American soldiers in Afghanistan fight not for the flag, but for each other – war reporter

26 May, 2011 07:15 / Updated 14 years ago

US soldiers in Afghanistan are not fighting for their country or their flag, but rather for each other, war reporter and filmmaker Sebastian Junger told RT.

“What I realized in the five months that I spent at this little outpost at the Korangal Valley in eastern Afghanistan -huge amount of combat, very isolated place – what I realized is that the guys were not fighting for flag and country,” he said. “They may have joined up for those sorts of reasons, but once they were there, they were fighting for each other and there was a completely kind of fraternal arrangement that had very little broad conceptual motivations behind it.”Not many American soldiers in Afghanistan take their time to reflect on why they are fighting this war, they are just fighting it, Junger said. “They did not debate why are we in Afghanistan very much,” he said. “It is like, well, 9/11, 3000 Americans were killed by attacks coming out of Afghanistan and we had to go to that country and fix it and find the people who killed our American brothers and sisters, and that is about the extent of their analysis.”