was leaning against some sandbags one
morning
not much going on sort of spacing out
and some sand was kicked into the side
of my some
sort of hit the side of my face
something hit the side of my face i
didn't know what it was
you have to understand about bullets
that they go a lot faster than sound so
if someone shoots at you
from a few hundred meters the bullet
goes by you or hits you obviously
a half a second or so before the sound
catches up to it so i
some sand sprayed in the side of my face
half a second later i heard
that it machine gun fire was the first
round
first burst of an hour long firefight
what had happened was the bullet hit a
bullet hit three or four inches from the
side of my head
imagine just think about it because i
certainly did
think about the angle of deviation that
saved my life at 400 meters it missed me
by three inches just
think about the math on that
every guy up there had that some
experience like that
at least once if not many times
the boys are up there for a year they
got back
some of them got out of the army and had
tremendous psychological problems when
they got home
some of them stayed in the army and were
more or less okay psychologically
i was particularly close to a guy named
brendan o'byrne i'm
still very good friends with him he came
back to the states he got out of the
army
i had a dinner party one night i invited
him
and he was he started talking with a
woman
uh one of my friends and she she knew
how bad it had been out there
and she said brendan uh is there
anything at all that you miss about
being out in afghanistan about the war
and he thought about it for quite a long
time
he finally said ma'am i miss almost all
of it
and he's one of the most traumatized
people
i've seen from that war
ma'am i miss almost all of it what is he
talking about
he's not a psychopath
he doesn't miss killing people he's not
crazy he doesn't miss getting shot at
and seeing his friends get killed
what is it that he misses we have to
answer that
if we're going to stop war we have to
answer that question
i think what he missed is
brotherhood he missed
some ways the opposite of killing what
he missed was connection
to the other men he was with now
brotherhood's different from friendship
friendship happens in society obviously
the more you like someone the more you
you'd be willing to do for them
brotherhood has nothing to do with how
you feel about the other person
it's a mutual agreement in a group
that you will put the welfare of the
group you will put the safety of
everyone in the group above your own
in effect you're saying
i love these other people more than i
love myself
brennan was a team leader in command of
three men
and the worst day in afghanistan he was
almost killed so many times
didn't bother him the worst thing that
happened to him in afghanistan
was one of his men was hit in the head
with a bullet in the helmet
knocked him over
they thought he was dead he was in the
middle of a huge firefight no one could
deal with it
and a minute later kyle steiner sat back
up
from the dead as it were because he'd
come he'd come back to consciousness the
bullet had just knocked him out and
glanced off the helmet
he remembers people saying as he was
sort of half conscious he remembers
people
you remember there was people saying
steiner's been hit in the head steiner's
dead and he was thinking i'm not dead
and he sat up and brendan realized after
that that he could not protect
his men and that was the only time he
cried in afghanistan was realizing that
that's brotherhood this wasn't invented
recently
many of you probably read the iliad
achilles surely would have risked his
life
or given his life to save his friend
patroclus
in world war ii there are many stories
of wounded
soldiers who were wounded who were
brought to a rear base hospital
who went awol crawled out of windows
slipped out of doors
went awol wounded
to make their way back to the front
lines to rejoin their brothers out there
so you think about brendan you think
about all these soldiers
having an experience like that a bond
like that in a small group
where they love 20 other people in some
ways more than they love themselves
you think about how good that would feel
imagine it
and they they are are blessed with that
experience for a year
and then they come home and they are
just back in society
like the rest of us are not knowing who
they can count on
not knowing who loves them who they can
love
not knowing exactly what anyone they
know would do for them if it came down
to it
that is terrifying
compared to that war
psychologically in some ways is easy
compared to that kind of alienation
that's why they miss it and that's what
we have to understand and in some ways
fix
in our society thank you very much
you