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