Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging

Junger briefly reflects on his own personal attraction to war, recalling his father’s warning that he owes his country something, and “you might owe it your life” (37). He also notes that in many tribal societies, young men were expected to provide their fitness for adulthood through sometimes brutal initiation rites. He then explains how he came to find himself in Sarajevo after the former Yugoslavia became engulfed in civil war in 1991. Junger shares some of his experiences as an inexperienced journalist in a war zone for the first time, but mostly he describes the deathly horror of life in a city under siege.

Sarajevo taught him the leveling and uniting process that can occur when communities have been devastated by natural or man-made disasters. He notes that the London Blitz during World War II, the nightly bombing of the city by Germany, did not produce social disorder, nor mass hysteria, nor even much individual psychosis. In fact, psychiatric hospital admissions decreased during the war, and psychiatrists were surprised to note that the symptoms of many of their long-term patients subsided during the air raids.

In contrast to these extreme moments of catastrophe, Junger observes that the “beauty and tragedy of the modern world is that it eliminates many situations that require people to demonstrate a commitment to the collective good” (59). Most people go their entire lives without having to find out what they would risk dying for. Junger also claims that there is a “gender differentiation of courage” during moments of crisis (59). Using the case of a mining accident, Junger explains that these gendered roles are vital to group survival and are even taken up within same-sex groups.

Junger finds that with both the London Blitz and the former Yugoslavia, survivors expressed nostalgia for wartime. Survivors note that at no other time before or since did they feel as connected, united, and loved as they did during the war. A Bosnian journalist explains her experience as a teenager living with other kids her age and hiding out from the fighting in Sarajevo during the war: “To be honest, it was a kind of liberation. The love that we shared was enormous” (69).