Sebastian younger has written a series of books on the war and military personnel. One of those that the congressman mentioned his tribe. Welcome to the 32nd annual Chicago Tribune printers row with fast. I want to give a special thank you to all of our sponsors. The theme of this years festival is what is your story, and we encourage you to share the stories you hear thispe weekend on twitter, instead graham or facebook using the hash tag 16. You can keep that spiri the spig all year by downloading the app where you will find all of the Chicago Tribunes premium book content, free and discounted books for subscribers and the complete schedule. Download today to get a free book at 5 off. Todays broadcast will be live g on cspan2 booktv. If theres time at the end for the q a session with the author we ask you to use the microphone located to your rights so that the home viewing audience can hear your questions. Before we begin todays program we ask you to silence your cell phone and turn off your camera flash. Please welcome the Senior Writer and columnist from the tribune and todays interviewer. [applause] dont know sebastian junger. It is not my place to do this but in light of the events of early this morning and this morning that we all do need to, if you pray, pray, but lets have a moment to consider those poor people in orlando. [silence] okay, before we get in deeply in this book, i need to know something about him. Rather more than capable harmonica player. Thats only because of chicago, i was a young man in the 80s i lived near amazing blues heart player and he grew up in chicago, one of the best in the world and i was lucky enough right out of college i was working in an italian diner, all i remember that was three generations that worked there and they all screamed at each other all of the time and i couldnt deal with it at all and the tips were terrible and i would take all loose change, it was all loose change and bank store to the diner and trade a pocket full of change and get a lesson from jerry and he was amazing teacher and i started playing playing playing playing in blues band. If you had one up here, i will play it. If someone has a harp. Im always going to carry one from now on. You grew sebastian there is one. Save it till the q a. We dont want to start that away. Youre right, you grew up, your father was immigrant, your mom was related to the grim family of grims fairy tales but you write in here, i found this fascinating, i hardly ever been west of the hudson river after you graduate in fall of 86 and in my mind what waited for me in dakota but the real me as well, elaborate . What do you mean . I grew up in affluent suburb. I wasnt tested in any physical way. I think a situation like that, test people psychologically. I dont know, if its a male thing or not, maybe not but as a young man felt like i hadnt proved myself, i hadnt earned my eye denty and i needed to go through some stuff and the only thing i can think of to go through was to travel across this country sort of putting myself at its mercy, a young kid with a back pac out in this great land. When did journalism enter your life and why . I ran mile to mile Cross Country and i end up writing a thesis in the navajo reservations, i trained with the best guys and came back to college and wrote the thesis and i got out of college, i did construction for a while, trying to figure out what to do and but i started thinking, well, that was pretty close to journalism, maybe i will try to be a journalist and sort of naive thought process. And this book for those how many of you bought this book already . Its pretty many but less than have so lets have a full house by the time its over. How does that sound . Its not that long. We were talking about back stage, the soldier story, anything but soldier play a part in this they thrive on it and and thats what this book is about and were told at the beginning this book is about a lot of people who have affected your life and many whom have you never met. Talk about the american settlers, i found the beginning portion fascinating. Where i was hitchhiking with a homeless guy that insisted that he give me his lunch because he wasnt needed at the coal mine, no one was sick for him and he really forced it on me and i kept that lesson my whole life that i realized, oh, my god, he thought we were on the same tribe he thought homeless, i was just having an adventure and he didnt know that. At any rate, i had a friend when i was young, when i was that age, mentor, figure, uncle figure name ellis, half apache and born literally in a wagon out west and best man i had ever men. He Read Everything from the greeks on up and he told me at one point, you know, its funny, throughout the history of this country along the front ear white people were always running off to join indians and the indians never ran to join the white people. We do have this phrase to go native. Theres no phrase to go civilized because no one wants to do it and i thought about it my whole life. It was a matter of the socalled civilized world being if not they were confronted with alternative where the indian lifestyle and the indian is is communal the right word . You dont use it in here. We are the only world power that developed along side 3,000miles of wilderness populated by stone age peoples. The interface did actually give a choice of how they we wanted to live. There was an opposite example right across the tree line and benjamin franklin, french writer, a lot of people at the time were quite disturbed by the fact that as i said, white people always ran off to join the indians and not the other way around. It was a superior christian culture, why were people fleeing it, why were people not coming towards it . What they decided that there was inherent galatarianism in society and if people, you cant accumulate more than you can carry and youre judged on your own merits and the basic galetarianism of that, frankly decide it was appealing to settlers and clearly that was not the case in White Society and that was they decided that that was the appeal and they incorporated something, riepghts of the rights of the individual and incorporated components into the american constitution. It was completely in sync with enlightenment thought as well but they deliberately put native american thinking in the constitution. My thought that your publishers were eager, another perfect storm, write about war again undoubtedly, this book has made the New York Times best seller list as of today, i dont think this should be a tough sell. What was the catalyst for this book . Was there a moment where you said to yourself, i need to write this book . Ive been thinking about what ellis had said to me my whole life. A component was people that were kidnapped by the indians and adopted into native society often when given the chance to come home refused it and i i thought about that my whole life and i wondered if that was true. Ellis was a good story teller too and i always had to wonder. Many, many years, decades later they were in a very tough deployment, i was at 20man position in this bridge, we got hit four times, very hard. It was a brutal, brutal violent deprived place and when the tour was done, those guys couldnt wait to get back to italy where they based all kinds of activity that i wont go into detail but definitely prepared for a good time when they got back to italy. After that, i caught up with them afterwards in italy, a lot of them said, you know, if we could go back to restrepo and we would all do it tomorrow and we thought, we dont wanting to back to america, we wanting to back to war and all of a sudden they thought about ellis and the captives and i thought, what is it about modern society thats so unappealing even for people that have enjoyed safety of its comforts. You say in here talking about war, when you receive your draft card vietnam had ended and you said that i had no problem with fighting a war, i just didnt trust, trust my government to send me to one that was completely necessary, you then quote your father and this is a quote i will remember forever saying im sure you know what it is, but you asked him about this and he was very antivietnam and he said, you dont owe your country nothing, you owe it something and depending on what happens you might owe it your life. Talk to me about your dad and the meaning of that quote. Yeah, he grew up in france and he came here during the war as germans were rolling, he got to this country and try today join the military but he watched as hundreds of american soldiers fought and thousands and thousands died in his home country of france to liberate europe from fascism and thousands of american graves on french soil, his home country and always cognizant of that. Mothers know this, 18yearold boys get a card in the mail from the government and we want to know where you live in case we need to draft you. Girls do not. I got this card and every adult i knew was against vietnam and i said to my father, im not signing, this is ridiculous, no, you are signing. He said what he said to me, you dont owe your country nothing. If its an immoral war, its your morale duty to oppose it but it might be a necessary war in which cases is your duty to fight it. All of a sudden became noble and i realized my people might need me and i think the real loss in contemporary affluence society is you never get the feeling feeling that your people need you. Were affluent enough to not need the individuals in our society in order to get by. This is the first time in Human History thats been true and actually a tremendous loss there. You make that point to that point, you make the point that sometimes we can overcome that burden, thats not selfimposed by disaster, you talk very articulate and talk about earthquake and you write an earthquake achieves what the law promises, but not in practice maintain the equality of all men. Crisis and trouble sometimes elicits that, yes . Let me just say it it it was an amazing quake. Right. 1916 or Something Like that. Devastating earthquake, all of the survivor huddled together before help got there and there was a complete breakdown of social class. Rich people, poor people, no distinction at all in society and said disaster produce it had quality of all men, even if law cant produce that. What you find in disasters and the reason people get nostalgic about them is theres massive societal breakdown but whats breaking down isnt the spirit of cooperation that humans are often known for, breaking down is the system, people come together during disasters, theres not chaos in the streets, its the opposite. People act better in catastrophes and social class breakdowns, rich and poor doesnt matter and brings the best in people and in london people strangers were sleeping shoulder to shoulder on the subway platforms bucket bre gaidz to put out fires in buildings, it was an 30,000 londoners were killed during this time and people missed afterwards and the authorities were shocked. There was they were prepared for mass psychiatric casualties because of the bombings and the opposite happened there. Again, if you feel that your people need you, your Community Needs you, it literally is as simple as this, you stop thinking about yourself and your problems. One lady said, we would have all gone down to the beaches with broken bottles to fight the germans if you had to. When you have people thinking about themselves, even though the society as a whole is under tremendous stress. Isnt that interesting among the many reasons you should buy this book . Im sorry i took your subjects quote and put it in your mouth. Here is sebastian junger, eliminates situations that require people to demonstrate a commitment to the collective good. I love that beauty and tragedy. Thank you very much. What i dont want to do is write about modern society that doesnt acknowledge the incredible good that comes from it. Sure. I mean, we have to all be cognizant of being incredibly lucky to live in an age of modern medicine, rule of law, philosophy and science. We have, you know, central heating and central airconditioning and many most people do in the modern society and this incredible blessing but the question is, whats the downside, why is it that as wealth goes up in the society the suicide rate goes up, why does the depression rate go up. I found a study that compared depression rates in nigeria to north america for some reason they were focused on women in this study, urban women in north america have the highest, wealthiest group in the study and they had the highest depression rate, rural women in nigeria, one of the poorest, most messed up chaotic countries in america had the lowest rates of depression. Hardship and poverty along with all the stress of that, they actually do those things, hardships do force people into collaborative communal existence and that collaboration and the communalism of that life buffers people against Mental Illness even though there are hardships that go along with that. The pressures and struggles and pains and trauma of war you have seen on the front lines as they say, its a very moving portion of the book where youre writing on a subway after getting back from afghanistan about a year or so, i think, before 9 11 and something has happened, something happens to you. Yeah, this was the fall of 2000. I never even heard p, ptsd and then in 2000. I was with Northern Alliance fighting the taliban. Back then taliban had fighters, jet planes, tanks and so we got pounded a few times and i came home pretty altered psychically. One day i went down to the subway and i had a massive, massive panic attack. I never had one before. Everything was going to kill me. Lights were too bright, the mob was going to turn on me, the trains were going too fast, they were going to jump the rails and hit me. Everything was a threat and i ran out of the station and the panic attacks kept happening and eventually decip desipated, i didnt get help because i thought i was going crazy. If i am going crazy, no one can happy me. I might as well do it in quite quiet dignity by myself. [laughter] there is much in the book about war and veterans and so much more. This is just ive known a number of vets and onward, this is a sentence that haunts me and makes me unbelievably sad. Todays veterans often come home to find that of though theyre willing to die of their country, theyre not sure how to live for it. Could i read the next few sentences there . You dont like my reading. Im like a professional reader for god sake. Its hard to know how to live for a country that regularly tears itself apart along every pausable ethic and general graphic boundary, the income gap between rich and poor continues to widen, many people live in racially segregated communities, the elderly are mostly sequestered from public life and rampage shootings happened so regularly that they only remain for the news cycle for a day or two. To make matters worse, politicians accuse rivals of deliberately trying to harm their own country a charge so destruct i have to group unity that most past societies would probably have punished it as a form of treason. Its no wonder so many of them get depressed when they come home. Its coming home, donald trump would be there is. I think this book to me has kind of if you read it and take it to heart and mind, kind a Ripple Effect of contemporary society, politics specially these days, theres something tribal about it to me specially mr. Trump. Do you agree because it really so many things in this book resinated in the current state of Political Affairs for me . Yeah, to think about our survival adaptations as a species is that they all can be used for good and ill and when you talk about the tendency for tribe, thats great until its used against another group and then its not so great. And so is trump exploiting, i dont even want to put the finger at trump, do many politicians exploit a kind of tribalism as Campaign Tactic to mobilize their base, yes, and theyre smart too, theyre playing an Human Evolution, it works, clearly it works because some people got nominated doing it. What i would argue if we are going to talk about if we are going to talk about that kind of fiercely affiliated community, we have to acknowledge that we are all part of one nation, we are part of a unity and that you really cant start doing that with subsets of americans in opposition to other subsets of americans. Youre destroying the country. That kind of tribalism it is the thing that keeps human groups coherent and close if we are going to presume to be a nation and i think we should continue to, if we are going to presume to be a nation of 320 billion, we better have that tribalism applied to everybody. As donald trump once said, either we have a country or we dont. He was talking about illegal immigration which is a different conversation. In a weird way i kind of like that sentence, yes, mr. Trump, either we have a country or we dont. That means that everyone in it including people of say mexican heritage or for that matter german heritage. I mean, he was german, i believe, i think that was his all of those ethnicity are equally part of this country. Either we have a country or we dont. Lets start thinking in real ways like that. I also think its hard not to think in chicago of the Gang Violence that besets and haunts this city and many other big cities here. The whole notion of gangs, the strange notion as gangs as tribes, i sort of understand people in depressed neighborhoods and disadvantage, they get family. But theres more . They get family, they get defense, psychological reinforcement. Gangs provide everything that humans form groups for, defense, identity, human connection, sets of emotional security, gangs provide that. The thing is if society doesnt provide and healthy groups for young men to belong to, and i say young men because they are particularly dangerous and vulnerable. And vulnerable, they can cause a lot of damage in society and if society doesnt provide good things for good groups for people to belong to, they will create bad groups to belong to but they will to something and one of the tragedies of high crime, poor highcrime neighborhoods. Everyone wants to serve Everyone Wants to be useful to the community. Many dont see the wider country as a community that they can serve. They just dont think theyre part of it, invested in it or that its invested in them. You talk often in the book about the trouble that exists with the increasing and i think its increasing, i think you do too, the economic disparity in this country is to my mind like a cancer. Evolution area reasons for agent communally. I have a sax talking about how rightwing and leftwing approach to society, each have strong evolutionary origins and theyr