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Sebastian Junger’s the Last Patrol: A Dialogue

The first things I noticed about Sebastian Junger were his striking good looks, the bit of swagger in his walk, the strong jaw and those Paul Newmanesque blue eyes. I had arranged a late September date so we could meet and get to know something about one another before taking the stage together at the US premiere of his new war documentary, The Last Patrol. The screening was less than a month away, on opening night of the American Museum of Natural History’s Margaret Mead Film Festival, established in honor of the famous anthropologist who early on advocated using film in ethnography. I imagine the festival organizers were thrilled to land The Last Patrol, an HBO documentary and the latest in Junger’s long list of film, journalism and literary accomplishments that include the Academy-awardnominated Restrepo, the New York Times bestseller book and hit movie The Perfect Storm and the National Magazine Awardwinning “The Forensics of War,” an article about the killing fields of Kosovo during the 1990s published in Vanity Fair.1 I know I was thrilled. I’d serve as interlocutor, which meant I would get to ask questions about filmmaking and ethnography, about war and the United States of America, about the boysoldiers who are the subjects of Junger’s war documentaries and about the aftermaths of war for these combat vets and the journalist who has been following them since June 2007. That first meeting in September—over coffee and a bite to eat—went well, I thought. We talked about anthropology (his college major at Wesleyan), his coming of age in suburban America, women in the military, his search for meaning in masculinity and his father—a German, half-Jewish exile. Junger impressed me as tough and tender, at once fixed in his beliefs even as he is open and vulnerable and accessible. I liked him and looked forward to our next encounter, onstage at the festival, on Thursday evening, the 23rd of October.