Sebastian Junger on the trauma of losing his friend and collaborator, Tim Hetherington:
Within an hour I decided not to cover combat again. I didn’t want to risk traumatizing everyone I loved by getting killed myself. I mean, you go to war, you think you’re gambling with your own life and then I realized that what you’re really doing is gambling with everyone else’s lives, everyone who cares about you. You’re dead. You don’t matter. It’s over. It’s everyone else who has to deal with it. I hadn’t really gotten that either and, when Tim died, I did and I also just ran headlong into the central tragedy of war which is that good people get killed and I sort of didn’t want anything to do with it anymore.
Image of Tim Hetherington in Afghanistan courtesy of Norget
