Leadership Lessons From The Great Books

War by Sebastian Junger (Introduction) w/Jesan Sorrells.
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00:00 Welcome and Introduction - War by Sebastian Junger.
01:00 Understanding Soldiers and Modern War.
07:23 Fear, Killing, Love Dynamics.
10:16 Sebastian Junger: Journalist & Author.
13:01 Sebastian Junger's Endurance & Neutrality.
17:51 War’s Heat, Fear, and Struggle.
22:07 Modern Warfare's Changing Motivations.
23:19 Evolution of Warfare's Psychology.
30:36 Violence, Legacy, and Inflection Points.
32:01 Transitioning to Serious Leadership.
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Music: Requiem, Op.22 - VIII. Agnus Dei, Draeseke, Requiem h-moll, op. 22 (WDR 11.11.11).
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Opening and closing themes composed by Brian Sanyshyn of Brian Sanyshyn Music.
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Creators and Guests

Host
Jesan Sorrells
CEO of HSCT Publishing, home of Leadership ToolBox and LeadingKeys
Producer
Leadership Toolbox
The home of Leadership ToolBox, LeaderBuzz, and LeadingKeys. Leadership Lessons From The Great Books podcast link here: https://t.co/3VmtjgqTUz

What is Leadership Lessons From The Great Books?

Understanding great literature is better than trying to read and understand (yet) another business book, Leadership Lessons From The Great Books leverages insights from the GREAT BOOKS of the Western canon to explain, dissect, and analyze leadership best practices for the post-modern leader.

Hello, my name is Jesan Sorrells and this is the

Leadership Lessons from the Great Books podcast,

episode number 170.

In one of the ever expanding parts of

historical and cultural understanding of war,

part and parcel of the legacy of World War I

down to our time currently, is the idea

among civilians who have never been to

war who romanticize the act of killing people and

breaking things. They look at war

as a furnace in which the dross of

complicated and uncomfortable human emotions

are burned off, and a

furnace in which or from which emerges

a mechanical, hard

man who can do the acts of killing and

breaking things that a civilian themselves cannot

do. In our modern time,

in our post modern American moment,

where the percentage of the available male population who

actively serves in the Military is at

0.8% or less than 1% of the available

male population, the understanding of what

exactly goes into making war and the

psychology of the actual soldier

himself, and yes, in some cases herself,

the understanding of that has been lost in a haze

of mythology, massive cultural inexperience,

biased media reports, and of course,

institutional, political and cultural

biases. What is

understood even less is

why the men who do go and serve in the US

Military fight in the first place. It is

incredibly difficult for the vast majority of the population in the United States to understand

at a visceral and emotional level the impetus that

leads young men to go fight and die in places that are hard

to find on a world map and that seem to be meaningless in

the larger scheme of living daily life in a

complex, postmodern, wealthy and incredibly comfortable

society like the United States of America.

What exactly are the young men and sorry ladies,

my apologies. It is still, even in these times of relentless

insistence upon gender egalitarianism in every

facet of life, mostly young men

fighting for. A better question might

be who are these young men who serve fighting for?

And what can civilians take as lessons from that

level of visceral commitment and apply to their non

combatant lives, draped, as I already

said, or drowned, depending upon your perspective, in

comfort, wealth and the most productivity

out of any human civilization in the history of humanity

today, on this episode of the podcast we will try. We will

attempt to extract multiple themes that may

potentially provide a pathway to an answer to

some of these questions, particularly these

questions that arise from our critical, skeptical

postmodern minds. And we will

be using the book today War

by Sebastian Younger

leaders dedication to filling and

fulfilling promises with honor even to the point of

death, cannot just be a marketing

position with no actual meaning and

sacrifice in the real world.

So as we open War by Sebastian

Younger, going to point out a couple of different things

in this episode today. So as usual with

copyrighted works, particularly copyrighted works that are, were

that are, that are not in the public domain

as war is not, we do not read directly or

we read minimally directly from the book. If we read it all

instead, what I'm going to do is I'm going to summarize the book and point

out what I think are some key themes in the content

for you to pay attention to when you pick it up and,

and read it. The other thing that I would recommend in

looking at War and in reading it in

is thinking about sort of the context in which it was

written and the time frame in which it was written. So when you

open it up, there's multiple different versions, but

this first paperback edition was published in 2011 by

Fourth Estate, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers out of

London. Obviously the material is copyrighted to Sebastian

Younger. And the version that I have

when you open it up has a table of contents and then it has a

map. You turn the page and it has a map of the locations that are

referenced in the material in the Korengal Valley.

So Camp Blessing, Firebase Michigan.

Let's see the Korengal Outpost, Firebase Phoenix,

OP Restrepo, the location of a,

of an IED attack now near Firebase

Vegas, which you'll find out more about that in the book

Hill 1706. And like I said, Op

Restrepo. By the way, I'm going to put this out there early. If

you get the movie or you go see the movie Restrepo,

that is a companion to this book. So

this book is a reporting, not a reporting. It is the reporting

on the war. In the war, the battle in

Afghanistan for, for the Karangal Valley that was

conducted by Sebastian Younger, who

at the time was writing for Vanity Fair and was an embedded

journalist with the 2nd Battalion in,

in Afghanistan. And he along with his,

along with his, his photographer

Tim Harrington reported

as a result of their five trips to the Korengal Valley

between June 2007 and June 2008 again for

vanity Fair magazine. That feature length

documentary that they produced is called Restrepo. And Tim Harrington

is no longer alive. He actually died in an Believers either an

IED attack. I think it was an ID attack if I remember

correctly, in Syria, reporting on the Syrian civil war

many years later, which of course was a knock on effect

from our efforts in Iraq.

So the book is set up in the table of contents,

is set up into three, three parts, right? So you have book one,

Fear, book two, Killing, and book three, Love.

And you begin to see as you read each one of these books what the

themes are that, that,

that Sebastian Younger is able to pull

from the interactions he has with the

men of 2nd Platoon.

It's also interesting to note that

he does not talk about politics in this

book. One of the points that he makes is, is that

it's, and it's, it's, it's kind of, it's kind of a

good point actually. He

says that, oh gosh, it's early in

the, in the first book in Fear, when he talks about

kind of who the men are, he talks about, you know,

o' Byrne and the rest of the men of Battle Company. He

talks about the Chinooks and the Apaches,

the, the, the background

of, not that background, but the, the folks of the

10th Mountain Division who were in that part of Afghanistan

before, before 2nd Battalion showed up.

And of course he talks about the Taliban there.

One of the points that he makes is that,

huh, politics

don't matter when the bullets start flying.

And that's a huge point right away or huge theme right away

that comes out right away initially in book one, Fear and

runs like a, like a, like a thread

throughout the entire remainder of this book,

by the way. It's also set up as a classic reportage kind

of document, kind of on the line of what Joan

Didion would have, would have done or Hunter

S. Thompson if he still been alive

and interested in doing something like this.

Restrepo is definitely a great film. I recommend Going and Getting It. There's also

another film called Korengal which was also made

for or produced from the documentary footage that Tim Harrington

shot along with Sebastian Younger. And I would

strongly recommend picking up this book, examining its themes

and looking at it closely, which we'll start doing

right now. But before we jump into the,

the themes that are in war, I want to talk a little

bit about the author. So Sebastian younger was

born January 17, 1962

and though he had a near death experience recently, is still very much, very

much alive. He is an American journalist,

author and filmmaker who has reported in the field

on dirty, dangerous and demanding occupations and of course

the experience of infantry combat. By the

way, his other books which are listed in the Front of War, just want to

point those out to you are the

Perfect Storm, which was turned into a, which was turned into a movie,

A Death in Belmont and Fire

and again, he is part of that, that long line of

reporters turned Authors that winds all the way

back in our history to Ernest

Hemingway really was probably the most most famous

author turned reporter. Actually reporter turned author turned back

to reporter. But this idea of being a

writer and doing dirty, dangerous and demanding occupations and reporting

on the results of dirty, dangerous and demanding

occupations and going directly into those experiences and

embedding yourself directly into those experiences has a long

journalistic and authorial history in the

United States. And Sebastian Younger is just one more person

inside of that legacy. Younger's works,

which makes him unique to our time, explore themes

such as brotherhood, trauma and, and the relationship of the individual to

society as told from the far reaches of human

experience. Younger graduated from Concord

Academy in 1980 and received a Bachelor of Arts degree from

Wesleyan University and cultural anthropology in 1984.

As an accomplished long distance runner, he spent summer training on the

Navajo Nation reservation and wrote his thesis on Navajo long

distance running and its traditional pre Columbian roots. By the way, he

does talk about his running background in the book War.

He also references it in interviews that you

hear about him later on. And he does actually say in the book, you

know, the running and the ability to

tolerate a lot of pain for a long distance

helped him in the, in the Korengal Valley where,

you know, he didn't want to be a burden on the, on

the troops. And at the end of the day, you know,

you have to be able to keep up. And we're only as

strong in a group of soldiers. We're only as strong

as our weakest point. And if the journalist is the weakest point,

then that's where the enemy will strike. And so

Younger fell back on that, that long distance

running and was able to run with a pack, was able

to commit to or not run, but hike with a

pack and was able to hike 60 miles and I'm not, sorry, sorry,

not 60 miles, was able to hike up the sides of mountains

with a 60 pound pack as well as

his cameraman, you know, bringing his cameraman's gear along as

well in order to film what was happening in the Korengal

Valley and to keep up with those soldiers who were also, by the way, at

the time of the writing of the articles in Vanity Fair that would

eventually become the book War, the Time of the Writing.

Most of Those guys were 20 years younger than him.

So, you know, this is, this is not an easy,

not an easy task. And I could tell

you as a person who's in my mid-40s, trying to keep up with folks who

are 20 years younger than me and, and I Don't have a background in long

distance running is always a challenge.

While much of Younger's writing is subjective and participatory,

he strives to maintain a neutral point of view and avoids contemporary

political discussion, especially around frequent subjects

that haunt his journalistic peers, like economic

inequality, diversity and social justice,

and of course, war.

In 2021, when

he was interviewed, he cited his quote, unquote favorite quote

in an interview with the Guardian. And I love this quote. And it goes

directly to the mindset of a man like Sebastian

Younger, a reporter like Sebastian Younger, a writer like

Sebastian Younger. And I quote,

journalists don't tell people what to think.

They tell them what to think

about. So when we look at

the book War, and when we look at particularly the

first book or the first part of War,

which is entitled Fear,

we open up and we start with that chapter and

there's a. An opening description of exactly

what we are getting into in the. In the

Korengal Valley. In the spring of

2007 in Afghanistan,

we. We meet a character named. A character, a

soldier named o'. Byrne. And

Younger begins to walk us through what it actually means to be a

member of Battle Company. O' Byrne grew up in

rural Pennsylvania, and he played

army for many years as a kid.

Um, and you know, he got in trouble at school, he started

fighting at home. When he became a teenager, um,

you know, you know, O'

Byrne's father shot him twice with a.22 rifle.

And of course, instead of going to jail,

he went to reform school for assault rather than his father going to

prison for attempted murder. And that was when O' Byrne was 16.

Later on, O' Byrne met a National Guard recruiter who talked him

into signing up and

transferred him from the National Guard into the. Into the. Or he

transferred himself from the National Guard into the regular Army. O' Byrne is a

linchpin character in

this entire book. He becomes. You see him grow

in leadership of the men of the.

Of the 173rd Airborne and of course, the men

of the 2nd Battalion.

Then we get introduced to the Korengal Valley and the Coral Valley.

I love this line. And we'll revisit this idea later on in

our. In our main. Our main episode that will focus on

this book with, with John Hill, AKA Small Mountain.

But this idea, I love this idea that the Korengal Valley is,

Is too remote to conquer, the too poor to intimidate, and too

autonomous to buy off. Everybody now knows about

the history of the, the history of

Afghanistan, right? And we'll talk a little Bit about that later on in

the. In the next section here. But this part of

Afghanistan is so remote that the Soviets didn't even get

to the mouth of the valley or didn't make it past the mouth of the

valley when they invaded in the 80s and the Taliban didn't dare go in

there at all. Only the Americans were stupid enough to go, or

brave enough, depending upon your perspective, to go into the

Korengal Valley. Then we continue to meet the other

men of 2nd Platoon, including 2nd Platoon Sergeant, a career

soldier named Mark Patterson, who was 30, a full

12 years older than the youngest man in 2nd

Platoon. And then we meet

Sebastian Younger and we talk about his arrival into the platoon and

how he was integrated into their group.

And then, of course, the fighting starts and the bullets start

flying, the patrols start exiting Firebase

Phoenix and they begin engaging the

enemy. During the summer of

2007, by the way, a summer

where it is 100 degrees every day and

tarantulas invade the living quarters of the American

soldiers and presumably the Taliban fighters as well.

But the American soldiers, to get out of the heat.

There's also a time when they're carrying so much gear and

they are fighting so hard that the smell of

their sweat is the smell of ammonia, because

they're actually breaking down muscle rather

than just straight sweat.

This first part, this first book, Fear,

sets up what's going to happen in books two

and three, Killing and Love.

And it gives you an idea of exactly

what, what it is that you're getting into when

you go into war in

Afghanistan. So what

is it like, dying and

killing? Not for America or

for religion, or for

economics or class

or for land or for women.

What is it like dying for your friends as an American

in a place dubbed the graveyard of

empires? The British came through

Afghanistan and couldn't subdue those folks.

The Soviets came through Afghanistan and couldn't subdue

those folks. And in 2001,

one, after the events of September

11th, we decided, yes, to go into Afghanistan

first, yes, going to Iraq second. But let's focus on

Afghanistan for right now. And we decided we were going

to disrupt, we were going to stop the

insurgents, we were going to subdue the

country. Of course, 20 years later, we would

exit in great power. Ignominity.

We're not going to talk about that today.

And the people that we sent there were not the

same people that we sent to wars in the

previous years of the 20th century.

These weren't young Gen Xers going to the Iraq war in

the early 1990s

or Somalia or Sarajevo. These

weren't soldiers

in the Vietnam era. These weren't

baby boomers and older baby boomers

and old, younger silent generation folks that we

were sending to Vietnam. These weren't

younger silent generation folks, younger World War II generation

folks that we were sending to Korea. And of course these

weren't Great Depression babies who were just grateful for three

hots in a cot and would very happily go

to Europe or island hop

across the Pacific in World War II.

The war in Afghanistan that went

on from 2001 to 2021 was

not Vietnam. It was a war not

of conscripted soldiers and low

intelligence draftees forced by social

or cultural norms to sign up.

This, this was not that, that

was not these people. These men

were not the same men that had

signed up for wars, to go fight wars for

America in other places in the past.

Matter of fact, if you ask these men, they weren't fighting the war for

America at all. They were fighting the war for an entire

myriad of reasons and America was very low on the

list. This is a challenge

of modern warfare because we have smaller and smaller troop

groups being asked to do more and more dangerous work.

It used to be that you can mass troops at the point, at

an inflection point and get some result.

That was one of the principles of World War I, is a follow

up principle from World War II and was still held to be a principle

in Vietnam. But over the course of time, what has

happening, what has happened at least in the US military

is that holding a position has become less

about a mass of people to an inflection point and is more

now about the intelligent application of force, technological

force, cyber force in our time,

and of course personnel force to any given

threat. But just like in any war,

in any time, in any era, the young men performing

these acts, holding this position, shooting people

and breaking things, they aren't doing it for political

reasons or even for social reasons or cultural reasons.

They're doing it because

it's a job with their buddies.

And I think we're going to have to wrap our brains, I think we've already

wrapped our brains around this. But the knock on effects

of this shift, this change, this

momentous move in how we actually conduct war

and the psychology of the people who conduct it has not

been fully appreciated by the non

war making non war fighting

public.

So what are we to take as we wrap up or as we begin to

turn the corner from our conversation around war? By

Sebastian Younger? Well, a couple of

things I think we can definitely take from

this Book. The big one, of course, is

that the more things change, the more they stay

depressingly the same. The United

states lost nearly 50 soldiers in the Korengal Valley,

specifically at OP Restrepo.

And the question when there is any loss of

blood or treasure, but really blood

from civilians who do not fight, the question is always

for what? Exactly. What

exactly was the strategic

outcome that we were looking for that justified

such a. From a civilian's perspective, large

tactical loss. This is the same question

that was asked in the past about the sacrifices in the trenches of

World War I, the battlefields of World War II,

the valleys and mountains of Korea and the jungles of

Vietnam and the deserts of Iraq. Both times.

And it is a question that goes to the vicious idea

or maybe the reality of trade

offs. You can never get something

for nothing. Nothing. And Thomas Sowell

once infamously said, or inciviously stated in his book

a conflict of Visions, Ideological Origins of Political

Struggles, and I quote, there are no solutions.

There are only trade offs.

By the way, the trade offs involved in war always

involve counting the costs, as was pointed out

by Jesus himself in Luke 14:28

32. You can go back and read that if you're

curious. There is a cost to things, whether it is

a material cost, an emotional cost or a

psychological cost. And we ask these young men,

and this is one of the major points that Sebastian Younger makes in his book,

particularly in the last section on

love, we ask these young men to make a

sacrifice, to lay down not only their physical lives, but lay

down their psychological lives, their emotional lives, and dare I say, even

their spiritual lives in the service of achieving

a tactical moment inside of

a larger strategic plan.

Civilian control of the military is one of the hallmarks of Western

civilization. Civilization and civilizations that come out

of and are influenced by the Western way

of war making and civilization,

sorry, civilization. Civilian control of the

military is ensured through political

elections and a formalized or.

Or formalized constitutional processes.

But this doesn't mean that the politicians that we elect, that we vote

for are any good or any better

at explaining the strategies of warfare or the outcomes of battles to the

people who voted for them than the generals are.

There's a great line in that anti war pro war

film directed by Stanley Kubrick, Dr.

Strangelove, or how I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb

from Sterling Hayden, who plays a general

in in a bunker in the

1950s who begins or kicks off

nuclear Armageddon. He says, and I quote, the

phrasing used to be war was too important to be left to the

generals. These days, I say war is

too important to be left to the politicians.

Close quote the

soldiers who were tasked with capturing and holding spots in the Corner

Valley in 2007 and 2008

and before and were doing so against the Taliban

were men who didn't know the strategy

either. They just knew that their country

had sent them there and now

their friends were getting shot there and all

bets were off. Remember

I said, the more things change,

the more they remain depressingly

the same. I was recently

reminded of an idea that

was buried in the book Starship Troopers

by the great Robert Heinlein, whose book A Stranger in a

Strange Land we covered on the podcast this season.

You should go back and listen to that episode. The idea in

Starship Troopers that Heinlein was rebelling against

himself, a veteran of the United States

military, the idea that he was pushing back

against was this one. And it comes

in a quip that typically comes from well meaning or

emanates from well meaning civilians who really don't

know anything about war at all.

The quip is violence is never the

answer.

Adults, particularly adults employed in the K12

education system in America, often deliver this bromide to

children. The sentiment behind such an aphorism is

admirable, and I think Heinlein would agree with me on this.

But just because it is admirable, that doesn't make it correct or

particularly useful.

Sometimes, and I'm saying this as a person who is

and has worked in the mediation and peacemaking space,

sometimes violence is the answer. It just

depends upon what the question is.

And we in the United States, we

are at a weird inflection point where the

things that happened 20 years ago and the people who did those

things and made those decisions are increasingly going to be

framed and perceived as old or

irrelevant. And the men who were

boys 20 years ago in the Korengal Valley

are going to be framed this way as well.

By the way, at the time of this recording, the news

broke that the former Vice President of the United

States, who was part of the decision making

matrix that the civilian population voted

for that, then sent those young men to the

Korengal Valley. A gentleman named Dick Cheney

has passed away. He was 84

years old, died, I suspect,

peacefully in his bed.

Hmm. War

in general is still

and remains the most serious act we as humans engage

in against other humans. And I

hope for the life of all of us that we are

exiting a time, an era over the last

20 years of deeply held

unseriousness,

unserious politicians unserious

generals, unserious executive

leadership. I pray we are exiting a time of

unserious media and unserious

entertainment. I pray that we are exiting a

time of unserious culture, and that we are

entering a time where, having been led

and been commanded and been demanded to do things by

unserious people, the people who had to do those

things now become the mature, serious ones,

and now speak with a mature and serious voice.

And I hope that we are in the

last gas of being led by those who merely perform

seriousness without a deep understanding of

competency and skill, because the

competency and skill that is required in order to

effectively dish out, for lack of a better

term, the sacrifices that are required

to make war is also a competency or

walks alongside competencies and skills that can explain

in a serious fashion to a

serious public that lies below a deeply

unserious elite the consequences of

of such actions.

And, well, that's

it for me.