THE SUMMER HE was 16, Sebastian Junger tried to save the boy who was trapped under the ice, but the boy wasn’t there.
Seb—that’s what everyone called him—was climbing high in the Alps with a group of kids his age, part of a summer outdoors camp typical for teenagers in France, where his family lived at the time. Seb was a good climber. He was comfortable out there, the ice thick under his crampons, his body—strong and experienced for his age—sweating in the cold mountain air. Ice ax in his hand, rope wrapped tightly around his waist, intertwined with the rest of the group.
They made their way down a particularly nasty ice chute, a slippery gully that would be the most challenging few hundred yards of the multiday trip. It was tricky for him and even for the guide. But they made it, steadily and carefully, to the bottom, where they rested on a large rock outcropping. They were taking off their crampons and drinking water when they heard voices from the top of the gully. It was a group of two dozen French boy scouts, a couple years younger, and Seb could see that they were going at it all wrong: disorganized, underequipped. Then one of the kids who was farther back slipped and slid into the others, triggering a human avalanche down the chute, a ghastly mass of arms and legs and snow and ice hurtling out of control to the bottom. Within seconds, the boys crashed just a few yards in front of Seb and his group, landing headfirst in a deep pile of heavy, wet snow, limbs sticking out at grotesque angles. Seb’s group could hear the muted screams of the boys buried underneath.
“Trois minutes,” Seb’s guide said. Three minutes. That was how long the children could breathe under there before they would die.
Seb’s group started digging as fast as they could, yanking out the kids one by one. One boy’s ankle was twisted clear around. Another boy had been hit in the face by a crampon. Blood stained the slush. So far, everyone was alive. When they found the scout leader, Seb’s guide asked him how many boys there were total. The leader, his brain clouded by the panic of the fall, couldn’t remember. The guide shook him. How many? How many?
There might be one missing, the leader said. I don’t know! He looked around, counting with his eyes, muttering unintelligible names, then—Yes! One boy is missing!
What happened next inside Seb’s mind had never happened to him before. He would later describe it as a psychotic break. The world beyond his periphery dissolved. He saw only the snow and ice, and he grabbed his ice ax and began digging with furious swings, hacking into the ice and the mountainside, sweat and spittle flying from his face in the rage of his search. His guide ran to him and placed his hand on Seb’s, stopping the motion of the ax. Seb’s eyes were wide, his breathing ragged.
“If you find him with that ax, you’ll kill him,” the guide said.
The scout leader, meanwhile, had scraped his way back up the chute and found the last boy clinging to the side of the mountain. He yelled down that everyone was now accounted for. There was no one left in the ice.
Seb’s guide sent him and another boy, the two most athletic in the group, into town to tell the police. The French air force sent helicopters to airlift the injured boys to safety.
That night, Seb and the rest of the group were in their bunkhouse, eating a supper of vichyssoise. He was mid-bite when the thought entered his head: One minute sooner and they could have all died. If his group had still been on its descent when that kid above them slipped, those two dozen scouts would have slid smack into Seb’s group at a terrifying velocity, unstoppable. There would have been no escape from the ice slide, and the children would have died. Maybe Seb. Maybe all of them.
One minute sooner.
WHAT'S WEIRD ABOUT the universe is that it only exists in a physical form in the present instant. There’s no tangible past or future. It doesn’t exist! It’s a succession of rightnow-rightnow-rightnow. That’s it.”
Sebastian Junger, now 62, says this while sitting in the apartment where he lives with his family on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. The cropped hair may be creeping up his forehead a little, but he still has the piercing gray eyes, steely jawline, and boot-camp build, all of it free of bullshit. The place has warm wood floors, cookbooks in the kitchen, brick walls. He and his wife, Barbara, have two daughters, four and seven. The girls have bunk beds down the hall, but usually all four of them end up sleeping on a soft floor pad together in the same room, a family bundle. There is no television. Junger does not own a smartphone. He communicates with anyone out of earshot via email or a flip phone. He has been thinking a lot about the universe lately.
Over three decades as a journalist, Junger has written about combat (War), about human connection and belonging (Tribe), about fire (Fire), about murder (A Death in Belmont). His particular journalism is defined by a ferocious attention to time—to the seconds that pile up by the millions to make up our lives and to the fact that just a few of those seconds can be the difference between life and death. His best-known work, The Perfect Storm, which explores the fate of a crew of fishermen off the coast of Gloucester, Massachusetts, is broken in his mind into sections defined by time: the crew’s final month, their final week, their final day, their final hour, and their final minute. Time is an obsession for Junger because seconds and minutes are unemotional facts, and he spins unemotional facts into heartbreaking, operatic stories. That is his gift: asking questions until he knows the facts few others have the patience and determination to find, then intuiting the human story inside those facts.
Like this fact, from War: “The distance at which you might literally be able to ‘dodge a bullet’ is around 800 yards. You’d need a quarter second to register the tracer coming toward you—at this point the bullet has traveled 200 yards—a quarter second to instruct your muscles to react—the bullet has now traveled 400 yards—and half a second to actually move out of the way. The bullet you dodge will pass you with a distinctive snap. That’s the sound of a small object breaking the sound barrier inches from your head.”
And this, from The Perfect Storm, an account of a helicopter rescue effort in the middle of the ocean: “The flight engineer pays out the cable and watches in alarm as the basket is blown straight back toward the tail rotors. It finally reaches the water, swept backward at an angle of 45 degrees, and DeWitt tries to hold a steady hover long enough for the swimmers to reach the basket. He tries for almost an hour, but the waves are so huge that the basket doesn’t spend more than a few seconds on each crest before dropping to the end of its cable. Even if the men could get themselves into the basket, a shear pin in the hoist mechanism fails at loads over 600 pounds, and three men in waterlogged clothing would definitely push that limit. The entire assembly—cable, basket, everything—would let go into the sea.”
And this one, from his own life: If the ambulance had taken another 15 minutes to arrive in his driveway in June 2020 as his stomach felt like it was exploding, or if one of the doctors had hit traffic on the way to the hospital that day and had not been there in time to save his life, or if his house was just ten miles farther up the Cape Cod coast, he would be dead.
“If you have an abdominal hemorrhage, time is of the essence,” Junger says. “And I burned through an hour and a half before I even got to the doctor because of how long it took for the ambulance to get to me, and then to the hospital. That’s an eternity. That’s pints of blood. I probably lost two thirds of my blood, which is right at the point where you go off a cliff and that’s it.”
THE SUMMER HE was 58, Junger was in his driveway on Cape Cod, paralyzed by a strange pain consuming his abdomen. The sky, he would write later—in his extraordinary new book about the experience, In My Time of Dying—“began to turn electric white. The whiteness burned out the treetops and then the house and then the driveway and finally my wife’s face. I told her I was going blind, and after that, I don’t remember much.”
His pancreatic artery was enlarged, which is known as a pancreatic aneurysm. When it ruptures, often for no discernible reason, it can cause extreme pain and usually death. Junger’s did rupture, and he was essentially bleeding out into his own body. The book chronicles what happened in the hours and days after, as medical professionals struggled to save his life in the ambulance and at Cape Cod Hospital in Hyannis. He was semiconscious or unconscious for hours, and he conducted almost all of his reporting a couple years later, interviewing the doctors, nurses, and EMTs who kept him alive.
There were times they thought he was slipping away, which means that what Junger has given us with In My Time of Dying is perhaps the first of its kind: a report by a journalist about his own death, in which he peeked at the edge of what might be an afterlife and returned to tell us about it.
“When I was dying,” he says, “my subjective view of it was enormously warped by what was happening to me physically. I was hallucinating, I wasn’t making sense, I didn’t know I was dying, but I didn’t know why I was getting all this attention at the hospital. It was like I was incredibly drunk. So I wanted to preserve that in this book, because I wanted people to know what it’s like to die, at least through my experience. You don’t have this ‘clarity’—it’s totally muddled! But I also wanted people to know what was happening to me objectively—medically, scientifically. By going back to interview the doctors, I was able to peg what I was feeling, in my foggy, twisted way, to what was happening to my body physically.”
An aneurysm can exist inside the body for decades undetected, which is what makes them hard to combat. In Junger, this triggered a massive bleed. The doctors couldn’t find the source of the leak for hours and, as a desperate final measure, inserted a catheter through his wrist, snaking it all the way into the abdomen, where they finally found the source of the bleeding and stanched it. To this day, even they can’t believe that this worked.
Junger has made a career of trying to find the truth in stories that can’t quite be figured out. No one will ever know for certain what happened to the Andrea Gail, the fishing boat captained by Billy Tyne, when it disappeared into an apocalyptic storm in 1991, but Junger came as close to finding the truth as any human could. It was the same with his near-death experience in Hyannis: As long as there have been people, people have had near-death experiences, but this time it happened to a reporter who goes after facts like a boy possessed with an ice ax, and when it was all over, he investigated not only the medical catastrophe that should have killed him but also that thin place between this life and whatever happens after. When he was in the hospital, in and out of consciousness, he felt himself slipping toward what appeared to be a dark pit. He writes:
And just when [the darkness] seemed unavoidable, I became aware of something else: My father. He’d been dead eight years, but there he was, not so much floating as simply existing above me and slightly to my left. . . . My father exuded reassurance and seemed to be inviting me to go with him. “It’s okay, there’s nothing to be scared of,” he seemed to be saying. “Don’t fight it. I’ll take care of you.” . . . I was enormously confused by his presence. . . . Because I didn’t know I was dying, his invitation to join him seemed grotesque. He was dead, I was alive, and I wanted nothing to do with him . . . .
Junger’s father—their relationship was good, if distant—was a physicist, and after his apparition came to him in the hospital, Junger immersed himself in the study of physics, the ways that time and space and consciousness overlap, to try to understand his experience more completely and come to an understanding as to whether some kind of afterlife is possible.
Being a person who follows facts, Junger looked beyond the lexicon of near-death experiences: tunnels, bright lights, out-of-body stuff. He believes in what happened to him, that it was not a hallucination, so he went after reasons to believe it. He didn’t write In My Time of Dying until three years after the incident, in a furious three-month period, but he was keeping notebooks the whole time—jotting down memories from the hospital, questions, and leads to pursue.
“I don’t believe in God, but that doesn’t mean I can’t conceive of a post-death existence,” he says. “The physical nature of the universe at the quantum level could include an individual post-death reality without any God at all. After all, you can have gravity and no God. You can have the speed of light and no God. So an afterlife does not require the existence of God, either.
“Or you could have a God who says, ‘You know what? I created a bunch of biological beings—kangaroos, turtles, bears, humans—and when they die, they’re friggin’ dead and that’s it.’ Just because there’s a God doesn’t mean you get an afterlife. Sometimes my friends will say, after the aneurysm, ‘So are you still an atheist?’ I’m like, Look, I didn’t see God. I saw my father. If I saw some evidence of the works of God, I’d have some belief, but I don’t believe things that there’s no reason to believe. I believe in trucks because I see trucks. I believe in snow because I see snow. But God? I have never seen such a thing.
“Is there some reality, post-death, that engages in our living reality in some way that’s completely beyond our comprehension, and we just get a sense of it? Yes, I can imagine that.”
AFTER RECOVERING FROM the ruptured aneurysm—it took only a couple months or so for him to get all his strength back—Junger experienced intense anxiety before falling into a depression. For the first time in his life, he saw a psychologist—that’s when he first remembered the story about the ice chute in France, and the arms and legs and the ax. He cried telling the therapist that story. He had once suffered from temporary trauma-induced depression, in the early 2010s. His marriage was breaking apart. His best friend, the photographer Tim Hetherington, had recently been killed while on assignment in Libya. Junger himself was coming out of a long period of time working in combat areas.
“I got to this place of Why exactly is life worth going through? Like, remind me again. That thought had never even crossed my mind. I love life! But I was basically like, Tell me again why we’re doing this. And that was very scary to me,” he says.
The depression that descended after his near-death experience was worse still. “I was actually worried about myself. I was in a very dark place. I have an amazing family. I’m very happy in my marriage, my daughters—I have everything. I couldn’t believe that that thought was popping up in this context. It’s one thing in a childless marriage after my best friend got killed—all right, I can see that back ten, 15 years ago. But not now.”
He had put himself in danger plenty of times, notably in the Korengal Valley in Afghanistan, work that resulted in War and the Academy Award–nominated documentary Restrepo, which he directed with Hetherington. In those places, he had what he calls “the illusion of agency”: the false belief that because you’re there by choice, you hold some measure of control. But a ruptured aneurysm on a nice summer day on Cape Cod? “It tracked me down in my fucking driveway,” he says. “It was like I owed the Mafia money. They will find you! You’re not gonna not pay this debt.”
The therapy helped. He found himself thinking more about what the aneurysm might have meant—why it had happened. There were no tidy lessons about seizing the day. But in writing about his own death, he was in fact writing about his life. His wife asked him if he felt lucky or unlucky that his own body had almost killed itself. “Did it illuminate the miracle of life, or did it overly focus me on the reality of death and now I can’t function in life? Which is it, blessing or curse?” he says. Junger needed to know.
It turns out that the origin of the word blessing is an Anglo-Saxon word meaning blood—Junger looks up everything. He learned that in neolithic, pre-Christian rituals in Europe, blessings would come in the form of a blood sacrifice. “So I started to think about this,” Junger says. “Maybe there’s no blessing that doesn’t come at a cost. And maybe there’s no wound that doesn’t come with some blessing. That consoled me when I saw it in those terms—I had a blessing, and it cost me something. You don’t get anything for free in this universe.”
Junger has a foot on the coffee table. He tugs absently at the sleeve of his T-shirt, gives a look like, Ever think of that? The apartment is small, just a few rooms surrounded by the universe his father studied endlessly, the one that almost swallowed Sebastian Junger when he was 16 in the French Alps, and again in Afghanistan when a bullet hit a wall inches from his head, and again when he started bleeding into himself on a patch of New England gravel. Pots and pans hang on the kitchen wall. A few feet away: the soft pad where he and his wife nestle with their girls each night, shoulders rising and falling with each sleepy breath. The center of his own universe. He is still here, Junger is.
He doesn’t say anything for a while. It’s drizzling outside. The seconds pass in silent succession, the universe existing in its physical form for each one before dissolving into the next and the next.
Rightnow.
Rightnow.
Rightnow.
Lead Loop: Getty Images; AP; Peter Foley; The Washington Post; Getty Images
