Living on the Edge: Reading All of Sebastian Junger

Sebastian Junger

Over the past fifteen months I read all six of Sebastian Junger’s books. I didn’t plan it as a project, but once it started it took on the coherence of one. It began in October 2024, when I heard Junger speak at the Hannah Arendt Center conference at Bard College. His talk focused on Tribe, but what stayed with me afterward—especially over lunch—was not any single argument, but his way of seeing the world. He spoke about danger, belonging, and the fragile structures that hold people together in crisis with the clarity of someone who had tested those ideas with his own body.

I had already seen Restrepo in 2010, the year I returned from Iraq. I watched it in a small theater in the Village with Jim Dao, then the New York Times’ war correspondent embedded with the 10th Mountain Division. Dao had encouraged me to see it, and he was right. The film didn’t feel like most war documentaries, which are shot from relative safety or filtered through official narratives. Junger and Tim Hetherington were in the middle of the firefights. The camera shook because bullets were flying. It was impossible not to feel that the filmmakers were risking their lives alongside the soldiers they were recording. Whoever in Army Public Affairs allowed that film to be released was either extraordinarily brave or quietly suicidal. Nothing in it was sanitized.

What struck me most at the time was how exposed Camp Restrepo was compared to my own deployment. I spent much of my Iraq tour on a large airbase. We had missile attacks, and we took badly aimed fire on night flights, but it was nothing like being in an isolated valley surrounded by hostile forces. The men at Restrepo were under threat every hour. When I later read War, Junger’s written account of that deployment, I gained a deeper understanding of the unit and of his own presence there. It only increased my respect for what he and Hetherington had done.

After the Arendt conference, I decided to begin with Tribe. It was the conceptual bridge between Restrepo and everything else Junger had written. I have known the comfort and intensity of belonging, and I also know how fleeting it can be. My best tank crew—the one I trained for months and that shot at the top of our battalion gunnery—fell apart within weeks. One man was reassigned. Another left the Army. Another went to a different unit. As Junger makes clear in both Tribe and Freedom, a tribe can be for life, or it can be for only as long as the mission lasts. Either way, while it exists, it feels more real than almost anything else.

Freedom extended that insight. It argues that human beings are built to endure danger, risk, and uncertainty, and that safety, while pleasant, can be psychologically corrosive. Junger’s stories of people choosing hardship over comfort made me rethink my own career, my own decisions to re-enlist and to seek out difficult environments. Comfort is not always the same as meaning.

Two of Junger’s books unexpectedly returned me to my childhood in the Boston suburbs. A Death in Belmont brought back the fear that hung over our neighborhoods during the era of the Boston Strangler. I was a kid then, but I remember how adults spoke in hushed tones, how doors were locked, how an invisible threat hovered over everyday life. Junger treated that story not just as true crime but as a social mystery, a way of examining how communities process terror.

The Perfect Storm did something similar through nature. Growing up near the Atlantic, I always knew the sea could turn deadly. I had seen nor’easters from shore. Junger turned that abstract danger into a gripping reality, showing how ordinary working men—fishermen just doing their jobs—could be swallowed by forces far beyond their control. Like Belmont, it is a book about how thin the line is between normal life and catastrophe.

Then there was In My Time of Dying. That book forced me to look again at my own near-death experiences. I have had two. One was an explosion that left me blind. The other was a racing crash that broke my neck and nine other bones. I faced mortality, but not in the prolonged, grinding way Junger did. His clarity about what it means to cross that threshold and come back from it is unlike anything I’ve read. It is not mystical. It is analytic, almost clinical, and because of that it is profoundly unsettling.

After finishing all six books, something shifted. I realized that, for all my brushes with danger, I had lived a comparatively sheltered life. Junger had gone farther—to the edge of war, to the edge of the sea, to the edge of his own biological existence—and then returned to tell the story with discipline and precision. He did not glamorize risk. He examined it.

Taken together, Junger’s books describe a world more dangerous than I experienced and more honest than most of what passes for contemporary nonfiction. He writes about soldiers under fire, fishermen in storms, families stalked by a serial killer, and a man dying on a hospital bed, but the subject is always the same: how human beings behave when the structures that protect them fall away. Reading him in sequence revealed a single, sustained inquiry into what it means to live on the edge of disaster—and how, sometimes, that is where life feels most real.

Sherlock Holmes, The Dog That Didn't Bark, and Protests in Iran

 

The phrase “The dog that didn’t bark” is one of my favorite metaphors from Arthur Conan Doyle’s imagination.  In this case part of the 1892 Sherlock Holmes story "Silver Blaze."

In the story, a valuable racehorse disappears and its trainer is murdered. Inspector Gregory is puzzled because the watchdog in the stable made no noise during the crime. Holmes points out that this is exactly the key fact.

Here is the crucial exchange:

Gregory: “Is there any point to which you would wish to draw my attention?”

Holmes: “To the curious incident of the dog in the night-time.”

Gregory: “The dog did nothing in the night-time.”

Holmes: “That was the curious incident.”

The implication:

The dog knew the intruder. If a stranger had come, the dog would have barked. Because it stayed silent, the culprit must have been someone familiar—an insider.

Since then, “the dog that didn’t bark” has become shorthand for:

An important absence — something that should have happened, but didn’t, and therefore reveals the truth.

The people of Iran have been protesting the tyrannical murderous Jihadi regime that runs their country for a month, at the cost of their lives. Yesterday 200 protesters were killed.  

Why are the campus protesters who were out in the street in support of Hamas terrorists as freedom fighters since October 7, 2023, not out in support of the people of Iran?  

Where were those campus protestors when the Iranian people strove for freedom in 2022? In 2009?  

No Jews, no news. 

The people who chant "Globalize the Intifada" in America and are silent about Iran are showing how much they care about the suffering of Islamic people.  

They don't, unless they can blame the Jews.

While protesters in Iran were slaughtered by security forces, the pro-terrorist Jew haters were on the street in Manhattan chanting: 

"There is only one solution; Intifada, Revolution!" "Death to the IDF" and "Say it loud, say it clear, we support Hamas here."

George Orwell’s Three-Power World—and Ours

George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four does not present a world of many nations. It presents a world of three empires—Oceania, Eurasia, and Eastasia—locked in permanent, shifting conflict. The alliances are deliberately fluid. One day Oceania is allied with Eastasia against Eurasia; the next day it is the reverse. The public is required to instantly forget yesterday’s enemy and embrace today’s. The deeper purpose of this system is not military victory but mental control. If the Party can change who the enemy is, it can change what reality itself means.

What Orwell was describing was not a fantasy of chaos but a theory of stability: a three-power system in which no one wins, no one loses, and conflict never ends.

We now live in something very close to that world.

The United States dominates the Western Hemisphere and the Atlantic order. China dominates East Asia and increasingly the Pacific and much of the global manufacturing system. Russia dominates a northern arc—from Eastern Europe through Central Asia—using energy, war, and coercion to compensate for its weaker economy. None of these powers is strong enough to rule the world, but each is strong enough to enforce a regional sphere.

And just like in Orwell, alliances are not moral commitments; they are tools.

Europe is “America’s ally” while being economically bound to China. India works with Washington while buying Russian oil. Turkey is in NATO while coordinating with Moscow. Saudi Arabia shifts between the dollar and the yuan. Nothing is permanent. Everything is transactional. The public is told these are contradictions. In reality, they are the system working exactly as designed.

This is where Trump fits in.

Trump does not think in terms of rules-based order or international law. He thinks in terms of turf. Venezuela is in America’s hemisphere, so Washington gets to decide what happens there. Ukraine sits in Russia’s historical sphere, so Putin’s actions are something to be bargained over rather than confronted absolutely. Taiwan sits in China’s orbit, so deterrence is maintained rhetorically while real red lines quietly soften. None of this requires Trump to admire Putin or Xi. It only requires him to accept that great powers get their neighborhoods.

Africa, in this worldview, is what Orwell called a “disputed zone”—a place where all three powers operate, extract, and interfere, precisely because no one controls it. China builds ports and mines. Russia sends mercenaries and weapons. The U.S. applies aid, sanctions, and pressure. The people who live there are not the point. The denial of territory to rivals is.

Orwell’s insight was that a three-power world does not bring peace. It brings endless, low-level conflict and constant narrative manipulation. Today’s ally can be tomorrow’s threat. Yesterday’s outrage can be erased by tomorrow’s deal.

The real war, then and now, is not over land. It is over memory—who gets to say what has always been true.

Orwell is the Prophet of Trump's Brave New World

I am among those who believed the Aldous Huxley predicted the future in his Brave New World. It was not Big Brother who crushed us individually and as a people.  We would simply sell out for drugs and entertainment.  

Which is true. And electing a game show host President underlined that truth with a Sharpie.  

And yet, world politics really is devolving into the spheres of influence Orwell predicted.  Huxley saw our individual fall into oblivion. Orwell saw the new world order.

Poet Flyer by E. John Knapp, a Review

 

E. John Knapp’s Poet Flyer surprised me. The beginning of the story is routine and predictable as a war memoir. Whirlwind love. Whirlwind training. Go to war on arrival in England. On the surface it looks modest: a slim volume of poems written by a former B-17 navigator, telling the story of his life in verse. Then with no warning, tragedy rips through Knapp's life.  From that fatal day forward the book becomes an account of survival. Not survival in the cinematic sense, but the quieter, lonelier kind—the survival of the man who lived while his crew did not.

Knapp does not frame his story as a war epic. He begins with training, with the formation of a ten-man bomber crew that becomes, by necessity, a family. Anyone who has served in a tightly knit unit will recognize the texture of those early pages the way shared danger forges intimacy faster than time ever could. Knapp makes us feel how completely his identity became bound up with theirs.

The central tragedy of the book is brutally simple. Knapp is grounded for a mission. The crew flies without him. Their aircraft is shot down after returning over the target—a fatal decision by the mission leader. Other crews see three parachutes. Six men, at least, are dead. Knapp survives because of an accident of paperwork and timing. 

What makes Poet Flyer extraordinary is how Knapp refuses to soften that fact. There is no melodrama, no attempt to turn the event into a lesson. Instead, the poems circle it again and again, the way a mind circles a trauma it can never resolve. He writes about guilt not as a single emotion but as a permanent companion, one that walks beside marriage, fatherhood, career, and old age. The war ends. His life goes on. But his empty seat in the bomber never disappears.

And yet this is not a book of despair. One of Knapp’s great achievements is to show how a person can carry unbearable knowledge and still live fully. He comes home to his wife. They raise children. He works. He loves. But always, somewhere in the background, there is the image of a burning aircraft and three white blossoms of parachute silk. The happiness is real—and so is the haunting.

The choice to tell this story in verse is crucial. Prose would have invited explanation and narrative smoothing. Poetry allows Knapp to write the way memory actually works: in flashes, fragments, images that refuse to be put in order. His language is plain. He writes like a man trained to calculate courses and distances, now measuring the space between what happened and what should have happened.

Poet Flyer is a war story that does not pretend war ends when the shooting stops. It is about survivor’s guilt—but also about moral luck, about the terrifying truth that who lives and who dies is often decided by chance.

-----

A particularly painful aspect of the story for me is how John lost his comrades.  My uncle Jack was on active duty with the U.S. Air Force from 1958-1978. He was a navigator on a KC-97 tanker plane in 1963.  He was on stand down to get married.  Just before his wedding his entire crew was killed in a midair explosion. I was 10 years old and attended the wedding with my family. I can vaguely remember a very somber event.  Jack did three full-year tours in Vietnam and three shorter tours after that tragic event.  

Sachsenhausen Nazi Death Camp.

Sachsenhausen occupies a grim but central place in the Nazi camp system. Located just north of Berlin near the town of Oranienburg, it was established in 1936 as a model concentration camp—designed not only to imprison enemies of the regime but to demonstrate how the entire terror apparatus was meant to function. Unlike Auschwitz or Treblinka, Sachsenhausen was not primarily built as a mass extermination center, but it became a central node in the machinery of murder, forced labor, and bureaucratic control that made the Holocaust possible.

Because of its proximity to Berlin, Sachsenhausen took on a special role. It housed many political prisoners, resistance figures, and high-profile detainees, including German dissidents, foreign politicians, clergy, and later Allied prisoners of war. Just as important, it was the administrative and training hub for the SS-run camp system. The SS Inspectorate of Concentration Camps was headquartered nearby, and Sachsenhausen became the place where guards were trained and procedures standardized. What was learned here—how to break prisoners, how to organize forced labor, how to manage mass death—was exported to camps across occupied Europe.

Sachsenhausen was also a killing site in its own right. Tens of thousands of prisoners died from starvation, disease, exhaustion, beatings, and execution. In 1941, the camp was used to murder at least 10,000 Soviet prisoners of war, many shot in a specially constructed execution facility known as Station Z. Jews, Roma, homosexuals, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and others deemed “undesirable” were imprisoned and killed here. While it did not have the industrialized gas chambers of Auschwitz-Birkenau, Sachsenhausen had gas vans, shooting installations, and crematoria designed to process bodies efficiently.

The camp’s layout itself reflected Nazi ideology. Prisoners’ barracks were arranged in a fan shape around a central parade ground, allowing guards in a single watchtower to survey the entire compound. This was not accidental. Sachsenhausen was built as a demonstration of how surveillance, discipline, and terror could be made architectural. The prisoner was never meant to escape being seen—or being controlled.

Sachsenhausen’s role in the broader death-camp system was therefore structural as well as lethal. If Auschwitz was the industrial heart of genocide, Sachsenhausen was part of its brain. Procedures for registration, punishment, labor deployment, and extermination were refined here before being implemented elsewhere. The men who ran Treblinka, Sobibor, and Auschwitz often trained in or passed through Sachsenhausen.

When Allied forces closed in during 1945, tens of thousands of Sachsenhausen prisoners were forced on death marches westward; many died along the roads. Those left behind were liberated by the Red Army in April 1945. The site later became a Soviet special camp, where thousands more prisoners died, adding another tragic layer to its history.

Sachsenhausen is the place where bureaucratic murder was organized, tested, and perfected—a reminder that genocide does not begin with gas chambers, but with offices, training programs, and men who learn how to make cruelty efficient.

 

My Books of 2025: A Baker's Dozen of Fiction. Half by Nobel Laureates

 

The Nobel Prize 

In 2025, I read 50 books. Of those, thirteen were Fiction.  Of that that baker's dozen, six were by Nobel laureates in Literature: four of whom I never read before. Early in the year, I was talking to one of my well-read friends about Nobel laureates in Literature. She reads the leading author of a country before she visits for the first time.  She had read Blindness by Jose Saramago before visiting Portugal. He won the Nobel Prize in 1998. I decided to read it and was stunned.  It was terrifying. If asked for a genre for this book, I would say Horror! Brilliant and frightening.

Next was The Vegetarian by 2024 winner Han Kang.  Another beautiful and haunting novel.  When I hear the word vegetarian now, I think of the crazy beginning of this novel. Until this year I never read Ernest Hemingway the 1954 laureate.  I finally read The Old Man and the Sea and loved it. Later I read In the First Circle by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn who won the prize in 1970.  I had meant to read this novel for more than a decade. It is so good.  It says so much about life in the Soviet GULAGs that could not be said in the relentless reporting of The GULAG Archipelago. 

The fifth was A Man’s Place by Annie Ernaux the 2022 winner. I bought the book at The Red Wheelbarrow English-language bookstore across from Luxembourg Gardens in Paris in November and read it on the plane back to America.  It’s about her father and her family’s life in the years after World War II.  On a long flight back from Asia, I re-read The Remains of the Day by 2017 Nobel laureate Kazuo Ishiguro. I have read all of Ishiguro’s books.  This one is my favorite.

I read a history book by the 1953 Nobel laureate: The Great Democracies by Winston Churchill, bringing my total to seven winners of the Nobel Prize in literature. Next year I plan to read Cancer Ward by Solzhenitsyn, A Happening by Ernaux, and For Whom the Bell Tolls by Hemingway.

Leading the list of the other seven novels I read was Austerlitz by W.G. Sebald.  It is a novel that begins two decades after World War II but is very much about The Holocaust. It unfolds slowly showing how that tragedy radiated through life far from the horror of the camps. 

Another friend recommendation was Piranesi, a strange fantasy novel with many references to C.S. Lewis and the Inklings. My wife read the John Grisham novels The Firm and The Exchange to me on long car trips.  The Firm was great.  The Exchange not so much. 

The last three are re-readings: The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera was just ss strange and good a decade after my first reading. Strong Poison by Dorothy Sayers confirmed my delight in the world of Lord Peter Wimsey. This month I re-read The Killer Angels by Michael Shaaara.  I first read this book in 1980 after three years as a tank commander in West Germany. I toured Gettysburg soon after and could not believe Lee ordered Pickett to charge across that field or Hood to charge up Little Round Top.  In re-reading it seemed much clearer that Longstreet was the moral center of this brilliant story. 

A Man's Place by Annie Ernaux, a Review

 

Annie Ernaux’s A Man’s Place is a short book that carries the moral weight of a much larger one. It is nominally about her father—an unremarkable café-grocer in rural Normandy—but in truth it is about class, shame, memory, and the price of social mobility. Ernaux, who would later win the Nobel Prize for Literature for turning her own life into a tool of social analysis, already has her method fully formed here: she strips language down until it is almost clinical, refusing lyricism, nostalgia, or sentimental rescue.

The book begins with her father’s death and then works backward, reconstructing the man he was and the world that shaped him. He came from the French peasantry, left school early, and spent his life clawing his way into a fragile petit-bourgeois respectability. He was proud, suspicious of refinement, quick to anger, and deeply anxious about not belonging. Ernaux refuses to romanticize him. He was not a noble worker or a tragic hero. He was simply a man whose entire emotional life was structured by class hierarchy.

What makes A Man’s Place so unsettling is that Ernaux includes herself in the indictment. Through education, books, and speech, she escaped the world her father inhabited. But escape came with betrayal. Every new word she learned widened the distance between them. Every gesture of middle-class ease was a silent rebuke to his roughness. She describes how he became self-conscious around her, afraid of saying the wrong thing, aware that he was being measured by standards he did not choose. This is not a story of generational conflict in the abstract; it is the lived experience of social mobility as emotional violence.

Ernaux’s style is a lovely instrument for this subject. The prose is flat, precise, almost bureaucratic. That is not a lack of feeling—it is an ethical decision. She refuses to decorate her father’s life with the kinds of language that would falsify it. His world was not poetic; it was practical, anxious, and constrained. By writing this way, she honors his reality while also exposing its limits.

The book also quietly dismantles the idea that personal identity can ever be separated from social structure. Her father’s masculinity, pride, and emotional reticence were not personality quirks; they were survival strategies in a world that punished weakness and ignorance. Ernaux shows how deeply those strategies shaped her childhood—and how impossible it was for him to adapt when she moved into a different class universe.

There is no reconciliation at the end of A Man’s Place. Ernaux does not claim to have healed the rift between herself and her father. Instead, she offers something more honest: understanding without absolution. She sees him clearly, and she sees herself clearly too—as someone who benefited from the very systems that made his life small.

In less than a hundred pages, Ernaux achieves something rare: a portrait of a man that is neither sentimental nor cruel, and a memoir that refuses to flatter its author. A Man’s Place is not about loving your parents despite their flaws. It is about recognizing how history, class, and language decide what kinds of lives are possible—and what kinds of love those lives can sustain.