Sebastian Junger on War

What draws him to conflict? What makes him want to write about war. He answers these questions, and more, on the Daily Beast.

From the piece...

The horrors of Latin America were the product of Cold War paranoia, but after the fall of the Berlin Wall others took their place. In 1995, Bosnian Serb forces rounded up 8,000 men and boys from the city of Srebrenica and machine-gunned them into pits, then used bulldozers to bury them. It was the last straw in a war that had claimed a quarter million civilian lives, and it helped trigger a three-week NATO bombing campaign that quickly shut down the war. Back home, the right wing was upset because we were risking our soldiers’ lives—though not one died during the intervention—and many on the left were upset simply because the U.S. Air Force was once again dropping bombs on people. Neither side seemed much concerned with the Bosnians themselves.

More and more, the focus of my journalism was to document and broadcast the suffering of civilians in war. Everyone agrees that war is bad, but that doesn’t mean it won’t happen, and the world’s most powerful nations are unavoidably left wondering whether they should intervene when it does. After Kosovo, I went to Sierra Leone, where tens of thousands of civilians had been killed or maimed by the Revolutionary United Front in what was essentially a war for diamonds. After three years of carnage, a single unit of British paratroopers stopped the war in its tracks. Only one British soldier was killed. A couple of years later, I found myself in Liberia during a rebel offensive that managed to drop mortars into a crowd of refugees in a U.S. Embassy annex in Monrovia. An American warship waited offshore, doing nothing, and in protest the locals piled the bodies of dead civilians in front of the embassy gate. I had never seen a pile of bodies before, and the only thing I could think to do was count them. There were 27, as I recall, though I think several children were hidden under the bodies of adults. I was the only foreigner in a mob of angry and traumatized locals, and I finally left when people began demanding why the U.S. wasn’t sending troops to stop the slaughter. A few weeks later, the Marines came ashore and ended the war not only without a single casualty but without firing a single shot.