The Perfect Storm By Sebastian Junger Ted Talk Summary

“Our lonely society makes it hard to come home from war” is presented by Sebastian Junger, who is the author of “The Perfect Storm”, and director of the war documentaries “Restrepo” and “Korengal”. Having seen war up close and personal, he recognizes the impact that battlefield trauma can have on soldiers. His talk is centered around how hard it is for soldiers to reacclimate to everyday life, especially in today’s society; a society that is broken, bitter, and divided. Junger’s TED Talk is effective because of his own experience with PTSD, and his understandings of a “tribe mentality” and the alienation they face when they return home.
Junger starts off this talk by mentioning that he was a war reporter for 15 years before he realized that he had a problem. He says that he spent a couple months in Afghanistan with the Northern Alliance as they were fighting the Taliban and that they got hit hard a couple of times during his stay. He goes on to tell about his own experience. One day, after
He speculates that if they had an experience a sort of tribal closeness within their unit when they were deployed; of eating, sleeping, and doing tasks and missions together. They were trusting each other with their lives and when they come home, they had to give all that up. He even brings up an example of the Israeli military and how they have a PTSD rate of around one percent. The theory is that, in Israel, everyone is supposed to serve and when soldiers come back, they're not going from a military environment to a civilian one; they're going back to a community where everyone understands about the military. Everyone has either been in it or is going to