2002 Cover Article

Sebastian
by Christopher Busa

photographs by khristine Hopkins

I. the language of the sea
Junger was living alone in bleak, post-season Truro, sequestered in his parents’ deserted summerhouse. I had known him for only a year or so; Provincetown Arts was planning to publish the dramatic chapter from The Perfect Storm that details the unpleasant experience of drowning, informed with a coroner’s knowledge of the two-step from spasm to final suffocation.
I had read the book in pre-publication galleys, sent enthusiastically to me by his publisher. Reading, I marveled at the way Junger built his sentences into paragraphs, his paragraphs into chapters, and his chapters into a story as unified as a balloon filled with water, jiggling like gelatin in your hands.
Waves make up the sea, organizing infinite molecules, via imperfect rhythms. A breeze across the surface of the water creates tiny capillary waves, which the wind then uses to get a better grip on more water. Junger’s book is a monument to the huge wave that strode a thousand miles across the North Atlantic, devouring a normally seaworthy 72-foot steel fishing boat.
I sensed Junger’s intuition: language was like the sea, a great unconscious power whose energy could be made visible by identifying with its rhythms.

II. OUTSIDE THE ART ASSOCIATION
I ran into Junger on the street in front of the Provincetown Art Association, sometime in the winter of ’96. I had just finished reading his manuscript, and I told him that it was magic. Then he told me a recent dream: he was in a bar in Gloucester, the Crow’s Nest, later depicted in the book and the movie. The bar was bright and buzzing, like any good bar, lively with people having a good time. In a dark corner of the bar, standing and raising their drinks, huddled around a tiny, tall, circular table, seven of the fishermen who perished in the storm conferred elbow to elbow about the book in which they now were immortalized as characters. One of them muttered, "Hey, the book’s pretty good," and the others nodded.
When we met recently in preparation for this article, Junger corrected me: "Actually,
in the dream I told you, it was just Bobby Shatford [the boat’s captain]. And we met on a deserted beach." The difference between a deserted beach and a lively bar is the difference between fact and fiction. The author likes to wear heavy boots in winter and go barefoot in summer. Either way, he walks the line.

III. The Idea of Immanence
BEFORE Perfect Storm was published, Junger knew a big blow was immanent; mysteriously he knew his future had arrived and was dwelling within him. "It was a month or so before the book came out and I knew what was about to happen. I wanted to make sure that the guy I had gotten to know for 35 years would still be there at the end of all this. I am a solitary person. I grew up as a solitary person. I realized this wave of attention was coming. I remembered I had a small mirror in my closet. I pulled it out and propped it up on my desk and sat down and just looked at myself. Then I began a conversation with myself: ‘Get ready for what’s going to happen; your life is about to get turned absolutely inside out.’" His was an effort to look into himself and see who or what was there.
He spent about an hour in conversation, a spontaneous response to his own foreknowledge. He was not sure what this meant, so he invented out of profound need his own version of a Zen exercise or a monk’s debate between self and soul. To enhance his thinking, Junger rolled a cigarette; he smoked while he spoke to the visage in the mirror, trying to see who was inside the person he was looking at.
When the book came out, Junger, all of a sudden, was doing the most frightening thing he knew of, which was addressing in public large numbers of people. He remembers the first time when he thought he was just giving an informal talk at a museum in Peabody. He walked out and faced a hall of thousands. He is grateful that he didn’t know at the time that C-Span was filming the event for television. He adapted by learning, trial by ordeal, how to speak in public, how to present himself on TV, and how to say what he wanted to say.
He took to a specific type of journalism as if he were born to create it. In his early 20s, he had struggled to write short stories. Reluctantly, painfully, he realized that fiction is frustrating, "elusive." He went in circles for months on one story trying to make it perfect. Say his dream had come true—the dream of a 25-year-old short story writer. Say the New Yorker published his perfect story. Junger saw that a week later someone else’s weak story would be the rage. An avid surfer, he wondered, What was the relation of the perfect story to the perfect wave?
When he is silent, I talk about proportion and the balance of thing to thing. I am thinking of a word, reify, treasured by Lucy Grealy, the colleague of Junger’s who wrote Autobiography of a Face. Reify means to make real.
Junger shrugs at my obviousness but I refuse to be embarrassed for asserting something essential. I know the word "perfect" is a loaded term. Junger owns the word. I can only refer to the "perfect story" as a separate genre, another seaport more exotic than Junger’s port of calls. The "perfect story," Junger sensed before he understood, was hardly earthshaking. It was, in fact, only weekly entertainment.
The perfect short story writer did not change the world! Nothing happened after the perfect story broke. Like a tree falling in Africa, out of earshot, certainly not seen, did the tree, in sincere honesty, actually topple? Who was the witness that can say so? The perfect short story writer petered out like a spent wave splashing onto thirsty sand. The invented story was so elusive, it had no resonance; therefore the invented story could not be perfect.

IV. CHAINSAW
JUNGER was living in Boston, waiting tables in Harvard Square at a stylish bistro, Casablanca, and working as a climber for tree companies, trimming limbs from ancient oaks and elms. After trimming trees, it was a breeze to serve Manhattans.
Junger met a woman and moved to a cozy love shack beside the water in Gloucester.
"Cozy love shack!" Junger objects sharply, demanding accuracy. "Well, it was a fisherman’s house with busted-up boats and dead cars in the yard."
Though he had never lived with a woman before, everything somehow was very nice. Except that Junger was beating his head against the wall trying to write short stories, even as he was starting to find satisfaction in doing a little more journalism. Breaking up with his girlfriend was an "upsetting episode," as he described it, speaking as a gentleman who could plausibly be called "Mr. Determination," if this were some sort of a merely fabricated story. Junger, in truth, was cut deeply by the break-up, and the episode forced him to move far away to Truro. Here was a world elsewhere, not Thoreau’s quaint Walden, but Junger’s contemporary version. The dune shack replaced the log cabin, a questionable improvement. Junger could see that the smallest ocean waves were big enough to leap over the frogs that lurked at the edge of the pond.
"It was a place I’d always been fond of. Any kid who comes to the Cape in the summer and has to go back to Boston at the end of August knows this. I said, Wow, I could be down here in the off-season, in the winter. I didn’t have to leave. Shit—it was great! I started hanging out in P’town, just because in January that’s where the humans are. I met Don Beal. I knew Gordon Peabody a little. I shot pool at the Bradford with some of the new writers in residence at the Work Center, like Matt Klam, Lucy Grealy, and Elizabeth McCrackin. In fact, that was the year that the Work Center fellows appeared on the cover of Provincetown Arts, standing on the sand dune, in the spring of ’93."
Junger was brought up on the Cape where artists and their kin have lived for generations. Co-existing like cartilage in the backbone of the community, these people live year-round on the final twist of the peninsula, where even the indigenous Indians only ventured out for the summer months when it was warm and where the shellfish were especially succulent. Summer on the Cape is a social celebration, but the harsh winter drives most everyone away. A few strays stay, sustained by an entrenched faith in the inherent value of pursuing some art, insisting against normal odds on the primacy of their own integrity of feeling. Here Junger realized that the most beautiful short story in the world has a negligible impact compared to a mediocre article in the New York Times. The knowledge devastated him. He sensed the power of journalism as a mode, not of contemplation, but of action.
His life may be said to have begun at age 30 when he cut his leg with a chainsaw. Instead of cutting the limb of a tree 60 feet from the ground, he cut his own limb. Out of the wound was born the idea of writing about dangerous work. Recuperating, he started to write about a surfing incident off Balston Beach in Truro in the winter of ’94. Surfing in the surge along the shore, he wiped out, lost his board, and almost drowned, giving him personal knowledge of the medical details of drowning—how the larynx, the organ of speech that thrives in air, shuts down in spasm underwater in order to prevent flooding of the lungs.

V. WRITING CAREER
JUNGER WANTED TO SALVAGE his writing career because it wasn’t going anywhere. Without a magazine assignment, he flew himself out west to a raging fire in the steep hills near Flicker Creek in Idaho and started hanging out with fire crews. He intended to write a book about six or seven different dangerous jobs, including fighting forest fires, commercial fishing in the North Atlantic, and the old-time harpooning of humpback whales practiced by "the last living harpooner" on a small island in the southern Caribbean. He made these early trips on his "own dime," without encouragement or support, because he knew each idea was right for him. Some of his early pieces were published in Outside and Adventure, men’s magazines that nurtured stories of extreme stress and spread the genre among the general reading public. Here is where Junger began to make distinctions between sports and war, national necessity and personal quest. Men’s Journal bought Junger’s first national magazine piece and years later sent him to Afghanistan to profile Ahmed Shah Massoud, the quixotic soldier/statesman who became the man Junger, maybe, most respects, after his father. Junger wrote a book proposal and a 50-page chapter on the Andrea Gail for what became Perfect Storm. Then he took more money out of the bank and flew to Bosnia because another chapter was going to be about war correspondents.
Researching the job of being a war correspondent would teach him a useful skill. If he couldn’t get the book published, he could become a war correspondent. "Going to Bosnia served a double purpose. I spent five months there. This was my first exposure to being a war reporter, such as it was. I had no idea what I was doing, but I loved what I experienced. All that was familiar broke away. In Sarajevo I started hanging out with a couple of other journalists, a Dutch guy and a Belgian guy."
He met Reza, the Belgian guy, a photographer, in Afghanistan in 2000. The Dutch guy was a journalist Junger met in an elevator in Zagreb, the capital of Croatia, hitting it off instantly. Reza, who was a little more experienced, said, "Listen, I know you don’t know what you’re doing. I’m going into Sarajevo. Why don’t you come with me?" Reza taught Junger, "a total amateur," by his own admission, how to file radio reports and write newspaper articles for ABC, Associated Press, and other networks. Intoxicated by what he was doing, he learned fast, urged on by a reinforcing desire to do a kind of writing that was itself a dangerous job. This was when he got a fax from his agent in New York, Stuart Krichevsky. He said, "Remember the book proposal about the storm. Well, I just sold it." Krichevsky asked Junger to come at once to New York. Junger obeyed the call, signed the contract, then locked himself in his parents’ summerhouse, spending two winters writing Perfect Storm. By that time he knew many people in Provincetown. He felt it was his kind of place, but he was afraid of becoming complacent, worrying darkly, "You know, you can get pretty comfortable down here."
Doing foreign reporting, before Perfect Storm was published in 1997, keenly deepened Junger’s sense of mission. He was in Bosnia in ’94, three years before the book came out. The first time he was in Kosovo was in ’98, and again in ’99. He went to Sierra Leone in 2000 and to Afghanistan in 2000 and ’01. Now he looked into the mirror of himself and said, "OK, you’ve been to a screwed-up country. Now you are back in a wealthy, protected country. There is something you need to say about the state of the world that Americans need to hear." Clear purpose became the courage that calmed his nervousness. He stayed conscious that the calm was not there when he needed it. Only after he returned from the speaking tour of Fire, the collection of magazine pieces that superceded his bestseller, did he become the guy who wrote them.

VI. BLUE PASTURES
JUNGER thinks visually. His mother is a landscape artist who exchanged the green pastures of Ohio for the blue pastures of Cape Cod; his father is an acoustic engineer who devises ways to reduce noise levels in everything from NASA moon launches to submarines to gymnasiums. Sound underwater is always magnified. If Junger’s father chose to dampen noise, the son chose to respond to its rhythms.
When Junger writes his outlines he makes use of arrows and boxes to plot out how he might present his material to people. Many of the books he consults on meteorology or the mechanism of firing a bullet are riddled with clear diagrams, graphic statements of a process more powerful than our ability to stop anybody from pulling a trigger. On assignment Junger makes notes part of the day, tape-recording interviews or not, depending on the kind of interview he does. He will fill up four or five stenographer’s books on an assignment, keeping the tape recorder going as a back up. During a conversation, Junger takes the best notes he can. He knows they are imperfect, but his notes outline his interest, providing an inventory or a table of contents. Later, when he puts the piece together, the notes vividly show where he has been. He will pick quotes, then go back to the machine to get the exact wording. "A quote is a sacred thing," he believes. "There should not be a comma missing. If you put something people said in quotation marks in an article or in a book that means those exact words were said. That to me is journalism."
Of course there are things the journalist can’t say. They can say a little, but not too much, about whom they are, in order to explain how they came by their report. At the bottom the question we are asking is how writers get their material, and how faithful their stories are to their sources. In matters of truth, nonfiction may supercede fiction. To keep a reader’s attention, fiction may have to be 10 times better than nonfiction. Junger, alert to a false moment in writing, will succumb to the first temptation to put a novel down, stopping to read on the slightest excuse. He believes that a bad moment in writing, perhaps asserting something not substantiated, or claiming a feeling not demonstrated, will lose the reader’s confidence. Like a fatal blunder in chess, the game will end. In nonfiction he allows that the writing can be a little flawed because the topic might be interesting. "But if I come across a novel that’s really great," he insists, "there’s nothing better than that."
The history of literature shows that culture does not want the writer to make up the story. Homer’s audience wanted to know what happened during the Trojan War. Beowulf declares, "Often Fate saves an undoomed man, if his courage is good," meaning that a man’s effort can prevail if his end is not foretold. Chaucer told tales in Middle English about the priests and nuns that make us blush today. Milton let Satan speak more eloquently than God. Shakespeare shamelessly took his history plays from detailed chronicles. Blake’s wife put an empty dinner plate before her husband, reminding him not to live by visions alone. Conrad, Hemingway, Steinbeck, and other 20th-century writers produced touchstone fictions drawing upon actual life. Every writer feels an obligation to transmute the material of true existence in some way, but Junger seems to have taken naturally, like a duck to water, to the practice of reporting.
Stanley Kunitz wrote a poem I admire among all others, "King of the River," about salmon swimming upstream to spawn. The involuntary feeling is delivered against a cascade of conditionals. The rhythms of the poem are a series of rapids that oppose the drive of the fish. The fish could die from a hook in its gill, with the triumphant fisherman reeling in a yard of muscle in mortal agony. But Kunitz’s fish dies with the dignity of knowing, as the poet says, that the water is not clear, the water is not still, that knowledge is not given to the fish, that the power is not granted them to break out of their cells, that their powers are not pure enough, and therefore this fish is not immortal. If, if, if is echoed by no, no, no. Yet the drive of the salmon drives the newspaper report that drives the poet. Kunitz wrote his poem after reading a New York Times article on the life cycle of the Pacific salmon. These factual reports easily attach themselves to entrenched, powerful metaphors that take you for a ride. The writer yields, respecting the medium’s source of power. Maybe someday Junger will write a terrific novel.

VII. SHORT FORMS
RIGHT NOW he is exploring tension in short forms, varying the degree of his presence as a reporter, which boils down to his use of the word "I." In "Escape from Kashmir" (1996), Junger took us through a series of harrowing decisions, first to escape, then to survive in the open terrain in winter in the countryside of Kashmir, one man against the elements. That man is not Junger, but it reads as if it were. Junger locates instances of intense personal struggle that are complicated by history, something greater than the individual. Yet when these individuals speak, their words are weighted with the history they embody. Junger builds tension incrementally, bit by bit, adjusting the balance to more finely define the differences being weighed. Practically wary of the ugliness of pretension, Junger simply avoids an approach to writing as a self-conscious activity. He knows he does not possess the final secret and he is grateful to pursue the fruitful leads of the locals in an area, painfully aware that their names may never appear in his articles.
Junger describes himself as a "loner." Something happens in a room when he is writing that gives him a result he is satisfied to accept. His pieces aspire to being full and complete statements, to being, in short, literature. This aspiration must be the source of his early desire to write fiction. Perhaps unconsciously, when he ceased writing fiction, he ceased to focus on people in his writing. He pointedly avoided detailed profiles of people, choosing instead to chart the drama of natural and social phenomena that dominate individuals. He saw the individual, like a tank or a helicopter, as a vehicle in a larger event. The larger event was the engine of individual will. The individual becomes identified with a social mission. His smoke jumpers, longliners, spear-throwers, code breakers, translators, forecasters, bonesetters, midwives, and telegraph crews, some of whom he has never written about, however much I wish he had, are specialists—expert witnesses to intense trauma. There at this point, their "I" becomes plural in a weird way because they speak for the physiological processes of all people. Junger doesn’t use a lot of pronouns enacting arguments between people.

VIII. PRONOUNS
The author agrees to meet me in my office and talk turkey. If we were ducks, we would speak ducktalk, the language of ducks. We are not ducks.
Though he had never been to my house, I respectfully invited him in the period when Storm broke. Absent then, now he arrived with a lit cigar, not too big, asking if he could smoke in my house.
"Seb," I said, "are we not fellow Beachcombers, those local ruffians who are the poor relation of the artist?"
Junger entered, knowing my tendency toward obscurity. He was modest and arrogant at once, but he soon forgot about smoking and began to look at the paintings on my walls. He fastened on the great photograph of the bearded clam warden, the early ancestor of Frank Gaspar, author of the only novel, Leaving Pico, written by a Portuguese son of the community. John Gregory, who recorded the subtle gray tones of P’town before color photography, took this male Mono Lisa. He is the mother of the good time when life made us new.
Renaissance, we know, or knew, means "new birth." Dante wrote a poem about it. Junger studied the duo-tones of the bearded clam warden hanging like a fish skeleton on my wall. The author saw that the gray tones were so subtle, the bum looked like an aristocrat. Junger is astonished by photography. Here the other guy looks like himself.
So I must ask him, "Would you prefer to profile a wall of fire than a line of beauty queens?"
Before answering we both trek upstairs, sit at my desk, his right elbow to my left elbow. Neither of us thinks to challenge the other to an arm-wrestling contest. The chessboard sits on a stool beside us. If we get bored, we can play chess.
Seb asks for one of my cigarettes and taps it loudly against the table by his elbow, packing the loose, machine-rolled tobacco of my Marlboro Light 100s. Normally, when forced to think, Junger rolls his own cigarettes, a tedious ritual that keeps the sin of his smoking to a minimum.
I sit on my usual perch, an air-filled, pearl-colored exercise ball. Seb sat on one of my creaky office chairs. As a joke, I had placed the menu from his New York restaurant, The Half-King, at his elbow. If he felt hungry, he could make a call.
What brought Junger to write the essays in Fire was not the phenomenon of fire. It was the dangerous job some men decided to do. It was the same with Storm: he was interested in writing about dangerous work and commercial fishing was a dangerous job. But Storm is a book more about meteorology, showing us how the weather is nature’s equivalent of human moods, fierce as war, sweet as fresh cream.
The natural world impacts on people in very specific ways. "If you are reading a murder mystery," Junger reasoned, "the investigation into who killed Ms. Whomever obliges you to assemble all the facts and evidence and try and figure it out. A storm killed seven men. So you have to know how storms work. That’s the force that killed the people. It could be fire, it could be the political process of a civil war in Sierra Leone. It’s no different than a storm. Those are the forces that killed people."
I follow Junger’s thinking. Politics shares kinship with meteorology. The sinking of one boat can be likened to the destruction caused by the rise of Serbian nationalism.
But I reflect that when people function as a crowd, the motion of the mob converts personal power into unified action. The combined force becomes unconscious, independent, like an emotion or a newsworthy weather pattern. No one person maintains conscious control. Junger writes as if social forces share kinship with storms, winds, and waves. Indeed, he writes of fire "advancing," "reinforcing" its very self, expanding and accelerating in perfect mixtures of heat, oxygen, and fuel.

IX. SHAKY POINT
AS FAR AS JUNGER CAN TELL wars happen when a central authority collapses: "People in the United States look at chaos in Afghanistan and say, ‘Why are those people so violent? Why are they killing each other?’ They are killing because the parents are not home to keep order. Americans are perfectly capable of killing each other, we are perfectly capable of a civil war, or any kind of anarchic chaos as we’re seeing in Afghanistan. As human beings, we are no different than Afghans or anyone else. But we have a very strong central government that keeps a lid on. In America you have people like the Michigan Militia; they are not a threat to us only because the central government is so strong. If this country were at a more shaky point in its history, as it has been and will be again, the Michigan Militia could trigger a complete fragmentation of this country. People talk about Bosnia, neighbors killing neighbors, but they forget that we were doing that in 1860."
Of course, I could assert, so directly as to be misleading, that the difference between the Michigan Militia and the Taliban is that the American tough guys are not frankly suicidal.
I may believe that the Oklahoma bomber preferred to kill others and live himself.
"May not that be a form of committing suicide?" Junger wonders, pointing out that Tim McVeigh gave up his life for what he believed in destroying, "choosing to be put to death slowly over the course of judicial process."

X. AWE
IN TERMS OF THE AWE WAR inspires, William James said a hundred years ago that war was completely exemplary, riveting attention so well that the only solution was to find a "moral equivalent of war." The only thing as exciting as war is not innocent sport, but the ruthlessness of art, where the risk of the artist is as real as the heroism of the soldier. Junger is driven by an intuition that "all play—children’s play, adult play—is a mimicry of war. Chess is. Tennis is. Football is."
Even so in courtship, I add, pointing out that birds, when they are trying to attract a mate, zoom close, invading the personal territory of their interest, then swerving away at the last moment, mockingly, pleasurably, mimicking the attack mode.
"You could say something similar about humans." Junger pondered this basic question about the relation between love and war. "There’s the initial move, then it’s responded to. This sort of dialogue is not that different from war."
"One reason I write about war," he said, "is that, as a form of reporting, it is intense, demanding. I get gratification, challenging myself. War kills many more civilians than combatants. It kills a hundred times as many civilians as combatants. A couple of hundred years ago civilians were pretty much left out of combat. They suffered the change of government, but battlefield death way outnumbered the killing of civilians.
"In modern times the ratio is the opposite. For every soldier killed in war, 100 civilians die. The exact figure is horrifying. I feel this is the most serious topic you can write about. Human suffering is bad. It shouldn’t happen. It does; it shouldn’t. War is a primary reason. If soldiers went off and killed each other and the survivors came home, that would be the end of it, like some really bloody football games. But hundreds of thousands of innocent people are being killed when they could live.
"Because I am an American and because we live in the most powerful country in the world, we are in a unique position to intervene. We have. Sometimes we do, sometimes we don’t. But when we do, it works. Ending the war in Bosnia and Kosovo was a NATO action impossible without the United States. Bosnia took us a few years to get going. Kosovo we entered quite quickly and brought that tragedy to a halt, stopped it in its tracks. Afghanistan, again, took us a long time. We had our own self-interest in mind, but we stopped a civil war that killed 70-80,000 civilians in the past few years. We stopped it. As an American journalist, I feel at least the possibility, if journalists write enough about war and the root causes of war, this very powerful country we live in might be moved to act.
"Clearly repressive regimes have done awful things to their own citizens and citizens of other countries. As an American journalist I feel it is my obligation to point out to Americans, ‘Look, this is the error of judgment our government is making in Guatemala, Central Asia, or elsewhere.’ To do that kind of reporting includes a duty to tell Americans when our government is doing something wrong. Doing something wrong is not only wrong, it is actually making us more vulnerable to attack. Now we are not protected by our policy."
Junger reduces sophisticated policy to the point of view of the local witness involved in the heat of action. He seldom gets his directions from generals, not being in the military. He merely seeks assignments that activate his wits. He travels lightly with a sturdy flak jacket, a compass, writing material, and a wad of money stuffed inside what used to be a thin passport. Now he has been to so many countries that he has been obliged to add many pages.
The roughest country he worked in was Afghanistan, beginning with the physical realities of life there. He slept crowded in a mud-wall house with Afghan soldiers. His food was cooked over an open fire. On his first trip, lasting a month, he had one bath. The hot water came from a pot that was boiled over a fire. There wasn’t much food. He lost 20 pounds. That was all right. He was prepared to deal with the experience as it went. He knew he could not set it up that much, particularly in a third-world country. He couldn’t call his travel agent and say, "Book me in a hotel in the cave district of Tora Bora. He could not arrange it in advance. So he just got there. Now he is on staff at Vanity Fair and the magazine books his flights. Still, after he steps off the airplane, he’s on his own. Often he works with a Dutch photographer named Teun Voeten.
Voeten is the only photographer Junger has worked with other than Reza. He met Voeten in Bosnia in ’93 and they became good friends. They did their first assignment together in ’96. Since then most of Junger’s articles have been collaborations with Voeten. Junger’s bar in New York, where good writers and beautiful women hang out, the Half King, also functions as a gallery for good photography. These are graphic glimpses from the field. The stern photograph of Junger that appears on the back jacket of Fire was taken on location, not fabricated in a portrait studio.

XI. MINUTE OF SILENCE
ONE EVENING AFTER A DINNER last December that I attended with Junger, everybody told stories. A fire roared in a man-sized, brick fireplace. Junger explained that, having returned from assignment for National Geographic, he would proceed to share the best moment of a bad time. There the Taliban would have soon shot him, but now he was among friends. He told us about the handheld walkie-talkies of our Afghan brothers. On the mountain ridges, Junger heard static voices rattling away in Arabic. Knowing music was banned in these mountains, Junger, who loves music as much as any Beachcomber, pulled out his harmonica, playing for about 15 minutes. Junger hypnotized us with his little story. "Nobody shot anybody while I played," Junger said. After that story, we all broke for some of our own music.
Junger profiled Massoud in Afghanistan, the warrior hero who became a martyr when he was murdered by terrorists posing as journalists. This was his elegy and we heard his sorrow.
Suddenly, after the attack on the World Trade Center, Junger was one of the few journalists in America who knew enough about Afghanistan to speak with helpful understanding. He had the huge readership of Perfect Storm, almost a guaranteed audience. To boot, not many best-selling authors are interested in doing foreign reporting. Junger may be the only one, neither because he believes he is a great foreign reporter nor because he is as experienced as some of his colleagues. Stephen Kinzer, a "fabulous journalist," according to Junger, inexplicably lacks Junger’s visibility. (Kinser’s book on Turkey’s role as a bridge between the occident and the oriental is reviewed elsewhere in this issue).

XII. PHOTOGRAPHY
PHOTOGRAPHY is very important to Junger (his sister Carlotta is a photographer, now living in England) but he likes to think that the reader can read his books and feel the pleasure of visual presence. His books are not illustrated with photographs, but future books may be.
He wants the reader to know what it looks like, feels like, to sit on a street corner in Sierra Leone and watch a rainstorm come, with the kids running around playing in the rain. He put thought into trying to elevate certain descriptions to the level of literature. He knew this effort would not add to the information, per se. But he knew there are times in an article, especially a political article, where he could make the reader feel that he or she was actually there. He reads a lot of literature, including Foreign Policy Review, always feeling that he wants his readers to finish his articles, and knowing that his stories will always need a little more attention than the others he reads.
He wants people to read an article he wrote and to feel they’ve just read a short story with dramatic impact and a clean narrative arc. Junger believes that artful journalism must possess a "narrative arc: hooking people in the beginning, then lifting them with rising intention. Tricks that fiction writers use to make it an emotionally fulfilling experience, I try to use those tricks too. These are topics I care about. The better I write them, the more people will read them and care like I do. Anybody who buys the New York Times wants to be informed. Somebody, who reads a newspaper, is reading it, regardless of the quality of writing, for information. Right? Somebody who picks up Vanity Fair is not looking to find out about the civil war in Sierra Leone. As they’re flipping through the pages and seeing photos of movie stars, they come to the first page of my article on Sierra Leone. I want the writing to be so good that even though they weren’t looking for that information, they can’t help but read the article, just because they’ve been seduced by the writing. While being seduced by the writing they end up finding out something I want them to know. It’s almost like I’m tricking them into finding out about something that they never opened the magazine hoping to know. It might even be a topic so horrifying they don’t want to know it. They read it despite themselves because the writing compels them. This is merely my aspiration; I don’t know if it works or not, but this is what I’m striving for.
"The first paragraph must be good enough so they want to read the second one, and the third, and all of a sudden they’ve read the whole article. A newspaper reporter does not have to do that. They have a guaranteed audience just because the guy bought the paper in the first place. Vanity Fair or any popular magazine can’t count on that. People read these magazines for entertainment."
Junger knows the old story that literature, to be literature, must simultaneously delight and instruct. He respects the magic of information, but does not quite believe it can be spun to say two things at once, landing like a roulette ball exactly as needed on red or blue, east or west.
Most of his stories do not involve him and so there is no first person. The Kasmir story was one. He wasn’t there. He didn’t put himself in the story. "What I find," he said, "is that a light use of the first person actually ties the thing together."

XIII. A LIGHT USE?
He explains, "A light use. What you don’t want is to become the point of the story. The journalist is there to serve the topic. The topic isn’t there as a platform for the journalist to perform a part. It’s not about you, it’s about Sierra Leone or Afghanistan or whatever it is. Using first person, lightly, helps the reader, helps them understand, and puts them there a little bit better, a lens that focuses their understanding. The locales I like are an incredibly alien world. So if the reader has someone over there they can identify with, namely me, another fellow Westerner, fellow American, it puts them a little deeper into the story. But you don’t want to do it so much that you become the hero. God forbid that the journalist becomes the hero of the story. That to me is absolutely awful."
I myself hate novels where the struggle is simply to write the damn book, and the conclusion becomes the pile of pages in your hands. When Junger advocates for the "light" use of the first person, he makes a defining utterance. Now, he challenges, it’s not a question of either/or but a heavy/light use of the I of the writer.
At a memorable workshop last fall at Robert Lifton’s annual think tank at his Wellfleet retreat, Norman Mailer read a passage from the Armies of the Night, originally written in the third person, with Mailer calling himself "Mailer." In the woods of Wellfleet he read the same passage substituting the first person for the third person, I for he. The difference was astonishing. The "I" of the author was not the equal of the character of "Mailer."
When Jonathan Swift sends his reporter Gulliver to a floating island in the 18th century where certain obscure intellectuals live, he discovers that the intelligent inhabitants all have servants with beanbags attached to a stick, called "flappers," so that the servants may flap their masters when it is time to stop speaking.
They hit their masters over the head to remind them to finish their thought, so they can go to dinner. They are the locals in a strange land. Like Gulliver, the journalist who ventures to a foreign land makes himself into such an improbable conceit. He is the innocent character who does the bold traveling. He is so invisible that he could call himself by a fictional name, anything but "Sebastian," a man who has a different kind of modesty, uninterested in exposing his secondary feelings to the world. He is more interested in the topic of his attention. His face in the mirror is not the subject of his attention. What he looks like is not how he feels.
Junger does not find himself very interesting, yet he is convinced that he has interesting things to say. He grew up in a privileged suburb of Boston. He attended Shady Hill School in Cambridge. He went off to Wesleyan University in Connecticut and majored in anthropology. Looking at the skeletons of early man, he marveled at a branch that had taken to using tools, Homo habilis, African guys.
When he was a sophomore in college, Junger believed that the captain of the Pequoid was not as interesting as the life of an actual fisherman. Without being quite analogous, I suspect that this is why Junger refuses to write about himself.
Others entertain him more. Besides, writing obliges him to learn much about the topics he’s writing about.
Where did he come from? Naturally modest, he is obliged to think, "out of nowhere."
His father, Miguel, now is American. Before that he was French; before that he was German. He came to the United States in ’41. Junger was born in ’62. Science and art were the end points for the arc that spanned his parents’ passion.
His father had a consulting firm in Cambridge, working for the Navy, for NASA, for private industry. What did his parents have to do with him? His father’s mind was immensely curious; his concern was how to minimize sound, dampen it underwater, where it could travel for miles and be heard only by whales. He spoke six or seven languages.
Miguel met Ellen, his wife, in a bar in Boston in 1960. His father is seven years older than his mother.
She was from Canton, Ohio, and broke from the conservative, upper-middle-class society that formed her in the Midwest. Instead of marrying at age 22 and remaining in Ohio, she went to Boston to become an artist. That ambition made her an outcast. She was the first person that she knew who had seen the ocean. In her town she didn’t know anyone who had seen the ocean. His mother spent her 20s learning and dreaming, like her son, studying, in her case with Henry Hensche, the acolyte of Charles Hawthorne, founder of impressionism on Cape Cod. Later the author’s mother began to exhibit professionally in Boston. She didn’t marry until 30, "an outrageous thing in the 1950s," Junger says.
Like his mother’s quest, Junger’s stories begin with a journey. He knew the story would not come to him in Truro in January while he was warming his hands in his parents’ chilly summerhouse. The initial effort is merely the author’s pivot, springing the story to life by going to the place where the story happens. The pace can be as slow as trudging through snow.
Ideally, Junger arrives without knowing anyone, without credentials of any kind except his impressive persona. Part of the drama is how the author gains his entrée. The decade of his 20s kept the aspiring author close to Boston, close to what was familiar.
He knew there was a story, but the story was elsewhere. It definitely was not where he was.
He realized, "If you can write fiction adequately, then the story is wherever you are. But I couldn’t.
I wasn’t a good enough writer. I wasn’t inspired or I hadn’t lived enough. I lived in a beautiful place, a forgiving environment socially, where it is easy to get passive and a little lazy. You have to create your own obsession. If you are not driven, internally, you can float along for decades."
His model for discipline was sports training. He was a competitive runner, very motivated and a hard worker. Training for competition means daily workouts, no matter how you feel or what the weather is. Junger entertained a delusion that, someday, he could run in the Olympics. He ran a 4:12 mile when he was 19. Throughout high school and college, Junger ran 100 miles a week, cross-country and track. After college he was sponsored by a shoe company, Etonic, (good track shoes, lousy tennis shoes) and ran marathons in New England. "I was in the hellish zone," he says with the wisdom of those who manage a rite of passage. "I was just below really good."
Yet he developed a ferocious sense of discipline. If he could run 100 miles a week for 10 years, then he could make himself do anything.

XIV. THE NECESSITY OF ONE WHITE LIE
IN FIRE ONE OF THE FIREFIGHTERS runs from a raging forest fire. Big fires move at an average speed of one or two miles and hour; one can walk faster. The fire that Junger recounts was moving at 18 miles an hour. Only when one firefighter, his pulse racing, drops his tools and abandons his useless equipment to run for his life, does he realize exactly what he is doing.
Junger, too, once ran for his life when he was chased by a truck-driver through deep snow in a field in France, where he lived for a while as a child.
He tells his story at the end of "Colter’s Way," set two hundred years ago in an area of the country now known as Montana. John Colter was a fur trapper who ventured into territory "implacably hostile to white men ever since their first contact with Lewis and Clark several years earlier." Paddling up a river in a canoe, he was captured by 500 Blackfeet Indians. He surrendered and was stripped of his clothes. "One of the Blackfeet asked whether he was a good runner," Junger writes. "Colter had the presence of mind to say no," telling the Blackfeet a white lie, even as they toyed with him. "They told Colter he could run for his life; when they caught him, they would kill him. Naked, unarmed, given a head start of only a couple of hundred yards, Colter started to run."
After three miles he had outdistanced every Blackfoot except one. He spun around suddenly and killed the attacking Indian with his own spear. He continued running, covering 200 miles in 10 days, arriving at a military fort "with his feet in shreds." When his feet healed, the trapper returned to the territory, lured once again by the abundance of beaver. He prospered in the wilderness. Finally he married and settled on a farm in Missouri, dying two years later.
Junger writes, "Where the Blackfeet had failed, civilization succeeded. Given the trajectory of Colter’s life, one could say that the wilderness was good for him, kept him alive. It was there that he functioned at the outer limits of his abilities, a state that humans have always thrived on. ‘Dangers . . . seemed to have for him a kind of fascination,’ another fur trapper said of Colter. It must have been while under the effect of that fascination that Colter felt most alive, most potent. That was why he stayed in the wilderness for six straight years; that was why he kept sneaking up to Three Forks to test his skills against the Blackfeet."
At the end of the story, Junger mixes in his own early adventure, defining "adventure" as a situation in which "the outcome is not entirely within your control." He was 11 years old and skiing with a group of boys in the Alps. His mother was doing yoga in Nice. One afternoon Junger’s friends had nothing to do. They discovered it was fun to throw snowballs at cars.
They were thrilled when they stopped an 18-wheel truck, brakes screeching. A lone driver, huge, leaped out of the cab. Why he chose to chase Junger is a mystery that haunts the author. The bogeyman pursued the terrified boy through waist-deep snow until the man fell exhausted. Arms flailing, he cursed the kid as he disappeared into the embrace of a warm room with people talking about nothing he knew about—joy and happiness in ordinary life.

XV. WINNING BY LOSING
IT TOOK JUNGER UNTIL AGE 25 to realize that he was not going to run in the Olympics. He had based his whole identity around being a good runner. Running was a lonely thing to do; he was a dedicated loner.
Without forethought, abruptly, Junger quit his competitive running career in the middle of a workout, literally stopping, calming his pulse, then slowly walking home, one modest step after another. Here his determined gait became especially deliberate. He was in the middle of an interval workout, running 10 times 440 yards. "The routine was to do 10 repetitions of quarter-mile sprints, with a 100-yard jog in between, a brutal workout," he remembers. His sprints were respectably in the low 60 seconds, putting his pace at about 4:15 for the mile.
Coming off the first turn of the sixth quarter, he stopped, halted. He did not jog home.
"I walked home, knowing I was never going to compete again. Something snapped," he said, snapping his fingers with a sharp pop. "All that ferocity and dedication—I just put it into journalism."

XVI. MEASURED DOSES
JUNGER HAS LITTLE PATIENCE with writers who complain about writer’s block or being unable to produce on a certain day.
That sounds self-indulgent to him. He insists that writing is no more mystical than building a house. Any carpenter knows the basics of putting a structure together, something inhabitable. You need a basic plan, then you follow what the plan says, prepared to be amazed at the discrepancy between the map and the journey.
If Junger is at a table full of people, he doesn’t tend to talk much. This rectitude is not an acquired modesty; it’s his natural instinct. The more people around him, the less he says.
One on one, he can talk for hours. From the discipline of sports he learned to handle stress in measured doses. On a daily basis, he played with the edges of stress, pushing it gently, a little, resting while jogging, then pushing it a little more, a little faster. Knowing those edges, human limitations, teaches writers about the limits of human understanding.

XVII. GAIN BEYOND PAIN
"FROM RUNNING," he said, "I learned that I know how to make myself suffer."
One can say, cynically, "No pain, no gain."
But Junger had this epiphany in the first stretch of his sixth sprint; making the first turn Junger the Runner quit road racing and Junger the Journalist made his first solid steps in a direction he chose. Two people, his parents who married very late, brought him up. His mother was 30, his father 37. From his mother he learned that artistic endeavors are important, despite the constant struggle to raise a family. The struggle taught him that art was an endeavor as worthy as having a family or raising children. Particularly around here, art is elevated to a status that is on a par with any other thing a person can do. Junger failed to write the perfect short story. He failed to break the four-minute mile. He learned the discipline of daily effort, banging his head against the wall in a chilly room or his feet against the ground in any weather. "None of these things panned out. But they gave me these very valuable skills. Sports showed me how not to be afraid of losing. I learned to lose and not lose my dignity."
None of this has much bearing on Junger’s love life. I hinted to him that people might be interested in this aspect of his persona.
He says, "I never saw the family as the ultimate goal. I saw a struggle with how much a family impinged on having a higher pursuit."
The desire for children may be a desire to bet on your future immortality, through offspring, rather than through your artistic production. But children may not be the future so much as a continuation of the present. The future may be the present that is one’s life.
I ask Junger if art gives people a chance to produce a piece of work, via a medium, that has the power to be as vital as a person.
He answers, "Yes, because there’s something not negotiable about what you are trying to do."

CHRISTOPHER BUSA is the editor of Provincetown Arts. KHRISTINE HOPKINS has published several books of black-and-white photographs and her hand-
colored infrared photographs have been widely exhibited.n