The Daily Beast: Why Vets Come Home And Miss the War
By: Kimberly Dozier
Sebastian Junger says Tribe is his last book about war. As last words go, it’s a good way to end, as this particular monograph may end up shaping—and changing—how the current generation of troops feels about combat and coming home.
“Why is it that you go through this terrible experience of war where you witness death and destruction, and you come home and there’s part of you that misses it?” wondered former-Marine-turned-Congressman Seth Moulton.
“All of the sudden, it all makes sense now,” he said of how the book of helped him understand why he missed his own four bloody tours in Iraq.
Moulton and his brethren came home to a fractured society where almost no one knows their neighbor, and chats by text or Facebook have replaced face-to-face interaction, the antithesis of the cheek-by-jowl closeness of troops in combat. Author Junger, 54, argues convincingly that Americans need to recapture the best part of their tribal beginnings, when small bands of people depended on each other for survival and so developed deep social ties that protect, bind and even heal, as an antidote to the chronic self-centeredness and loneliness that plague modern living.
The slim volume, Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging, is part anthropology dissertation and part Malcolm Gladwell-style musings on American society, with a dash of how the military experiences war and homecoming. Published in May by Grand Central Publishing imprint Twelve Books, it’s listed as a best-seller by both Amazon and The New York Times.
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