"War" by Sebastian Junger--Reading the Book 15 Years After I Saw the Movie

 

In August of 2010, eight months after I returned from Iraq, I went to see the documentary Restrepo with Jim Dao of the New York Times.*  Restrepo records the the men of 2nd Platoon of Battle Company, airborne infantry on the farthest outpost in the midst of the worst fighting in the War in Afghanistan.  The movie was filmed and directed by Sebastian Junger and Tim Hetherington. 

I wrote briefly about seeing the movie in 2010. War documentaries can be slow, wanting to get every detail right. Restrepo roars from one scene to the next. Hetherington and Junger captured moments when everyone around them was in a fight for their lives--they were armed only with a camera.  Even the moments of boredom had the feral, roaring feel of men waiting for a fight as if chained.  

And the candor, especially of the officers in charge of 2nd Platoon and Battle Company was amazing.  The default setting for talking to the press in the military is STFU (Shut the Fuck Up).  Most soldiers I have known hate the media. When I first served during the Vietnam War soldiers felt outright betrayed by the media.  

The officers and men said what they really thought. I would not have believed the candor if I had not seen it.  

Now fifteen years after seeing the movie, I read Junger's book War based on the same year in the Korengal Valley of Afghanistan plus follow up with the soldiers of the Restrepo outpost.  

I have not seen a more visceral or candid documentary of any war. I would recommend the movie to anyone. The book had me laughing out loud at some points and then reading page after page never able to stop in the middle of a patrol or fire fight.  Usually I like either the book or the movie better (usually the book). In the case of the HBO series Band of Brothers I much preferred the series to the book. 

By contrast, War and Restrepo they are companions. I would watch Restrepo first simply to feel the rush of the story then read War to linger on the words and the detail.   

In 2011, I volunteered to go to Afghanistan. The deployment orders fell through, certainly for the better. War was published in May 2010.  I intended to read the book after seeing the movie, but forgot about it in the rush of life after returning from Iraq. In retrospect, if I had read the book I would have better understood why I wanted to go back and why I should not.

In October of last year, I met Junger at a conference where he was a featured speaker.  He spoke about his book Tribe which is very much informed by War and Restrepo.  The conference was on Tribalism and Cosmopolitanism at the Hannah Arendt Center at Bard College. We had lunch together and talked about the Army, deployment, Army food, and how strange it was to return to the "real world" after war. And about how funny and terrible Army jokes are. 

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*Dao was the war correspondent of the Times and in the middle of a long-term assignment covering the 10th Mountain Division on a year-long deployment to Afghanistan.  The 10th Mountain is stationed at Camp Drum, New York.  Dao's coverage of a year at war is here. 

Tattoos are Rare in Panama

 

Sleeve tattoos like the one above are common in Panama City, Florida, not mention Philadelphia, Portland, Pittsburgh and Phoenix, but not in Panama City, Panama. Across the Central American region, tattoos are rare.  

One reason is the association of tattoos with gangs and drug cartels. People with tattoos were seen as part of those groups. 

A barista in Panama City who is college age said she and her friends don't get tattoos.  No particular reason, they just don't.

I have been living in Panama since November and just noticed that I don't see tattoos everywhere, as I would in any major city in America or Europe.  

Today I rode the both subway lines in Panama. The five-car trains are open. You can see from one end of the train to the other.  As far as I could see, no tattoos.  At one busy stop a security guard with a tattoo got on the train. If I rode a subway in New York, Philadelphia, or DC, I would have a hard time finding people without tattoos. 

It was a woman with sleeve tattoos that made me aware that I was not seeing tattoos.  When I saw her fully-inked arms in an outdoor restaurant I realized I had not seen sleeve tattoos for months--since I was last in Philadelphia. The woman with sleeve tattoos I saw here was an American tourist, not a Panamanian.

As perception, I know it is much harder to "see" what is absent than what is present so I don't feel too bad about not noticing that people in Panama don't have tattoos. I also wonder if I was simply seeing "normal" for most of my life.  Before this century, most Americans did not have tattoos. For fifty years, I lived in the world where tattoos were rare.        

Now they are everywhere--in the US.  

But not here in Panama. 

 

A Review of An Immense World by Ed Yong

In the fall of 2024 I read An Immense World with the Evolution Round Table at Franklin and Marshall College, a group I have been part of for more than two decades.

It is easily the most beautifully written of all the books of more than two dozen books I have read with this group.  Rather than simply gush about it, I copied the review from The Guardian newspaper. If you read popular science this book is deeply informative and a joy to read.

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A Review of An Immense World by Ed Yong 

This magnificent book reveals the strange and mysterious ways that creatures sense their surroundings – pushing our understanding of them to the limit

Review by Killian Fox

20 Jun 2022

Scallops have eyes. Not just two eyes, like humans have, or eight, like most spiders do, but up to 200 of them, each clasped by a thin, wavy tentacle protruding from the inner edges of the corrugated shell. Considering how rudimentary a scallop’s brain is, these eyes are surprisingly sophisticated. Play a scallop a video of juicy particles drifting by in the water, as researchers at the University of South Carolina have done, and it will likely open its shell, as if to take a bite.

It’s possible, at a stretch, to say what’s going on here. The scallop’s eyes transmit visual information to its brain, which creates a picture, however fuzzy, of some juicy plankton approaching, and it springs into action. The shell opens wide, the plankton floats in, and snap! Dinner is served.

It’s a neat enough explanation, but it’s not true. The reality, as with most cases in Ed Yong’s magnificent new book on animal perception, is more complicated, more mysterious, more wondrously strange.

Yong has a knack for vivid similes, and here he invites us to think of the scallop’s brain “as a security guard watching a bank of a hundred monitors, each connected to a motion-sensing camera… The cameras may be state-of-the-art, but the images they capture are not sent to the guard.” What appears instead is a warning light for every camera that has detected something, and the guard reacts without actually visualising the prey. If this explanation is correct – and Yong is always alert to the possibility that it might not be – the scallop “doesn’t experience a movie in its head the same way we do. It sees without scenes.”

This throws up further questions, not least: why do scallops have such keen eyes if their brains can’t process the visual data? Yong doesn’t give us a conclusive answer, but the example raises a deeper point that lies at the heart of his book. We humans are so deeply embedded in our own particular way of seeing the world that we find it hard not to impose our perspective on other creatures – if indeed we bother thinking about them at all.

A British science writer based in the US, Yong is drawn to material that pushes our understanding to the limits. His first book, I Contain Multitudes, dove headlong into the world of microbes and made often punishingly complex subjects digestible to lay readers without oversimplification. While working on this follow-up, he broke off to report on Covid for the Atlantic, producing a series of deeply researched, often devastating articles that won him a Pulitzer prize.

An Immense World might be his most audacious undertaking so far. Humans, like all creatures, are trapped in sensory bubbles unique to each individual – what the Baltic-German zoologist Jakob von Uexküll referred to as our Umwelt – which means we “can only tap into a small fraction of reality’s fullness”, as Yong puts it. Our eyesight is pretty good, but it’s nowhere near as panoramic as that of a mallard, which “sees the world simultaneously moving toward it and away from it” when flying. Nor can we perceive ultraviolet colours, as most animals can, or sniff out the topography of underwater mountains and valleys, like some seabirds seem capable of doing.

We may feel like we are the masters of our planet, having mapped every inch of its landmass and stared into the guts of an atom, but when it comes to understanding what it’s like to be a songbird using the earth’s magnetic field to navigate across continents, we barely know where to start.

Yong is up for giving it his best shot, not least because he understands how damaging it can be to disregard other creatures’ perspectives. When we unthinkingly flood the world with light and sound, we wreak havoc on bird and turtle migrations and disrupt owls and orcas in their search for food. Even scientists who have spent years working with a single species can botch research by failing to fully consider their point of view. But Yong also relishes stepping into other Umwelts just for the sheer fascination of it. “We don’t have to look to aliens from other planets,” one scientist tells him. “We have animals that have a completely different interpretation of what the world is right next to us.”

She has a point: who needs sci-fi when you’ve got a blind catfish with flow-sensing teeth all over its skin, or crickets with ears on their knees, or a dolphin that can perceive your innards through echolocation? Even everyday encounters seem extraordinary through the “magic magnifying glass” that Yong holds up. The jerky movements of flies buzzing around your living room aren’t random, but a response to fluctuations in temperature too minuscule for humans to detect. The hearing of chickadees changes with the seasons, speeding up in the autumn, while large flocks are forming, and becoming more pitch-sensitive in spring, to register the subtleties of mating calls.

The book is so full of these little astonishments, beautifully rendered, that Yong occasionally risks overwhelming our sense of wonder. By the time we get to the chapter on magnetoreception – easily the most confounding of the senses, in part because no one is certain where the relevant receptors are located – it’s almost a relief when he admits that he has “no idea how to begin thinking about the Umwelt of a loggerhead turtle”.

But it’s the attempt that matters, and Yong succeeds brilliantly in shedding light on these alien worlds – worlds that drift around us every day, like plankton around a scallop, but whose richness and extravagant strangeness we rarely pause to examine. Now, thanks to this book, we have scenes to help us see.

Bilingual Books and the Challenge of Lifelong Learning

More than a decade ago in a Paris bookstore I picked up French-Greek edition of The Gospel of John, Jean Evangile: traduit du grec, preface et annote par Bernard Pautrat.  I read it in 2017 after I took three semesters of Ancient Greek with undergraduates.  Most of the Christian scripture is easier to read than histories or philosophy in Ancient Greek and much easier than poetry or drama.

The Greek is a standard late 20th century international text. The French on the facing page is a contemporary translation.  Greek is the language in which the apostles wrote, but not the language Jesus spoke. So the gospels are a combination of narrative with quotes from Jesus (and any other dialogue) that are translations of Aramaic and Hebrew.   

When I began, I read the French first. I would read a sentence or paragraph then read the Greek. When I got stuck in both languages I would refer to David Bentley Hart's translation of the Christian scripture.  He has a lot of notes. Since it is a one-man translation, a committee is not deciding on word choice or the flow of a passage. I like that better.

As I went along the Greek I took two decades ago started to come back. I know a lot of Greek grammar. As I read more, I  remembered more vocabulary.  By halfway, I was reading a Greek sentence first, then the French.  By the end, Greek paragraph or two before switching to French.   

In fact, since the Greek in John's gospel is so uncomplicated, I was more likely to puzzle over the French grammar by the end.  

As a method of learning languages, I can only recommend this method to those who want to read. I know that if I really wanted fluency, I would have to immerse myself in one language until I was fluent.  It would have been better if I started my immersion before the first grade. But reading keeps languages in my head and lets me experience a little of  what a native reader of a language enjoys all the time. 

Also, I have tried reading a dual-language text in which one of the languages is English. It is difficult not to lean on the English.  

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The Text Itself 

Of the apostles who wrote the gospels and letters of the Christian scriptures only Luke was a native speaker of Greek.  His gospel and the Acts of the Apostles, which he wrote, are much better Greek than the rest of the book.  Which also means more difficult Greek. 

Between my two readings of Jean Evangile, I joined a synagogue for the first time in my life and became a somewhat practicing Jew.  This made the end of the gospel much more vivid and disturbing.  John makes very clear the plots and intrigues of the Jewish leaders are why Jesus was crucified.  

In the words of Jesus, it is very clear that Christianity should not have and money, power, buildings, or any connection to this world except to point people to the Kingdom of God.  So the Jewish leaders represent any religious leader that has money and power.  

But for the kind of person who thinks they can read a 2000-year-old twice translated book literally (Jesus spoke Aramaic and Hebrew, John translated his words in Greek, then the Greek got translated into English.) he would not look for the universal meaning of the actions of the Jewish leaders. The literal reading looks bad.  

Israel Alone by Bernard-Henri Levy--The World Changed The Month It Was Published

 

On September 10 of the year just passed Bernard-Henri Levy published his new book Israel Alone.  I have read several of Levy's books since returning to Judaism in 2017, so I read this one eagerly.

Levy made clear that on campuses in Europe and America, Jew haters were attacking Jews with impunity. Western leaders kept saying there must be a cease fire no matter how many Jews are raped or murdered.  Israel did seem quite alone and embattled. Hezbollah attacked from the north. Iran had attacked with a barrage of missiles. The Houthis were firing ballistic missiles from Yemen. Hamas continued to hide in hospitals and use Gazans as human shields.

Israel looked quite alone. 

As I read the book, I realized the deep lament at the center of this brief book had receded somewhat.  A week after the book was published, Israel attacked Hezbollah killing and maiming thousands of its tactical leaders in the Pager Attack.  Terrorists taking a huge dose of their own medicine.  

Before the month ended Hassan Nasrallah and most of the top leaders of Hezbollah were dead in an air strike that showed how deeply Israel had penetrated the terrorist organization.  Then Israel smashed the Hezbollah rocket launchers and attack tunnels on its border.  

Israel attacked Iran and took out all of Irans air defenses.  Israel or any other of Iran's enemies with an air force could attack at will. A month later, pro-Russian/Iranian Syria collapsed.  The Russians are gone. The Iranian supply route to Lebanon is gone. 

The Trump administration takes office with Trump threatening there will be "all Hell to pay" if Hamas does not release all of the hostages from the October 7, 2023, attack on Israel.  

Among the predictions of chaos after January 20, many believe Trump will begin mass deportations.  He may.  But several of Trump's cabinet picks have plans to revoke the visas of students who are supporting Hamas and other terrorist groups.  The first deportations may be terrorist supporters on visas. There will be nomass protest of deporting those who cheer Hamas and other terrorists.

Israel is still largely alone, but since Levy's book was published, Israel has crushed several of its enemies and winners always have friends.  

Tribe by Sebastian Junger -- The Ancient Roots of Many Problems of the Modern World

In October, I went a conference on Tribalism and Cosmopolitanism.  The first and featured speaker was Sebastian Junger, author of seven books that, in part, describe the lives of modern tribes in America including soldiers, commercial fishermen, and others who risk their lives in their work.  Junger said, "The real and ancient meaning of tribe is the community that you live in, that you share resources with, that you would risk your life to defend."

He is also the co-director with Tim Hetherington of the documentary Restrepo, the record of a year with soldiers on one of the most dangerous outposts in Afghanistan. The soldiers of Battle Company, 2nd of the 503rd Infantry Regiment 173rd Airborne Brigade Combat Team are the definition of a tribe.

Humans as a species are tribal.  Forming tribes and living as tribes describes most of human history. In the book, Junger shows that people who live without tribes, without the community and deep connections tribes afford, are adrift and often unhappy without knowing why.  

Junger said it was a commonplace in frontier America that people who went from civilization to Native American tribal life did not come back.  Whatever civilization could offer, those who left would not return. 

As I read the book, I felt I was learning the secret code of my life--the yearning for a tribe.  I grew up in a Boston suburb in the 1950s and 60s, not connected to extended family or religion or even a sports team.  I joined the military shortly after high school graduation in 1971 and loved being part of a group with a mission. I got out after being blinded in a missile explosion, but healed completely and re-enlisted within a year.  

After three years as a tank commander on the East-West border, I got out, went to college, got a professional job, then a quarter-century later re-enlisted and deployed to Iraq for a year.  That deployment ended 15 years ago this month.   

In an odd twist, I saw Restrepo right after it was released in late June 2010 in an NYC theater, a few months after I returned from deployment.  I walked out of the theater and wanted to go to Afghanistan.  

Belonging to a tribe has been normal for we humans in all of recorded history and before.  The cosmopolitan drive in us allows great learning, great invention, modern medicine and all the wonders of the modern world, but it does satisfy our need for deep human connection.  Tribes do that. Tribe, the book, explains the history and present reality of the tribal impulse in our lives.

The French Roots of Sinatra's "I Did It My Way"

In November 1968, Frank Sinatra told his friend and collaborator Paul Anka that he was tired and ready to give up show business. Sinatra had asked Anka several times to write a song for him, but Anka had been intimidated.  He saw himself writing teen songs.  During dinner Sinatra said, "You never wrote me that song."

Still reeling over the news at 1 a.m. in his apartment, he found himself toying with lyrics to a melody he had heard in France. “I thought, ‘What would Frank do with this melody, if he were a writer?’” Anka says. “And all of a sudden, it just came to me: ‘And now the end is near. I face the final curtain.’”

Anka knew the melody for these words.  A few months before,  Anka was in the  south of France and heard a song called Comme d'habitude which can be translated "as per usual."  More loosely "same old shit." The melody was written by Jaques Revaux with lyrics by Claude Francois and Gilles Thibault.  The sad song was about a man in his mid 30s who was left (dumped) by his much younger (teenage) lover.  Anka wrote a completely different lyruc on the same melody.

Anka gave the song to Sinatra who recorded it before the end of the year.  In  1969, I Did It My Way was an instant hit around the world and became a signature song for Sinatra for the rest of his life.  

Sinatra did not quit show business.  

In the 1960s most pop music traveled from from the United States and England to the rest of the world. I was fascinated to learn the story of a hit song in France that became a very different song in America.