By Sam Jemielity
Most people know Sebastian Junger as the movie-star-handsome author of The Perfect Storm, but the best-selling writer regularly reports from some of the world's most dangerous regions. Junger has seen massacred civilians in war-torn Kosovo, gruesome mutilation victims of diamond smugglers in Sierra Leone and survivors of deadly forest fires in the American West. His new book, Fire, is a collection of his reportage about these hotspots and the people caught up in extreme conditions most of us happily never will know.
In The Perfect Storm, Junger re-creates the actions of a crew of a fishing boat trapped in deadly seas. He explores the simple thought processes -- "Should I join this crew? Should we turn back because of the storm?" -- that led these men to their deaths. The stories in Fire evince Junger's obsession with how humans respond to life-and-death situations, but one article in the book has taken on heightened importance in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks of September 11. Last November, Junger and a National Geographic photography crew hopped a rickety helicopter to visit the northern Afghanistan enclave of Ahmad Shah Massoud, hero of the Afghani war against the Soviets and leader of the anti-Taliban Northern Alliance. When Junger's article on Massoud ran in the March 2001 issue of National Geographic Adventurer, more Americans cared about the outcome of the impending Oscars than of the Northern Alliance fight against the Taliban. Now the terrorist bombings have pushed the power struggle in Afghanistan to the forefront of world politics.
Massoud, a brilliant military strategist often described as the Che Guevera of Afghanistan, never lived to see the tragic attack on the United States. On September 9, the 45-year-old Northern Alliance leader was assassinated in a suicide bombing -- most likely carried out by agents of Osama bin Laden, Junger says. As Junger notes, Massoud had long asked for aid from the United States in his fight against the Taliban. It took the tragedy of September 11 to bring about that armed help, on a scale Massoud could never have imagined. Playboy.com caught up with Junger, 39, to learn more about Massoud's life and death, and his now-infamous enemies in Afghanistan. Junger also discussed his most frightening moments in the field, the motivation for reporting from war-torn countries and his reaction to seeing his own country become another war zone.
