04
Jun
The core psychological experiences of war are so primal and unadulterated, however, that they eclipse subtler feelings, like sorrow or remorse, that can gut you quietly for years. Once in Paris I caught sight of two men carrying a mattress across the street and went straight into full-blown panic: eyes wide, heart pounding, hands gripping my chair. I’d just come out of Liberia, where I’d seen a lot of dead and wounded people carried that way, and at the time I’d had no reaction at all, zero. I was too terrified by the violence around me, and too amped by the magnitude of the story I was covering, to pay much attention to anything else. Then a sagging mattress in Paris triggered a three-week backlog of trauma and shame.
War | Sebastian Junger
