Chapter 7

Dragon-Slayers

You know, it would sort of be like, if you’re a dragon-slayer and there just were no more dragons. And then you wonder, like, who am I and what am I doing here?

—Laird Hamilton1

Clausewitz, Updated

How must we engineer the turn to humanity that General Dallaire exhorts us to accomplish in the 21st century? Against the backdrop of the progression laid out in the introductory chapter from fighting to competing to imagining to leading, how do we civilize our martial impulses, even as we add the bite of pragmatism to our everyday civilian dreams? We can begin with the point where the two worlds cross over into each other and—at least for this chapter—with the young men who seem predisposed to make that happen.

In 2007–2008, the author and journalist Sebastian Junger made multiple visits to the Korengal Valley in Afghanistan. His goal was to capture the experience of combat. For his base he chose the 2nd Platoon, Battle Company, 173rd Airborne Brigade. Over 15 months, Junger worked with Tim Hetherington, a noted British photojournalist, to document the lives of the young men at an outpost named after an early American casualty in the U.S. Army’s occupation of the valley. The visits generated pieces for the magazine Vanity Fair, and those became the basis for Junger’s book War. Together with Hetherington, Junger also produced the award-winning documentary Restrepo (2010), which consists of video they shot while with the 2nd Platoon. Hetherington was killed a year later while on assignment in Libya.

At the start of War Stories I quoted one of the classics in the literature on war and the military, Carl von Clausewitz’s On War. Von Clausewitz and Junger come at their shared topic from very different places: Von Clausewitz was a general and a theorist of war and military strategy; Junger went into Afghanistan as an embedded journalist and spent much of his time with the troops who bore arms rather than the officers telling them how and where to fight. By virtue of his assignment, Junger witnessed not only the intensity and the minutiae of combat but also the long periods of waiting, recuperation, and preparation before and after those firefights. Those moments make up the bulk of Restrepo and many pages of War. They involve a very specific population under particular circumstances and as a result, come much closer to the testimony Chris Kyle provides in American Sniper or the experience of the fictional soldiers in Three Kings than the big-picture view of war that von Clausewitz and Dallaire offer.

At the same time, Junger makes time to address the theory of war in something like von Clausewitz’s spirit and takes on the broad-gauge implications of war for our time that Dallaire sets forth. The language is different, and it takes us into the domain of sociobiology and neurobiology, territory that we began to explore with E.O. Wilson’s assessment of the causes of the Rwandan genocide. Junger divides War into three sections—“Fear,” “Killing,” and “Love”—and after all of the empirical observations about the lives of the soldiers, pretty quickly reaches for science to explain why we fight and how and what responsibilities those realities put before us:

Society can give its young men almost any job and they’ll figure how to do it. They’ll suffer for it and die for it and watch their friends die for it, but in the end, it will get done. That only means that society should be careful about what it asks for. In a very crude sense the job of young men is to undertake the work that their fathers are too old for.2

Junger takes care not to judge the value of the American presence in Afghanistan, but he captures here and elsewhere in his book the importance of constantly assessing the value of the military engagements we undertake on the international (and by implication, the domestic) stage.

He also joins Roméo Dallaire in his concern about the next generation and puts a similar challenge on the table—how to turn a century that has begun for America with the longest wars the country has ever fought into something more humane:

There are other costs to war as well—vaguer ones that don’t lend themselves to conventional math. One American soldier has died for every hundred yards of forward progress in the valley, but what about the survivors? Is that territory worth the psychological cost of learning to cheer someone’s death?3

National security may justify the small territorial gains, especially if one can make the argument that those deaths pave the way for a more humane world. Still, Junger takes the inquiry two steps further: one in a direction we have already gone with Chris Kyle, a second in the direction with which we have been concerned throughout War Stories. The first simply amplifies Kyle’s explanation for why he served four tours in Iraq, with the added complication that it contradicts Junger’s implicit skepticism about why a country would choose armed action:

War is a big and sprawling word that brings a lot of human suffering into the conversation, but combat is a different matter. Combat is the smaller game that young men fall in love with, and any solution to the human problem of war will have to take into account the psyches of these young men. For some reason there is a profound and mysterious gratification to the reciprocal agreement to protect another person with your life, and combat is virtually the only situation in which that happens regularly.4

American Sniper makes exactly this point without the filter of a journalist who has chosen deliberately and objectively to assess what drives the troops. With or without the filter, it seems possible to generalize across populations as well. In An Ordinary Man, Rusesabagina tries to explain the phenomenon of the Interahamwe, the Hutu militia mostly made up of young men, and the human inclination to go along with others, even when—or perhaps especially when—the group favors extreme action:

It is no surprise to me at all that the young teenagers in the refugee camps could have been organized into Interahamwe chapters in the winter of 1993. Something magical happens to you when you join a group, a feeling I can only describe as freedom. I felt it myself on various soccer teams when I was growing up. I also felt it when I joined the staff of the Hotel Mille Collines. It is possible to lose oneself in the purpose of the collective effort; we embrace this feeling of being dissolved into something bigger because at our cores we are lonely. We are trapped inside our own skulls.5

Going along with others means, in this case, saying “yes” to the genocide, although Rusesabagina insists that “ordinary” human beings can and should say “no.” At a cross-cultural level, Rusesabagina’s definition of freedom seems exactly the opposite of what an American audience would understand by the term: freedom as another word for “liberty,” a keyword for American democracy but also for the American cultural inclination to default to solo agency, often in the name of principle. And yet we are a people of teams, if not soccer, then certainly football, baseball, hockey, etc. Moreover, the young men with whom Junger concerns himself have volunteered to spend years of their lives in a sector of our society that imposes the most visible constraint possible on individual freedom. How can this be?

Chris Kyle explains it by celebrating the “overwatch” that he, as a sniper, provided his comrades-in-arms. Junger similarly argues that his subjects are most drawn to the military life because it allows them to protect their comrades. His conclusion derives both from his observations as a reporter and from the neuroscience that he reviews in search of an explanation. The urge to protect, in this scheme, is a fundamental human driver. Like Kyle, Junger identifies other motivating forces in the troops at OP Restrepo, including the adrenaline rush of combat, the embrace of violence, a fascination with guns, and the comfort of black-and-white, them-and-us reasoning. These motives vary in strength individual by individual, and as became apparent with American Sniper, the psychology is bewilderingly complex. Yet in the “Afterword” to War, he lists the many soldiers he got to know in the Korengal Valley who, after U.S. forces withdrew from their bases there, were thrilled to settle into another deployment or otherwise found their way back to Afghanistan amid marriages, divorces, births, deaths, and all of the other lurking complexities of civilian life. There’s a touch almost of astonishment to the sweep of his catalog, one that he extended in 2014 with two more documentaries, Korengal and The Last Patrol. In War, though, he ties it all in the end to brotherhood, something clearly beyond visceral response or mere emotion. It is a code, a standard of behavior that puts the group above the individual and imposes a responsibility on those who live by it.

The simultaneous mundanity and complexity of civilian life provides the second hook on which Junger hangs his explanation for the appeal of service, and it goes to the heart of my argument in War Stories that we should find a way to fuse impulses from both worlds into something new and more humane. In war, the smallest of details focuses the big picture of life and death:

In the civilian world almost nothing has lasting consequences, so you can blunder through life in a kind of daze. You never have to take inventory of the things in your possession and you never have to calculate the ways in which mundane circumstances can play out—can, in fact, kill you. As a result, you lose a sense of the importance of things, the gravity of things. … At Restrepo, that connection was impossible to ignore. It was tedious but it gave the stuff of one’s existence—the shoelaces and the water and the lost shirt—a riveting importance. Frankly, after you got used to living that way it was hard to go home.6

For reasons that will become apparent, Junger himself knows better than to let his argument rest here. Still, he offers it as a perceived, partial truth and challenges us to examine the terms on which we live our lives beyond the battlefield. The challenge here involves more than bringing a few more vets home with a sense that they are both welcome and have something to contribute. Rusesabagina fears exactly the same spirit of inattention that Junger finds in civilian life and the threat it holds that “never again” could become “yet again” in the blink of an eye. And yet away from the battlefield, civilian life presents analogies in abundance for the commitment that Junger detects in his soldiers, with less ambiguous results. These are habits of the mind and the heart that warrant cultivation, even off the battlefield. To illustrate the point, we turn now to the politics of big-wave surfing.

Stoke

As the final credits roll on Stacy Peralta’s documentary film Riding Giants (2004), a sign appears at the entrance to an unidentified beach: “­DANGEROUS WATERS—OFF LIMITS TO ALL MILITARY PERSONNEL.” Given the big wave-riding venues on which Peralta and his team focus in the film, the beach could be on Oahu or somewhere along the California coast, presumably near a military facility, and given the chronology of the film, it could be 1969 or 1999. Regardless of the geography and the time, nothing signals better the difference to which we have returned throughout War Stories—the divide between military and civilian social frameworks—than that sign. Although young men and women train to put their lives at risk in the military, their organization has here declared the temptation to dare the surf too high a risk. In the final seconds of Peralta’s film, young men in swimming trunks walk past the barrier and paddle out to ride the waves. They could be disobedient servicemen or inattentive civilians, but their “uniform” erases the distinction, as does their goal: to have substantially the same emotional experiences that drive Chris Kyle and others in the films and literature we have considered so far about war, but through very different means.

Peralta divides his hymn to big-wave riding into three parts: the first is set in southern California and Oahu; the second on Half Moon Bay at Mavericks, just south of San Francisco; and the third in Hawaii, Tahiti, and outer reefs beyond any identifiable shoreline. The three locations also sketch a progress in time, from the 1950s through big-wave riding today, and they center on a trio of celebrity big-wave riders: Greg Noll, Jeff Clark, and Laird Hamilton. I first saw the film on a flight from Boston to Denver, hundreds of miles from any discernable surf, having dismissed it in advance as just another airline film. By the time we landed in Denver, I realized that it crystallizes half a century of American cultural history through its apparently simple structure. I knew, too, that I had heard the story before but couldn’t remember when or where. Multiple viewings later, it became apparent that the film describes not just key facets of modern American history but also how history is made across cultures and through time.

Why ride big waves? Various characters in the film answer this question, each in his or her own way. Sam George, a former competitive surfer, surf journalist, and co-writer with Peralta of Riding Giants, comments in the film on one of the moments in what became the legend of Greg Noll:

On that classic day, the biggest swell ever seen, he essentially rode alone. And he faced it when it came to him, and that’s what every surfer does in their own life. Everyone can relate to that.7

Jeff Clark, years later, stresses a different aspect of the big wave riding experience born of his years of solitary surfing at Mavericks before it was discovered by the surfing community:

It was my sanctuary. I could leave the shore and go out there and be so focused and so in tune and feel the ocean with every fiber in my body and I was part of it.8

At the same time, more than any other location documented in the film, Mavericks brings out the menace that comes with the sport. One of the few women in the film, Dr. Sarah Gerhardt, elaborates on Clark’s musings:

I have to overcome the safety mechanism that wants to rise up in me and keep me from doing something that can kill me.9

Gerry Lopez, one of the older generation of surfers, comments in the same vein:

I remember getting so uptight on the way out. … Jesus, I’m not going to be able to surf. And I remember finally having to go, “Okay, shit, I guess this is a good day to die!”10

Perhaps in response to that recognition of mortal danger, the last of the trio, Laird Hamilton, signals the difference that tow-in surfing created. In a way that Noll and Clark gloss over, it’s about the team experience and the ethical imperative it generates:

If one of those guys go down, I will put myself on the line … every time. … It’s part of their nature, so when they go home at night, they sleep well.11

It is easy to spot the connection between soldier and surfer as each embraces the adrenaline rush of what they do. In that sense, the focus on the individual carries over from one medium to the other. In both, though, we see the urge to “protect” and the deliberate engineering of a lifestyle that makes that possible.

It is less easy to pick out the psychological differentiators between those who join the military, like Chris Kyle or the fictional Troy Barlow, and those who followed the early surfers out to Waimea and other parts of the North Shore on Oahu. The independence of spirit that Noll documents includes the spirit of adventure that the first two embrace, but it unambiguously dismisses, at least at the outset, the wealth that Barlow and his fellow soldiers want in Three Kings. Noll and his cohort epitomize the stereotype of walking away from the mainstream in late 1950s and early 1960s America. Movie camera in hand, Noll recorded the lifestyle that he and his fellow big-wave riders cultivated in those early years. He testifies that they lived rough, stealing chickens and pineapples from nearby farms so they could focus on riding the waves, not making a living.

The choice to walk away also directly negates the soldiers’ search for a disciplining authority. As discussed in earlier chapters, in films from Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket to Eastwood’s American Sniper, boot camp plays a key role in the description and classification of the military commitment, and the autobiographical literature backs up that analysis. On the face of it, nothing could defy that submission of the individual will to organizational aim more clearly than those moments: for Kyle (and this would have been equally true for the fictional Special Forces Major Archie Gates), the experience is even more intense—a challenge to see how far others can force one to force oneself. The big-wave riders captured in Riding Giants share the instinct toward self-discipline and self-­discovery through that discipline, but what they defer to is different—the waves themselves. Hamilton’s comment about slaying dragons says as much, and the many scenes of waves that Peralta includes in Riding Giants drive home the point. The big-wave riders appreciate a reality that takes them not just beyond themselves as individuals but to a full-on encounter with the inexorable—and for that reason both inspiring and moderating—power of nature.

Extreme Commerce

For all the testimony of a possible mystical union with forces larger than ourselves, the three men who star in Riding Giants address another, equally real aspect of the surf culture that evolved in the post-World War II era and that came to fruition just as the United States began its engagement in Vietnam. Sam George comments:

All the sort of ancillary artistic pursuits that surrounded surfing, they really did all come together in a rush, all of it happening from 1960 to 1965.12

Peralta documents Noll’s marketing genius, starting with his signature striped black-and-white swimming trunks and the very successful surf business that grew out of those early years living rough. Noll set a pattern for some of the best of the big-wave riders, translating his experience and energy into the design and manufacture of surfboards. In that sense, his apparently steady documentation of how he and his fellow big-wave riders lived and surfed seems less a frat boy’s documentation of their high jinks than an initial, perhaps unwitting, evangelism followed by carefully calculated image development. As Peralta tells it, the big-wave riders connected practice, exploration, and design and build. The impulse was constant and intense and continues to this day. In short, Noll, Clark, and Hamilton ultimately returned to the mainstream, indeed defined it for their time. For those of us who weren’t riding big waves, that negotiation of the interface between individual exploration and popular appeal mattered as much as the spiritual self-fulfillment to which Peralta’s three iconic surfers bear witness.

They and their cohorts also seem to have expressed the pattern for what we now think of as “extreme sports” in a whole range of media, from skiing to snowboarding, skydiving, rock climbing, and beyond. In this model, practitioners adapt or develop technologies and materials that will allow them to do more and do it better—a mindset that has come to be seen as the best of the modern American business environment. It underlies the now-historic success stories from the tech’ sector of Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, and others to whom we turn today as representative mythmakers. Peralta’s chosen surfers personify the entrepreneurial business model: They laid the groundwork for their iteration of it, even as they walked away from the 1950s conformism documented in Sloan Wilson’s 1955 novel The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit13 and explicated at the sociological level by William Whyte’s The Organization Man,14 ­published just a year later.

As with so much of the cultural legacy of the 1950s, though, Wilson’s book and the film made from it, starring Gregory Peck, Jennifer Jones, and Fredric March,15 seems in retrospect much less conventional than received opinion would have it, and World War II plays a major role in that deviation from the stereotype. As for Whyte, he focused precisely on the clash of collectivism and individualism that we have detected here between soldier and surfer. For both types, the TV series Mad Men, which ended its seventh and last season in spring 2015, reminds us of what we haven’t left behind from that era. Riding Giants chronicles the fullness of that time, leading away from Madison Avenue to the beaches of southern California, when surfing broke onto, washed over, and was absorbed into the mainstream.

Sam George and other commentators in the film peg the change to Gidget, the first of a series of films, starring Sandra Dee, about a teenage girl who discovers surf culture. Following the release of Gidget in 1959, they tell us, surfing went in a matter of two to three years from a practicing population of 5,000 to two million. Suddenly, an impulse among a few to reject mass consumer habits redefined those habits, changing the way young America thought about clothes, music, nature, and a meaningful lifestyle. Even as Noll profited from the discovery that surfing could make one happy, he and other veteran big-wave riders found the mass embrace of their private endeavor hard to take. As Noll himself puts it, “Man, it just makes me puke!”16 And yet decades later, the link between big-wave riding and all of what Sam George calls “ancillary” activities remains: Witness Laird Hamilton and Buzzy Kerbox’s appearances in magazines such as GQ. Madison Avenue may have yielded territory to social media, but the impulse to celebrate and profit from those who walk away continues strong.

Following 9/11, our military engagements in the Middle East have put a similarly substantial cultural and commercial phenomenon front and center for Americans. Many have argued that because of the geopolitics of the early 21st century, we have had no choice but to embrace this recasting of who we are, a people that lives in and with a permanent war economy. “Camo” has replaced Greg Noll’s bold beach style, and the debate about concealed- or open-carry has as much symbolic cultural significance as the latest board technology did for Noll, Clark, and Hamilton. Regional militias have been with us for a very long time, but we now embrace paramilitary culture through our preferred political debates, an outsized focus on armed engagement in TV programs and video games, and our media-driven perception of how we relate to one another individually and in our ascriptive identities.

As was the case with surfing and the lifestyle it symbolized for Americans in the early 1960s, we have made choices to get to this place. Yet we have done so under the impression that our hand was forced, that larger, impersonal forces made our actions inevitable. Those who converted to surfing may have embraced the same illusion, albeit with a positive spin: they, too, may have thought that what big-wave riders showed us was just waiting to be discovered. In retrospect, though, one can read into the rejection of the 1950s treadmill or rat race a very early recognition on the part of a few, and then many more, that we had willingly committed to an unsustainable path for a growing global society, and that it was time to reverse directions. At all times, we should test for, and nurture, the entrepreneurial spirit that produced not just lineups on beaches around the globe, not just the first landing of a man on the moon, but also the social upheavals of the late 1960s and the rejection of a war that has left a bad taste in the mouths of people in and out of the military for generations.

As much as we might think we have entered the realm of mere taste or individual preference here, the impetus toward commerce expresses systemic forces that can be channeled for good or ill. That opportunity is as old as humanity itself, as the stories we tell ourselves and the way we build our societies around them. It integrates the discipline inherent in the military mindset with what Sebastian Junger describes as our more relaxed citizens’ vision of who we are. Even as the surfers at the end of Riding Giants blithely stride by the off-limits sign on that unnamed beach to surf the next big swell, they are delivering on the project for our young men that Junger cautions us to attend to: they are doing what it takes to satisfy a collective hunger for action. How do we as a society heed our better angels in articulating that assignment?

Culture Change—“A Few Good Men”

I mentioned in an earlier section of this chapter that the story Riding Giants tells seemed deeply familiar to me, even on first viewing. It wasn’t the individual surfers: I had heard only of Laird Hamilton, and then only for his appearances in glossy magazines. It wasn’t the landscape: I have never visited Hawaii. It wasn’t even the sense of oneness with nature that the various surfers so ably capture and that I have experienced at a very attenuated level in amateur skiing or white-water rafting. It took me several viewings to realize that it was the social dynamic, first among the big-wave riders themselves and then in their relation to the rest of the world, that felt close and compelling. For all the similarities between the group dynamics of Junger’s 2nd Platoon and the surfers Noll captured with his movie camera, the locus of authority made all the difference, and that difference is, and was, a big one. In all of the testimony captured in the film, even after the turn to team integration that tow-in surfing necessitated, the individual remains dominant as do a hierarchy of skills and competence. Sarah Gerhardt, the physician who recognized that she had to overcome her impulse toward self-preservation in order to ride Mavericks, extends that autonomy to the moment beyond risk:

When it comes down to it, it’s up to me whether I live or die. It’s up to me whether I go on a wave or not.17

This is not the world of Sandra Dee, but it expresses the same sense of freedom and empowerment that Gidget so neatly conveyed, using the paucity of women surfers and stereotypes of women as less physically adventurous than men to emphasize the point. Into that world, one can pour one’s ambition and abilities: for all of the informality and self-­deprecation to which the film bears witness, the world of big-wave riding is the stuff of meritocracy, and the riders all know it. Sam George describes Greg Noll as the “most complete surfer of the 50s and 60s—by far. No one else could even come close.”18 Laird Hamilton is given equal recognition at a much later stage in the film’s half-century history: “Laird’s the king out there,” and “There’s no one that comes close to his abilities.”19

This is the world of the warrior, but of a breed different from the men Junger encountered in the Korengal Valley. When Laird Hamilton describes himself, in an apparent flight of fancy, as a “dragon-slayer,” he indexes his performance to a different standard. This is the world of the medieval epic, where knights go off to find the Holy Grail, slaying the dragons that impede their progress; this is, to return to a moment in our chapter on The Hurt Locker and Blade Runner, the world of the Fisher King. Only now the grail is the perfect wave or, perhaps more strategically, an ever-bigger wave. The perfect wave would mark the end of time because it would leave Hamilton without a sense of purpose and identity. Riding Giants effectively documents that progress: a search, however costly in human and even in material terms (as expressed through the application of more and more complex machinery) for waves that would enable big-wave riders to surpass all previous accomplishments.

Behind the quest lies the court from which the knights sallied forth on their missions, either individual journeys or the crusades against the infidel. Behind the swimming trunks and stolen chickens and pineapples, the story of Greg Noll and the other big-wave riders recreates the world of the Arthurian legends with Noll as King Arthur and the others of his generation as the Knights of the Round Table. Laird Hamilton is the next generation, pure of heart, exceptionally brave, one of a very few knights to find the Grail. The big-wave riders’ story even has its Merlin, one of the “Ancients,” in this case Duke Kahanamoku, a native Hawaiian, an American Olympic medalist in swimming (1912, 1920, 1924), and an evangelist for the then largely unknown sport of surfing. Kahanamoku’s story links curiously to another evocation of the Arthurian legend, the Kennedy administration’s cultivation of its image as “Camelot,” the seat of Arthur’s court. In 1962, JFK visited Hawaii, and among the local dignitaries in the receiving line he reportedly singled out Kahanamoku, a childhood hero, for extended conversation. Thus do legends find and fulfill one another.

The story and the analogy have more than antiquarian interest for us. In much the same way that we can see in the cultural impact of the big-wave riders a sea change in the values to which a society commits, so, too, did the Arthurian legends come to symbolize a code, a standard of behavior to which the society committed as an ideal. The notion of chivalry that drove standards of behavior for centuries derives from this moment in Western, European culture. The tenets for which the Knights of the Round Table were admired may have been honored less often than Arthur could have wished, but that didn’t, and still doesn’t, diminish their power. They gave subsequent European cultures names and faces to associate with those standards. This, too, is about brotherhood.

It is worth noting that the social dynamic described here is not unique to Europe or the West. I first came across the phrase “the world of the warrior” when I taught Ang Lee’s Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon in China.20 Multiple audiences of Chinese MBAs walked me through the world of wuxia pian, a popular genre of Chinese textual narrative that has long since translated into film. In these stories, warriors such as Ang Lee’s Li Mu Bai (Chow Yun Fat) and Yu Shu Lien (Michelle Yeow) demonstrate their martial prowess in defense of the world of the emperor that rules China. The warriors distinguish themselves through their fighting prowess, their standards of behavior toward one another and the rest of society, and their commitment to service: they are the model of the professional, upholders of an ethic that the society has deemed suitable for all, even if it is practiced only by a fighting elite.

Whatever Greg Noll, Jeff Clark, and Laird Hamilton may think they were doing by becoming big-wave riders, the social dynamic illustrated here makes them an elite and gives them the power to effect change that human societies have apparently always assigned to elites. It is important to note that the relationship confers moral authority on what might at first seem like a purely mechanical competence: big-wave riding for the surfers, fighting for the warriors of the wuxia pian, and the chivalric acts of the knights of the European Middle Ages. To the extent that the knights ultimately sallied forth on crusades against what they perceived as heathen Muslims, the warrior ethic became one with the evangelical impulse to fulfill an established, faith-based agenda. On balance, though, the recursion to elites seems more frequently to enable a change in, or renewal of, ethical standards, a re-centering of social priorities.

Does Junger’s 2nd Platoon qualify as such an elite? It is one thing to talk, as various figures in Riding Giants do quite comfortably, of individual aspiration, individual excellence (Hamilton is the “king out there”), and therefore, ultimately, individual authority. It is another to dismiss that authority, as Chris Kyle does in American Sniper, as the “head shed” or to focus, as Junger does in War, on the men in the trenches, at the outposts where rank is largely assumed away because no one has it. One might characterize this trend as leveling and, as such, an expression of our ever-more-democratic vision of the world. With Junger’s war fighters in the Korengal Valley in the early 21st century, we seem no longer to seek moral guidance or, if we do, the lesson we take away speaks to equality and a commitment to mutual support. These virtues emerge in the absence of guiding authority or in the presence of an authority that serves primarily as a disciplinary force, not the leadership that, willed or unwilled, results in visible, modeled behavior. In War, no one seems to know why he or she is fighting, so the dominant return on the individual investment is the fighting itself. Between Kyle’s Manichean vision of good and evil, on the one hand, and the 2nd Platoon’s sense that they are on the cutting edge of the fighting but shouldn’t ask too many questions, on the other, the individual soldier has to find it hard to reintegrate into society stateside.

And yet Junger ultimately reconciles these apparently irreconcilable worlds and the values that animate them. I noted earlier that War is divided into three parts—“Fear,” “Killing,” and “Love.” The last of the three, “Love,” is ominously theoretical, as though the journalist in Junger found and cathected with the first two categories but allowed his reporter self to be replaced by his researcher self when it came time to talk about the redeeming virtues of what he had witnessed. He plausibly introduces elements of sociobiology to identify the physiological and psychological drivers that made combat, if not war, so appealing to the men of the 2nd Platoon. It is only when they come home, though, to a place that so many of them seem eager to avoid, that we understand the significance of what they have lived. In the final paragraphs of the “Afterword,” Junger attends a Medal of Honor award ceremony for one of the soldiers in the platoon. The families of two soldiers who died in the same firefight that earned the other his medal are also present. Junger describes the closing moments of the ceremony at the White House as President Obama hugs a crying mother:

The room stood silent now, everyone crying, everyone at attention—the medal forgotten, the war forgotten, the politics forgotten, everything forgotten but the one irreconcilable fact that a mother had lost her son and there wasn’t a damn thing anyone in that room could do for her to make this story turn out well.21

In that moment, the military and the civilian worlds come together and it suddenly becomes possible to measure the cost of the war, the latest of the projects we have assigned our young men. They go eagerly to the battle, as Junger documents, yet this closing story alone gives full meaning to the many stories that capture their and their fellows’ life in combat. Even more, in a world where the leaders have been largely invisible, suddenly the leader in whose name the 2nd Platoon went to war in the Korengal Valley confronts the real cost of the project over which he presides, however remotely. In that confrontation, which is also a deliberate commemoration—the reason why we award medals—War acquires a poignancy that outstrips all of Junger’s firsthand, well-crafted, nonjudgmental field observations. At the White House at that final moment, with the press and the brass in attendance, whatever the Medal of Honor recipient may be feeling, or the mother of his fallen comrade, or the President himself, they are all in mourning, and we with them. This is not how the story is supposed to end.

One can imagine all parties walking away from this event in sorrow but resigned each to his or her own role and fate, and yet in a world where such an encounter is possible, even expected, it becomes equally possible to imagine a different outcome. In that world, the energies that went into fighting a war can be redirected to fighting for peace, if only by virtue of small efforts made in the belief that the next wave matters. Here the law of unintended consequences comes back as an opportunity, if only we have the imagination, or perhaps merely the desperation, to seize it. And in seizing it to find the humor that will balance the mourning and allow us to go on.