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Boston Common - 2016 - Issue 3 - Summer - Art of the Summer

Boston Common - Niche Media - A side of Boston that's anything but common.

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46 BOSTONCOMMON-MAGAZINE.COM PHOTOGRAPHY BY TIM HETHERINGTON IN HIS LATEST BOOK, AWARD- WINNING JOURNALIST SEBASTIAN JUNGER TACKLES PTSD. BY ROBERT COCUZZO WAR & PIECE OF MIND After more than two decades covering combat in some of the most violent corners of the globe, Sebastian Junger, award-winning documen- tarian and the bestselling author of The Perfect Storm, believes he's finally answered the questions about war that have burned within him since his childhood in Belmont, Massachusetts. In his latest book, Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging (HarperCollins), he examines how the tremors of war—namely today's unprecedented rates of post-traumatic stress disorder seen in many veterans—might have as much to do with civilian life as combat itself. "Once I stopped war reporting, I was able to think with a little more nuance and some more quietness," says the 54-year-old from his summer home in Cape Cod. "Out of that came these thoughts that I had about my society." He believes that American society has become fractured and far removed from the tribal sense of community soldiers necessarily come to rely on, so that, upon returning home, they're not only grappling with the emotional traumas of war, but doing so in an inherently isolating environment. "It's very easy to be distracted by the drama of warfare," Junger says, "but it requires a certain respect for ordinary lives to understand that, for better or for worse, there's an awful lot of drama everywhere. It isn't just gunfire." sebastianjunger.com . Embedded: Sebastian Junger at Outpost Restrepo in Afghanistan's Korengal Valley in 2009. The US Army outpost and its soldiers were the subjects of an Oscar-nominated 2010 documentary made by Junger and the late photographer Tim Hetherington. SCENE READ

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