Note to Mods - please move this to a more appropriate forum if you think best.

Sebastian Junger ("The Perfect Storm" & "Fire") has a new book ""War: As Soldiers Really Live It" offering insight into the psyche and motivation of soldiers in Afghanistan. It also covers the motivation of young Taliban fighters and insights into the "war on terrorism".

I can relate to much of what he says in this interview and think that, like a couple of other books, this book can be invaluable to those who care enough to try to understand young men at war.

Though written about young American soldiers, from my experience, the same motivations are pretty much universal as are the traumas experienced.

This book is definitely on my reading list.

This excerpt from the interview is very revealing:

CNN: What do you hope that people will take away from the book above all?

Junger: I think civilians don't understand war very well. There's no reason they should, and their understanding of war comes from Hollywood, which is hopelessly heroic/tragic, and then it comes from news reports, which are confusing and I think inspire a kind of hopelessness. But when soldiers come back from combat, they're coming back to a civilian world that doesn't understand the emotional territory that they, the soldiers, were in for a year.

My hope is that when people read my book, they'll understand that emotional territory better.

So when a soldier is in some kind of distress back home, I think it would be very helpful for his wife to realize that not only was he traumatized by his service, but is also being traumatized by being taken away from it, by being taken out of a world of incredible intensity and very obvious meaning into a civilian world that is less intense and where the meaning of life is more diffuse and less obvious.

The more that civilians -- wives, fathers, mothers, children -- understand the really complex emotional territory of combat, the better our society will be able to re-incorporate these young men and give them a useful and productive role back home.
The link leads to an interview he did with CNN's Anderson Cooper:

The Afghan war -- as it really is - CNN.com