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American Morning
Interview of Sebastian Junger, Journalist
Aired December 10, 2001 - 09:16 ET
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
PAULA ZAHN, CNN ANCHOR: At least eight journalists have been killed in the war in Afghanistan. That is more than the reported number of American military deaths. Author Sebastian Junger repeatedly put himself in danger, reporting from the front lines.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: You know, if it hits right there, you're really in danger.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: The photographer have to be always in a dangerous place.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: You can take notes from down here quite easily.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
ZAHN: Junger also spent considerable time with Ahmed Shah Massoud, that is the Northern Alliance leader who was assassinated in September. He has written two best selling books. His latest is called "Fire," and Sebastian Junger joins me now to talk about his experience in Afghanistan. Welcome back. Welcome home.
SEBASTIAN JUNGER, AUTHOR, "FIRE": Thank you.
ZAHN: You were over there for how long?
JUNGER: Last year, I was there for a month, and I just got back after another one month trip about two weeks ago.
ZAHN: Some of the video you brought home is startling to watch, and I wanted to start off with a situation you found yourself in when -- were you were basically cornered? Set this up for us.
JUNGER: Yeah, last year we were caught on a hilltop position that had just been taken from the Taliban. I was with the Northern Alliance, and the Taliban attacked back and -- with rockets at first, and we were really curled up in our fox holes. It was very, very scary, and then something a little similar happened this past time. I mean, if you go to a front line, you're at risk, basically.
ZAHN: Why don't we come back to that situation when you were on the hilltop, so people can see exactly what you were up against. Let's play that now.
The Northern Alliance leader Massoud shortly before he was assassinated. What was the significance of that meeting?
JUNGER: Well, Massoud was the glue that held together the Northern Alliance, and I spent a month with him while he was fighting the Taliban last year, and it's interesting to note if -- he was killed two days before the September 11 attacks, and he'd been fighting the Taliban for -- since 1996. Had he not done that, Afghanistan would be completely Taliban country, and we would have had no allies in Afghanistan to help us over the past two months fight al Qaeda and fight the Taliban. He really held it together, and I think his role in all of this is going to come out more and more as we look back on this past fall, but I got to spend a month with him, and that was my first meeting with him that you saw right there.
ZAHN: And the repercussions of his being gone have been pretty enormous.
JUNGER: Oh, they've been tremendous. He really held it all together, and the last piece of my book is about Massoud and the extraordinary job he did in Afghanistan. He drove the Soviets out. Brilliant guerrilla fighter, and he used that against the Taliban also, completely outnumbered. An extraord -- absolutely extraordinary man.
ZAHN: And, we have talked a lot over the last several weeks what journalists are up against in working in war zones and I'm hoping, now, that we have a piece of tape that we can share with our audience so they can understand the risks you were taking when you were reporting for National Geographic. Let's listen.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
JUNGER: The shooting is regular. They're shooting at us right now. They've seen us on this rooftop, and they don't like it.
You hear them whistle. You hear the bullets whistle as they go by. They don't like us being here because they know we're watching them. Maybe they even saw the TV camera, so they're trying to get us to get out of here.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
ZAHN: Now, you seem relatively calm when you're delivering this, but how are you feeling inside? These things are flying right over your head.
JUNGER: Well, yeah, I mean, we're behind sandbags, and, you know, it gets your adrenaline up, I mean, you know, it's a intense situation, but we were behind sandbags, and we were relatively safe.
What really is frightening, actually, is shelling, and that happened to us this last trip and also last year. When they shell, there's no way -- there's no place that's safe at all. You just have to hope it doesn't hit near you. You get down as low as possible and hope it doesn't hit near you. And you can hear -- I mean, it's a horrible moment, you can hear these things come at you. It's a classic, you know, -- sound, and all you can do is wait to see where it hits, and it's absolutely terrifying. It really -- it's terrifying out of proportion to the danger, I think. It really just unhinges you.
ZAHN: I wanted to share another small part of what you have on videotape. Once again, to help people better understand the ravages of this war. Let's listen to that clip now.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
JUNGER: This is the part of war, you know, you don't think about. When one guy got killed, one family has to deal with the rest of their lives.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
ZAHN: What were you exposed to, when you went into villages where civilians were hurt?
JUNGER: Well, you see terrible refugee problem. I mean, you hear about refugees and -- but when you actually are there, when you see them -- these people -- I mean, these people were eating grass, and it was just heartbreaking, and in that situation we saw a little bit of -- it was a soldier, 21-year-old -- 20-year-old soldier who had just been killed. There had been a battle that night, and they -- hours earlier he was alive, and they had just brought his body back to his family, and his family was burying him. He was just a kid, you know, and we were there at funeral, and then the father almost had a sort of psychotic episode. I mean, he went out and starting yelling at the Taliban, "you've killed my son, you've killed my son, I'm going to come kill you." And, this was last year before everything happened.
And, you know, war is very dramatic. It's very compelling as a journalist, and then you sort of realize that the price people pay -- you know, this family is going to live with that death forever, and it's a loss just like anyone here if they lost their son, they experience it -- those people are poor, but they experience it the same way. It was really --
ZAHN: It didn't make you doubt U.S. resolve, though. And in times of war, we talk about this cloud of confusion --
JUNGER: Yeah.
ZAHN: -- and the cloud of fog, because the families, obviously, here in America, who have lost Green Berets, and members of the CIA are experiencing much that same sense of devastation.
JUNGER: You know, I think wars come out of flawed policy. You know, from any country, and it's -- they're trying to rectify a situation that shouldn't have happened in the first place, and I think a lot of things went into the problems in Afghanistan, a lot of things. But, it had to be done. The Taliban were an awful regime by any standard, and the Afghans themselves -- I mean, many, many, many, Afghans died in this last round of fighting. Even in Kabul, Afghans were killed by American bombs, and when we got into Kabul, they were cheering America, because they knew America had freed them with the Northern Alliance, just an extraordinary thing to see.
ZAHN: Well, your reporting was superb. Final thought on "Fire" and what you're communicating to the reading public through your latest book?
JUNGER: Well, it's a collection of my foreign reporting, and it ends with Massoud in Afghanistan last year. There's a lot about forest fires. Kosovo, all kinds of crazy places.
ZAHN: Well, best of luck to you, and thank you very much for sharing some of the video with us. I hope you're sleeping okay these days. Are you still hearing things whiz over your head? That's a sound I never want to hear. Sebastian Junger. Good luck.
JUNGER: Thank you very much.
ZAHN: Thank you, again, for your time this morning.
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