The award-winning author was kidnapped in Nigeria and reported from Bosnia and Afghanistan. But his biggest battle for survival was at home when an artery ruptured in his abdomen. Now he has written a memoir about it.
On June 16, 2020, Sebastian Junger nearly died. Lying in the emergency department of a hospital on Cape Cod, he sensed a dark pit opening beneath him and a little to his left. “It was the infinite dark, infinite black,” he says.
Junger leans back on the sofa, his feet up on a coffee table. He’s wearing a blue lumberjack shirt, green trousers and walking boots. We’re in the living room of the little flat he shares with his wife and two small children on the Lower East Side of Manhattan.
“I just became aware of this vast emptiness underneath me,” he says. “That’s when my dead father showed up.” His father sought to reassure him about the infinite pit of purest black. Junger’s father was a theoretical physicist and a committed atheist. The idea that he would appear like this, as his son was on the verge of death, it would have gone against all his principles. Yet there he was. Junger has spent his life putting himself in harm’s way. He has been a climber for a tree-pruning company, shinning up 30 metre white pines; a surfer who nearly drowned beneath the mountainous waves of a winter storm; and a war correspondent. Also, he bicycles in Manhattan. He had a whole list, before the hospital drama, of all the times he nearly died. Once, lounging against the rampart of an American outpost in Afghanistan, a puff of sand flicked his face as machinegun fire struck the sandbags by his head, the bullets reaching him long before the sound of the gun did. Another time, in Nigeria, he was briefly captured by a militant group and one of its members, a short, very muscular fellow, his entire body painted white, told Junger he would kill him. “He said, ‘When we kill you, I’ll be the one to do it.’ "
Junger remembers thinking, “Do not let your knees buckle. I mean, salvage some shred of dignity here.” He goes to places where most of us would rather not and brings back a story. Now, in a sense, he has done it again by nearly dying in the hospital in Cape Cod. When an artery ruptured in his belly, he lost nearly all his blood. “The ultimate front line,” Junger says. It was “way more traumatic”, he says, “because I hadn’t signed up to gamble with my life. I mean, if you go to a war zone you’re doing that, right? I was in my driveway.”
Junger spent two years recovering from the shock of it and another two years writing a book called In My Time of Dying. His time of dying did not include his life flashing before his eyes, a phenomenon known to near-death experience researchers as the “life review”. But his book gives you a version of it: the selected highlights of a memoir interspersed with the hospital drama, all described in tight, vivid prose. Reading it, I became fairly convinced that I have spent my own life cowering in a cupboard.
“Well, I feel like I have too,” Junger replies. He is 62 now. “I know guys who are way more widely travelled and experienced than I am. So I think there’s no way to avoid that feeling.” To his mind, he is actually extremely cautious. He tells the story of travelling with a friend at the age of 20 to a Moroccan trading post where soldiers were battling desert nomads for control of a piece of the Sahara. Junger and his friend walked into the desert, found a nomad camp and had tea with them. The headman, a camel trader, explained that he was about to journey deep into the desert and would return to the outpost in six months and, hey, would Junger like to come with him? “I have the feeling that whatever I choose, I will make the same choice for the rest of my life,” he writes. “If I gamble everything to find out what I don’t know, then I will always do that.” Deciding not to go, he felt as if he were leaving that other more courageous version of himself at the edge of the desert. “I was like, ‘I’m going to have to live a coward’s life,’ " he says. But that other guy, would he have lived very long? “Maybe not,” he says. “Which is the question that cowards ask themselves.”
Junger is from Massachusetts. His father, the physicist, was a specialist in acoustics; his mother, an artist, whose friends were artists and yogis and talked about positive and negative energy. “What energy would that be?” his father would ask. “Is it measurable?” Once, early in their marriage, his mother heard her husband say, “That’s the most gorgeous thing I’ve ever seen,” and found him reading a physics textbook, gazing in rapt wonder at a page covered with equations.
Growing up, “I spent a lot of time in the woods,” Junger says. “I was a long-distance runner. I was all kinds of physical things that my father wasn’t.” His father was also “sort of on the spectrum” and did not always seem to register the things around him, he says. Junger did anthropology at university and wrote a thesis on Navajo distance runners. “I was sort of a medium student but the thesis just lit me on fire,” he says.
After a summer working on building sites, he had the idea that he would be a journalist. “You go somewhere, research something, write about it. Sounds good.” He took a job cutting trees to pay the bills. “I’d be 80ft in the air with a chainsaw on a rope,” he says. “I did that with a huge amount of fear. I was terrified of heights… I learnt not to look down… Most people are scared of dying. And we go through our lives by basically not looking down.”
In the evenings after work he would drive to the nearby fishing port of Gloucester and rent a room above a bar. He was researching the story of a swordfishing boat that went down with all six of its crew during a hurricane in 1991. “I would show up covered in sawdust from the day,” he says. “I’d hang out in the bar. And I really looked like another worker in Gloucester.” He interviewed the families of the six men. Outside Magazine published his article and he put together a book proposal. He had another idea too, for a book about dangerous professions: “Forest firefighting, logging… I had a bunch of them and one of them was war reporter,” he says. So he went off to the siege of Sarajevo, reasoning that he would either become a war correspondent himself or interview a lot of them for this book. He packed a typewriter “because I had heard there was no electricity in Sarajevo, which there really wasn’t”. While he was there, his agent faxed to say he had sold the book about the fishing boat and Junger needed to come back and write it. The result, The Perfect Storm, was later adapted into a film starring George Clooney.
It also caused people to talk about Junger as a new Hemingway. “I think my prose had a kind of clarity and simplicity,” he says. “And I think that a little bit of war reporting and some tree work made me seem sufficiently masculine… I don’t know. I mean, they didn’t say, ‘He’s the next Joan Didion,’ right? Another writer I admire enormously. So, whatever.” Graydon Carter, the editor of Vanity Fair, hired him as a writer after Junger had explained to him that, “The only thing I’m interested in writing about is important stories overseas.” He did not wish to interview movie stars. “So if Vanity Fair is willing to do a piece about the war in Kosovo or the diamond trade in Sierra Leone, I’m in.”He began travelling to war zones.
“I really fell in love with that… not quite tribe, but the collection of people doing that work, particularly the freelancers,” he says. He became close to the British photographer Tim Hetherington and made a documentary with him called Restrepo, based on the year they spent embedded with an American platoon that was stationed to an outpost in the Korengal Valley in Afghanistan. In his book, he recalls a foot patrol in which he had to hide behind a holly bush as bullets chopped up the leaves above his head.
He also survived an IED explosion that blew up the Humvee he was riding in. Afterwards, “I was pretty jacked for a couple of hours, and then I got extremely depressed and anxious. That lasted a long time,” he says. “The immediate aftermath of a near miss, it’s sort of psychologically jagged… It is partly a kind of ecstasy and it’s partly just a complete dread.”
Hetherington was killed in 2011, in Libya. The day before, Junger had tumbled off his bicycle and nearly been killed by a taxi in Midtown Manhattan, and he could not shake the idea that he was supposed to have died and that Hetherington had been taken in his stead. Around the same time, Junger’s wife suffered a miscarriage and again he thought, “It was supposed to be me. It took someone else. And part of me knew that’s not how the universe works, but that didn’t matter.”
His marriage fell apart and his father died. Junger felt as if he were moving through the world in “this Plexiglass bubble”. Then, in what seemed to him to be another equally random event, he met an American playwright in a New York bar and fell in love with her. They now have two young children. When his youngest was two and a half and their second child was on the way, Junger began experiencing flashes of burning pain in his abdomen. He ignored them. One night in June 2020, he had a disturbing dream that he had died and his family were mourning for him. They were at their house on Cape Cod. The day after the dream, two teenage girls from down the street came round to babysit while he and Barbara climbed the hill to a cabin in the woods. There the pain returned, so debilitating he could barely stand. His wife managed to get him back down the hill and into the passenger seat of their car and one of the babysitters called an ambulance.
He looked to the paramedics as if he might just need a drink of water, but his wife insisted that he go to the hospital. By the time he was being wheeled into the emergency department, there was not much blood left in his veins and it was still not clear what was wrong with him. He has some memories of that ride but, in the hospital, he began to experience “distortions”. He started to see, in hospital machinery, the faces of the warriors from the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta, who briefly captured and threatened to kill him. Then, as doctors worked over him, he became aware of the pit of purest black.
Junger remembers saying, “Doctor, you’ve got to hurry. You’re losing me.” He was saved after a doctor threaded a catheter from his left wrist through his venous system, as another put it, to fix the rupture in one of the small arteries that supplies blood to the pancreas.
He received nine pints of blood. There were a few more dicey moments in intensive care. Then, a few days later, he was released. During his recovery, he began writing down what he was thinking. “I was surprised at my paranoia,” he says. “I was surprised by my fear that I actually did die, and that maybe this right here, that you’re experiencing, this is my dying hallucination… It was partly because of the dream that I’d had the night before, when I dreamt that I’d died.”
Seeing your wife and kids must have helped you shake that idea, I say. “At one point I asked my wife, ‘I’m here, right? I’m not a ghost.’ And she was like, ‘Yes, you’re right here. You survived.’ It’s exactly the kind of thing a hallucination would say, right?” Yes. Very hard to disprove. “Totally,” he says. “It really did a number on me psychologically.”
Scared that the same thing could happen again, he went to see a doctor about whether he ought to have a complex surgical procedure, of doubtful efficacy, to try to safeguard against another aneurysm. “I’m tired of worrying I could die at any moment,” he said. “Have you considered religion?” the doctor asked.
He did a lot of research and learnt that it rarely happens twice. Though it can easily kill you, “If you survive when they plug the hole, it’s as if it never happened,” he says. But he did consider religion in a manner of speaking. He began reading up on near-death experiences and what they might signify: whether they are a hallucination of the dying brain or something more. “I understand that when you put the brain under duress and don’t give it enough oxygen and this and that, it will hallucinate,” he says. “But why do the dying all hallucinate the same kind of thing? Why do the dying see the dead? And even people that they didn’t know were dead? And then why is it only the dying that see the dead and nobody else in the room is seeing Aunt Julie in the rafters? I don’t know. That doesn’t prove anything, but it does make me wonder: is it possible we just have completely misunderstood reality, and that there is actually some other dimension that endures after death?”
In his book, Junger writes that the idea that any of us “will appreciate life more after almost dying is a cheap bit of wisdom asserted by people who have never been near death. When you drill down into it — which you must — we are talking about an appreciation of death rather than of life. Eventually you will be all alone with the person you really are thumping frantically in your chest… You will know yourself best at that moment.” But, “We don’t get that knowledge until it’s too late because then it can’t be tainted by vanity or pride or desire.”
That said, nearly dying was not without some lasting benefits. For instance, he’s a more patient driver. “I don’t get enraged in traffic jams,” he says. “I’m like, ‘Listen, asshole, you’re lucky even to exist on the Cross Bronx Expressway.’ "
He is glad he did not go off with that camel trader into the Sahara. Being cautious, he says, “produced a life that I’m incredibly happy with”. “I have this amazing family and a wife that I love and children that I adore… As far as I’m concerned, I made the right choices. Otherwise, I wouldn’t be here right now.”
In My Time of Dying: How I Came Face to Face with the Idea of an Afterlife by Sebastian Junger (Fourth Estate) is published on May 23.
Written by: Will Pavia
© The Times of London