http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-chat/3438436/posts
PTSD is a complex condition with vexing moral and psychological aspects, but in Mr. Junger’s view it’s mostly about men being depressed because they can’t play war anymore. This odd, juvenile rendering of military life is a problem with much of Mr. Junger’s recent work. He presumes to speak for veterans, but he has never been inside the prison. This makes him, as an Iraq veteran friend of mine put it, “a war tourist.” Mr. Junger is never able to bridge this divide between himself and his subjects, and he ends up leaving his reader stranded.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-chat/3438436/posts
He makes some very good points, but Sebastian Junger is not and never was a grunt, or anything close.
In this program Junger differentiates between short term PTSD, which he sees as a residual of the heightened state of alertness naturally encountered in a combat situation and somewhat adaptive, and a more long term condition which he says is complex and debilitating and beyond his capacity to say much more about - he notes several times that he’s not a psychologist and therefore has few opinions on the individual, personal dynamics of what affects people’s experiences under most situations - an anthropologist by training, he’s primarily concerned with the social and cultural benefits and limitations to membership in various groups - at times his discussion does become so generalized that belonging to a military unit and having been through combat seems no more dramatic and harrowing than having been on the football team or having belonged to the local scout troop.....