This week on Uncommon Knowledge, Sebastian Junger. Beginning in 2007, Junger embedded for fourteen months with the 173rd Airborne Brigade Combat Team, making five trips to the Korengal Valley of eastern Afghanistan, a location that saw more combat than any other in the Afghan theater. The product of his experience, his new book War. Today, Junger discusses the first of three chapters in the book, which is entitled, simply, “Fear.”

One soldier said to me, “You know, the scariest stuff that happened up there were the things that didn’t happen – the attacks we were expecting that didn’t happen.” Once an attack started, fear really was not a problem. I mean, you were kind of functional, but your mind went blank – or at least mine did. The guys were very well trained – they jumped on their weapons and they did what they were trained to do. Fear? Not really an issue during combat. But before combat—that was when it hit you..

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