Sebastian Junger Tells Tim Heatherington’s Story
Sebastian Junger is an award winning journalist, a best-selling author and filmmaker. His first book, The Perfect Storm was an international bestseller and was made into a film starring George Clooney and Mark Wahlberg. He made his first film which documented the Afghanistan war, Restrepo, along with his friend and colleague Tim Heatherington. Restrepo won the grand jury prize for best domestic documentary at Sundance, and was nominated for an Academy Award in 2011. Sebastian recently stopped in the SiriusXM studios to talk with Ron Bennington about his new film, “Which Way is the Front Line From Here: The Life and Times of Tim Heatherington” which addresses the risks of working as a wartime journalist on the front lines. Excerpts from the interview appear below.
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Ron Bennington: This had to be a really difficult thing for you to edit and put together.
Sebastian Junger: It was. I mean, it wasn’t more difficult than the original tragedy obviously. And in some ways, I think it was kind of therapeutic. I learned that my friend and colleague, Tim Hetherington was killed almost two years ago now, in Libya. I was supposed to have been with him on that assignment, and I wasn’t with him. And I felt very guilty about it. And one of the ways I sort of dealt with his loss was to try and make a film about him.
Ron Bennington: Well, I think we all have this romantic kind of notion about war correspondents. But most of the time when I was watching this film, I’m like, “Get out. Just don’t stay there. Just get out. This is insane.” Because you guys have gone to some really hairy places, and it’s not surprising really when someone gets killed.
Sebastian Junger: No, I mean, people get killed in war. And if you cover war, you have a chance of getting killed. And journalists are no, they’re not a special case, they get killed like civilians do and like soldiers do.
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Sebastian Junger Talks About War
Ron Bennington: But what kind of people are drawn to the front lines? What is it about the front lines?
Sebastian Junger: Well, war is incredibly dramatic, compelling, and even alluring. And I think I can prove that in a way. If I say to a room full of people, and I’ve done this before, “Who here is horrified by war?” You know, everyone raises their hand. And then if I go on to say, “Who here has paid $12 to go watch a Hollywood war movie for entertainment?” Everyone raises their hand. It’s a very compelling thing. And it contains really ancient human narratives of bravery, and group loyalty, and things like that. And is also an enormous dose of adrenaline that comes with getting shot at and surviving. And all of those things are very compelling to the human mind, and it’s almost irresistible at times.
Ron Bennington: And what’s odd though, then it’s hard to get some of these stories back here for people in America to watch. I was sitting there thinking, watching that, the lack of that that’s shown on regular American TV. That we don’t watch a lot of this with the 6:00 news.
Sebastian Junger: Well I think there is a fair amount of coverage of the wars, but also, networks are ratings driven. They’re businesses, they’re corporations. And they show, more or less, what their viewership wants to see. The beauty of documentaries is that if you make a good documentary, you don’t have to worry about ratings. If you make a good documentary, people will watch it. And when Tim and I made “Restrepo”, it was really widely seen. And had that been, I don’t know, some kind of network news piece, nobody would have – very few people, relatively few people would have seen it.
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Sebastian Junger Talks About Covering Both Sides of a War
Ron Bennington: Do you think if they invited people in, journalists would show up for that though?
Sebastian Junger: Oh my God, are you kidding? Of course.
Ron Bennington: And would you be willing to go? Or are you done with war?
Sebastian Junger: I’m done with war reporting. I mean, if you – as a matter of principle, sort of journalistic ethics, or whatever. I – yes, I think I would be willing to go and try to understand. Wars don’t end until – many wars don’t end until there is some basic level of understanding between the two groups. And I feel like if someone were able to do really good reporting from the Taliban side, it actually might help the peace process.
Ron Bennington: That’s so interesting to hear. Because you think there are stories that we don’t know. Particularly when we tend to see each other as either oppressors or terrorists, or whatever we have. Those kinds of names keep us from understanding, keep us from understanding why human beings are involved in this.
Sebastian Junger: Well there are a lot of different kinds of war and it’s very hard to categorize. You can’t talk about war, because there’s just too many different types. I mean, specifically, in Afghanistan – I mean some wars make sense, some wars don’t. Specifically in Afghanistan, the Taliban, I mean it’s a war for power for them. And it’s war for religious control and for power. And the people who are dying, most of the people who are dying are young men who are getting paid not much money to shoot guns at Americans. And the people who are in power, most of them are in Pakistan. And I think there is a way to kind of undue that. My experience with Afghanistan, I have to say, I was there in the 90s. Right before the Taliban took over, and those were dark days in Afghanistan. And those dark days really ended with 9/11. When NATO forces came in. And right now, as tough as things are there, it’s easy to forget that it’s the lowest level of civilian casualties in that country in 30 years. We have to remember that when we talk about war and peace, and what to do with the military. It gets really complicated.
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Sebastian Junger Talks About the Difficulties of Coming Home from War
Ron Bennington: I’ve talked to guys that have come back from Afghanistan or Iraq. And they almost forget that this kind of system that we have in this country – they were living in a totally different one. They come back here and people will be dog eat dog or whatever, and the kind of back biting that takes place in corporate America. And they’re like, they miss the brotherhood that they felt. They miss being a part of a real team when they were in the military.
Sebastian Junger: Yeah, absolutely, that’s one of the sort of ironies in all this. Is that very often men miss war when they come home from it. A lot.
Ron Bennington: Because of these highs that they can find.
Sebastian Junger: Yeah, it’s arguably more meaningful. The consequences of things are certainly greater. The sense of group identity is very powerful. And we are a species that thrives on group identity, it’s very, very powerful in a war situation. There’s a fair amount of adrenaline. And you’re totally self-defining. In High School, if you’re ugly or your family is poor, or whatever. You can be discriminated against for those things. In combat, nobody cares anything about that aspect – those aspects of who you are. What they care about is if you’re a good soldier. And if you’re willing to risk your life for everybody else. In other words, if you’re brave. And everyone can choose to be brave. You don’t have to be big, you don’t have to be good looking, you don’t have to be anything. You just have to decide to be brave and to value other people’s lives more than your own. If you do that you’ll be respected by everyone else. And that’s not true in High School, and in some ways it’s quite liberating.
Ron Bennington: And of course, isn’t it true that once you leave and get back into civilian life and you find out that you work in a place that doesn’t value the same kind of things. I mean we value, kind of, a dog eat dog work in corporate life here.
Sebastian Junger: Civilian society is very individualistic. And life in a platoon at a remote outpost can not be individualistic. It is about the welfare of the group. And the individuals, the importance of the individual disappears in that.
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Sebastian Junger Talks About Tim Heatherington
Ron Bennington: What – you had worked with Tim for years. But when you were putting this documentary, I guess, now you’re looking at him as a subject rather than a co-worker. Did anything change about the way you perceived your friend as you were putting this together?
Sebastian Junger: Yes, and in really sort of lovely ways. I knew him in the context of war. He was very brave, he was very focused, he was incredible. And I didn’t have as much a chance to see a kind of softer side to him. So when we found footage of him working with children in Sri Lanka, or talking to these fishermen in Sri Lanka. It was just this absolutely beautiful side of Tim that was so gentle, and so open, and sort of just bright. Bright like a bright light. And he just illuminated people and people loved him. I mean, I knew he was like that. Because I saw it at work a little bit. But I wasn’t quite aware of how much that dominated his character when he was working.
Ron Bennington: Yeah, he was certainly an artist as much as a journalist. And I thought that was one of the other interesting things. Is that, we’re living in a time where journalism is changing so much that anybody can kind of shoot video these days and go off and put together any documentary that they want fairly cheaply. Do you plan on staying with documentary film? Or is this…
Sebastian Junger: I’m going to keep making films, yeah. I have another contract with HBO. I won’t be doing it to the exclusion of writing. I think they actually go together quite well and I’ve spent most of my life as a writer.
Ron Bennington: You work as a writer, you work making documentaries, and of course speaking about these type of things. It’s “Which Way Is The Front From Here? The Life and Times of Tim Hetherington”. Now this is going to be debuting on HBO Thursday, April 18, at 8:00. It’s not an easy film to watch, because you do develop feelings for Tim as this thing is going on. And you know that as a story teller, you want us to kind of fall into Tim’s world before all this stuff comes together. And it’s amazing that he went from the Oscars back to the front.
Sebastian Junger: Yes, we were at the Oscars for “Restrepo”. And we got an assignment with Vanity Fair to cover the Arab Spring. And at the last minute I couldn’t go. Just personal reasons, Tim went on his own and he got killed. And he was dead six weeks after the Oscars.
Ron Bennington: Stunning. And when you get that phone call. You’d kind of mentioned this, there’s guilt involved, there’s kind of survivor’s guilt for you.
Sebastian Junger: Yeah, I felt like I should have been there with him. That I’d abandoned him. Felt a lot of confused things and, I don’t think there’s anything I could have done. And then I felt guilty about that. Because not only was I not there but I didn’t have any medical training. Had I been there I still couldn’t have saved his life. He bled out. He died of loss of blood from a shrapnel wound in his groin. And when I found out that he had a wound that was not necessarily mortal. I decided to start a medical training program for freelance journalists. Freelancers do 90% of the front line reporting in the world. Network news guys – really it’s very little of those guys. It’s really freelancers. And they have no training, no support, no back-up at all. So I started an organization called Reporters Instructed in Saving Colleagues. RISC, R-I-S-C. It’s completely funded by people’s generosity and we train freelance – experienced freelance war reporters in combat medicine three sessions a year in New York City.
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Ron Bennington: It’s a phenomenal documentary about a really – a phenomenal person. “Which Way Is The Front Line From Here? The Life and Times of Tim Hetherington”. Sebastian, thank you so much for stopping by my friend.
Sebastian Junger: My pleasure.
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“Which Way Is the Front Line From Here” is airing on HBO all month. Visit the official website for more info and follow Sebastian Junger on Twitter @SebastianJunger
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You can hear this interview in its entirety exclusively on SiriusXM satellite radio. Not yet a subscriber? Click here for a free trial subscription.
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You can learn more about Ron Bennington’s two interview shows, Unmasked and Ron Bennington Interviews atRonBenningtonInterviews.com.
