Can Mandatory National Service Fix America? With Sebastian Junger

Author and documentarian Sebastian Junger reframes post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and raises the question of mandatory national service for Americans. Junger is the author of Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging
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All of the archeological and anthropological evidence from prehistory and current day hunter-gatherer societies shows that we’ve thought to live in small groups of 40-50 people, maybe 100-150 people. Those were the typical living sizes based on encampments that have been found and of course people living in those conditions today. The size of our brain seems to be correlated to groups of about that size when compared to other primate species. Clearly we live in a modern society and we organize ourselves in much larger groups. But our wiring, our evolutionary wiring seems to be backdated to a period of time some tens of thousands of years ago when we lived an existence of hunter-gatherers in a very harsh environment.
Our evolutionary design has a lot of implications for how we live in modern society and of course for how we conduct warfare. A platoon is around 40 or 50 soldiers not by coincidence. That’s around the size of a typical hunter-gatherer group in our evolutionary past. One of the things that soldiers find when they’re deployed in combat or even at a rear base is that they very naturally fall into a kind of communal existence with their platoon mates. They’re sleeping shoulder to shoulder. They’re eating meals together, doing missions and patrols together. They’re doing everything together. You’re never out of sight of another person. And you basically live for the group. There’s no individual survival outside of group survival in our evolutionary past and often in combat as well. Because we’re wired for that, because we evolved for that it feels very, very good when you experience that. And I’ve experienced it as a civilian reporter in a platoon. It feels instantly right. The only analogy I can think of is holding a baby in your arms for the first time. I just feels like oh my god, this is exactly what I’m supposed to be doing. This is right. And that kind of communal existence feels deeply correct and natural in the same way. And so when soldiers come back from deployment often they miss the war but what they really miss I believe is that communal connection. Not so much the combat and the killing of course – they’re not psychopaths, they’re just like the rest of us. But they do miss that communal connection because modern society is pretty much gone. And they don’t really notice that until they return to it.
One thing that interested me in researching my book Tribe was the high rates of PTSD, post-traumatic stress disorder, in the U.S. military. And estimates vary but they range as high as around 20 percent and much higher percentages than that claiming disability from it. In the Israeli military by contrast the rate is as low as one percent. PTSD is a hard thing to measure. That’s why there’s some variability. But it’s as low as one percent. It’s way lower than in the U.S. And I wanted to know why. They are roughly equivalent militaries, modern societies. What is the difference? And Israeli psychologists that I spoke with pointed to a couple of things. One was that the wars that Israel has fought in the last couple of generations have been like right on their doorstep. The Yom Kippur War of 1973 saw Israeli soldiers fighting literally on the outskirts of their own villages, fighting an invading army. And the psychological damage that comes from fighting in that kind of circumstances is greatly lessened as compared to traveling thousands and thousands of miles to fight a war that doesn’t seem to bear any relation to your home, to your country. It’s a distant affair that maybe doesn’t seem necessary sometimes.