Life After Combat: Phil Zabriskie & Sebastian Junger

In “The Kill Switch,” Ochberg Fellow Phil Zabriskie, who covered Iraq and Afghanistan for Time and others, reconnects with Marines and soldiers he met in Iraq and finds them ready and willing to examine soberly and honestly what they’ve done and were asked to do. From boot camp through the initial invasion to the crucibles of Ramadi and Fallujah and beyond, they recount firefights, ambushes, car bombers, hand-to-hand combat, and the life and death decisions they made about Saddam’s soldiers, insurgents, and people, even children, who were caught in the crossfire. And this was all before they came home and confronted a lengthy slate of new and often grueling challenges linked to what they did and didn’t do on the battlefield.

Though only 10 percent of American forces see combat, the U.S. military now has the highest rate of post-traumatic stress disorder in its history. In a recent essay in Vanity Fair, “How PTSD Became a Problem Far Beyond the Battlefield,” veteran war correspondent Sebastian Junger discovered that PTSD develops as much at home as it does on the battlefield. We might think we have a basic understanding of PTSD: Soldiers in battle see things they'd like to forget, but years later combat memories come back to haunt them. That's the received wisdom. But perhaps we have it all wrong. Maybe it's not the reminders of the fighting that cause post-traumatic stress so much as the void ex-combatants face when they leave the community of soldiers behind.