Korengal

Today we had the privilege of having Sebastian Junger come to our school to speak on a panel discussing his new film Korengal, the follow-up to Restrepo. Other members of the panel included, SGM LaMonta Caldwell, who was featured in those films, CDR Curt West, from the USU Department of Psychiatry, and COL (Ret.) Robert Fix, Sr., former Army commander of troops in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Junger made one point during the panel that really stuck with me. It seemed to pick up right where this TED talk ended. "Why are we trying to reintegrate soldiers into our society?" he asked. The audience chuckled at this, but Junger continued to make his point. Our society is made up of the most depressed, alienated people in history. People are lonely, they sleep alone and are closed off. How could you want to be reintegrated into that after spending 15 months, surviving in close quarters, without all the technology and devices to be distracted by, sleeping in the same room with other several other human beings? Junger studied anthropology and took an anthropological approach to this topic. Early humans lived in a world much like soldiers do in combat. Living in close quarters, trusting one another and encountering threats to their lives on a daily basis in the wild. How is it that those ancestors, and modern day tribal cultures are able to reintegrate with their societies, without facing the massive problems that soldiers do today? Junger described the Apache tribes, who actually have a war language. They don't speak the Apache language at war, and they don't speak war language at home. The war language is believed to be literally toxic to women and children. Another chuckle from the audience came when he said that we do have sort of a war language today. Soldiers subconsciously create the linguistic dichotomy, purposefully created by the Apache. Junger also mentioned, while being careful not to make any political remarks, that the Israeli army has a 1% rate of PTSD, while our own military has a rate of 20%. Why is that? What is it that they do differently? This talk really got me thinking that we need to be taking a broader approach for treatment of PTSD. I wrote my master's thesis on treatments for PTSD, and the biggest conclusion I came to was that there is no good treatment. Perhaps it's our society that needs to change rather than those with this "disorder."