Sebastian Junger «Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging»

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Автор Sebastian Junger

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This book is dedicated to my brothers, John, Emery, and Chief

AUTHOR’S NOTE

This book grew out of an article that I wrote for the June 2015 issue of Vanity Fair titled “How PTSD Became a Problem Far Beyond the Battlefield. ” Certain short sections of that article appear virtually unaltered in this book.

I have included all source material for this book in a section titled “Source Notes. ” I do not use footnotes because this is not an academic book and footnotes can interfere with the ease of reading. Nevertheless, I felt that certain scientific studies about modern society, about combat, and about post-traumatic stress disorder had the potential to greatly surprise or even upset some readers. With that in mind, I decided to include at least a cursory mention of the source within the text so that in certain cases, readers could quickly verify the information for themselves.

Both the book and the article include phrases that some people find problematic or even offensive. The first is “American Indian. ” Many people prefer the term “Native American,” although when I tried to use that with an Apache interview subject named Gregory Gomez, he pointed out that the term properly refers to people of any ethnicity born in the United States. He insisted that I use “American Indian” instead, and so I have.

The other problematic phrase is “post-traumatic stress disorder.

” Some people understandably feel that the word “disorder” risks stigmatizing those who continue to struggle with wartime trauma. I ultimately decided to retain the word because any long-term traumatic reactions would seem to qualify as a “disruption of normal physical or mental functions,” as the Oxford American Dictionary defines the word “disorder. ” Most health care workers—and many soldiers—agreed with that position.

Finally, this book includes several first-person accounts of events that happened many years ago, in some cases before I was even a journalist. Those scenes are retrieved from my memory without the benefit of notes, and the dialogue was not recorded in any way except by my memory. Ordinarily, speech enclosed by quotation marks should be documented with a tape recorder or notebook, and any event should be written down as it happened or shortly thereafter. In the case of these few stories, however, I had to rely entirely on my memory. After giving the matter much thought, I decided that doing so was within my journalistic standards as long as I was clear with my readers about my lack of documentation. The people in those stories have been in my mind my entire life and have often served as crucial moral guides to my own behavior. I only wish I knew who all of them were so that I could thank them somehow.