This Journalist Nails The Reason Why Young Men Want To Go To War

Orvelin Valle
Feb 5, 2020 7:02 PM PST
1 minute read
Army photo

Photo: Spc. Joshua Leonard/US Army

Going to war is not about the ideologies of the left or the right, it's about becoming a man.

"I'm a journalist," said Sebastian Junger – Oscar-nominated documentarian and best-selling author – in an interview with War is Boring. "I don't put any political agenda into my work. I think the right wing tends to idolize soldiers – you can't talk about them critically in any way. The left wing went from vilifying them in Vietnam to seeing them as victims of a military-industrial complex."

Also read: Here's What An Army Medic Does In The Critical Minutes After A Soldier Is Wounded

For young men, however, war is much simpler than a political agenda. Modern society doesn't describe what manhood is and much less, what it requires. Joining the military fills that void by finding a peer group and purpose to their lives, according to War is Boring.

This generation has a track record for delaying the rituals of adulthood. They're taking longer to finish school, achieve financial independence, marry and have children, compared with their parent's generation, according to a New York Times article about millennials. Perhaps it's a financial decision as the article explains, after all, we did just go through the great recession, or it's young men devising their own rites of passage.

Photo: Wikimedia

Junger tells War is Boring that tribal societies have clear rituals and expectations of adulthood:

There's a lot of initiation rites for young men around the world that involve torturing young men," he explains. "So that young man can then demonstrate that he's willing to undergo an enormous amount of pain in order to achieve adult status.

They could actually live untested lives, if left to their own devices," Junger says. But "they don't want 30-year-old males wondering about their manhood."

But initiation rites help define the line between childhood and the adult world, and they define what manhood is. "We don't have anything like that," Junger says. "But I think it's wired in us. It's certainly wired into our language when we talk about, 'C'mon, be a man about it,' or 'Man up.'"

The way Junger sees it, young men choose to fight, "Okay, if I go to war, surely I'll come back a man." When he asked why they joined, the common response was the terrorist attacks on 9/11, military family tradition, and the thought of becoming a man. Check out the full article on War is Boring.

Sebastian Junger is famous for his award-winning chronicle of the war in Afghanistan in the documentary films Restrepo

 (2010), Korengal 
(2014), and his book War WAR
 (2010). Here's the official trailer for Korengal:

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