Just returned from Sierra Leone on assignment for Vanity Fair magazine, the freelance journalist and author of The Perfect Storm (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1997) met recently in New York City with the Naval Institute's Fred L. Schultz. Their discussion centered on the mechanics of writing the best-selling book—the harrowing true story of one of the fiercest storms in recorded history—and on the new Warner Brothers movie by the same name, starring George Clooney, Elizabeth Mastrantonio, and Mark Wahlberg.
Proceedings: The biographical notes we've seen describe you as simply a freelance journalist. How did you get started in the writing business?
Junger: I was an anthropology major at Wesleyan in Connecticut, and I wrote a thesis on Navajo long-distance runners. I ran a lot in college, and I decided to go to Arizona and train with those talented runners. That turned out to be the most stimulating thing I did in college. I was very enthusiastic about some things academically, and not so enthusiastic about other things. I was an athlete, and that was pretty much my focus, with a few exceptions.
As I was working on the thesis, I fell in love with the process--the researching and the writing—which seemed close to what I thought journalism must be. So after college, I started writing for a weekly newspaper in Washington, D.C., The City Paper.
Then I did the same for The Boston Phoenix. I spent my twenties making almost no money at all, but I was writing about things that were interesting to me. I grew up on the Eastern Seaboard, so maritime topics always drew my attention. I wrote about tugboats and drawbridges and other weird things. But I couldn't really make a living at it until about 1993 or '94.
Proceedings: Obviously, The Perfect Storm is the main reason we're here. We've heard that it's required reading, from middle schools to the Naval Academy. How valuable do you think it is as an educational tool?
Junger: It's not a textbook, which is both its weakness and its strength. I've had meteorologists read it and tell me that I really got to the essence of how a storm works in terms of explaining it to the layman. They told me that they find it hard to communicate meteorology themselves, in common terms.
Others have been quick to show me what I left out and tell me it's much more complicated than that. So, I can't decide whether it's a strength or a weakness that it simplifies things just enough so that the layman can understand. I'm a consummate layman myself. There's nothing I know a lot about. As a journalist, I learn about a lot of things, but I'm not an expert on anything.
Frankly, I don't quite know how to evaluate the strengths of the book, except I do know that it seems to make people excited about topics that they weren't excited about before—maritime history, the history of Gloucester, Massachusetts, oceanography, or how waves work. They are all things that I put in the book because I was interested in them and I wanted to make them compelling.
For pure information, people really should go to the same textbooks I consulted when I was doing my research. The most helpful book I did mention is Oceanography and Seamanship, by William Van Dorn, an oceanographer in San Diego. This is an incredibly good textbook in basic oceanography for sailors. It deals very well with weather and how waves work.
Proceedings: Why did you choose to leave out references to the source material you used?
Junger: I thought that footnotes or references within the text would be cumbersome and unsightly and diminish the pleasure of reading the book. I could have had a list of source materials, but I'm a journalist, not an academic. Journalists must develop a sort of a pact with the reader. You promise that you're doing the best job you can to present the most accurate information, in addition to making it readable, compelling, and entertaining.
And the reader has to believe you're not trying to mislead. So I don't need footnotes at the end of every paragraph. The New York Times does not footnote its sources, and it's been around for 150 years. If I read in a New York Times article that the gross national product of Sierra Leone was such-and-such a dollar amount last year, I believe it. I don't need to see the government source.
Journalistic books sort of do the same thing, except of course they're saying a lot more, so there's more of a chance to get in trouble. But the contract with the reader is the same.
Proceedings: Some of the quotes in the book are in quotation marks, and others are not. We've never seen them handled quite like that.
Junger: I hadn't either, actually. That was the only solution I could come up with to differentiate the quality and grade of information. If I was interviewing you and asked you about your fifth birthday, and I have it on tape, I know for sure you said that this is what happened. But if you repeated a conversation that you'd heard ten years ago between two other people, I would know you're saying that's what you heard, but I wouldn't know for sure that that is what was said. So if I interviewed someone for the book about personal experiences and I got it on tape, I put it in quotation marks. If it wasn't on tape and it was just someone remembering, it might be right and it might be wrong. If that deserves a quotation mark, then what do you put around something you've taken from a tape? It's almost like I have too much respect for the quotation mark to misuse it.
As a journalist, I thought it was important for the reader to understand that I'm aware of the limits of people's memories and recollections.
Proceedings: Is the training and testing for para-rescue jumpers really more stringent than Navy SEAL training, as you imply in the book?
Junger: The Navy SEALs deal with the maritime environment. The para-rescue jumpers are trained for every environment you can imagine—rock and snow, the desert, and the sea. If you fail any of the tests, you fail them all. Navy SEALs, I believe, can specialize. As I understand it, if you don't quite make it in emergency medicine, then you're not the guy to do the bandages, and you do something else. One failure or shortcoming doesn't trigger a failure in the whole training program. With the para-rescue jumpers, it's really an all-out effort. What the para-rescuers told me was that they have to be expert in a broader scope of things. And the stakes are higher. They said if they failed one test, they had to start at the beginning of the program, which is something like 18 months long.
Proceedings: People who go to sea in dangerous weather obviously have different motivations, but few seem to have a good idea of what's at stake, as far as rescue goes. What would you say the Coast Guard, the Air National Guard, and the Navy—the real heroes of The Perfect Storm, some would argue—could do to communicate this?
Junger: Maybe the movie will. People are very cavalier about the sea—about everything, really. We have this feeling that technology always will save us. I smoke sometimes, so if I get cancer, I'm betting there will be a new medical technology that will save me. But technology has a limit, as those guys in the Air National Guard helicopter found out. They were all but unrescuable. Most were very lucky.
The reality is that some pleasure boaters do stupid things and take risks they shouldn't take. They don't need to be out there in the first place; it's recreation. We live in a very indulgent society. They get in trouble, and suddenly Navy destroyers are being sent out to save them. What a cushy society we have that can afford to do that.
Journalistically, I'm much more interested in people who get in trouble doing their jobs. Someone has to build skyscrapers or drill for oil or catch fish or farm, things that get people hurt and killed. Someone has to do it to keep the society running. Nobody has to climb mountains or sail across the Atlantic to keep society going. The people who are doing something functional interest me much more.
But to the rescuers, it doesn't matter who's in trouble. Even though this storm was a traumatic experience for the Air National Guard guys—one of them died—they looked at it as just doing their jobs. The Coast Guard guys I talked to were thrilled to be out there. Dave Moore, the rescue jumper, said everyone was jealous of him. They had trained for years for it. And no one ever gets to do it. These are brave people, and you could call them altruistic because they're doing something to help others. But they also love it. That was my sense. Maybe there are some who don't, but I don't think they're in the business.
Some soldiers in wars don't want to be there. But sometimes they've done very brave things in situations they didn't want to be in at all. In my mind, they're different from the guys who feel privileged and thrilled to be rescue swimmers. They're qualitatively different. I'm going on about this because I really have wondered about the morality of how one can ask someone else to risk his life to save yours when you were simply careless. The answer is that a lot of those guys are thrilled to be saving your life. That's what they trained for, and they're at the peak of their profession. It's the most intense moment of their career. Dave Moore will remember that rescue for the rest of his life.
Proceedings: Based on what you've heard, what was the atmosphere like on board the sailboat, the Satori, when the rescue swimmers arrived?
Junger: Just from talking to Karen Simpson, who was on board, they were desperately relieved. There were two women and Ray Leonard, the captain. They had spent 12 hours thinking they were going to die, and they now realized they weren't. I don't know if you've ever been in a situation like that, but I imagine it's a huge relief. I don't know the guy, but I think Leonard was torn. He must have been as scared as the two women were, but I think he had a hard time admitting it. That's my guess. He was torn between being relieved to be saved and being ordered to leave his boat.
Proceedings: Let's talk about the movie. All the trailers we've seen have featured the fishing boat Andrea Gail, but nothing seems to address what happened to the search-and-rescue teams.
Junger: The movie does. Although, like the book, it focuses on the Andrea Gail and the Gloucester community, it has major sections about search and rescue; they just didn't do trailers of it. I think one brief scene in the trailer shows a helicopter in trouble, but it flashes by very quickly.
Proceedings: Hollywood is well known for playing fast-and-loose with the facts. How do you feel about making a movie from a nonfiction book?
Junger: I was concerned about that. The first thing I said as I was negotiating this deal was that if they don't have everyone on the Andrea Gail die, they need to change the name of the characters and the movie itself. I didn't care if they were having George Clooney playing the lead or not. He can't live. Everyone dies. What are you going to say to Bobby Shatford's mother when you have the character playing him actually live? You tell her; I'm not going to tell her. And so they stuck to the story. I don't want to be too cynical, but I think the popularity of the book forced them to do it. I don't know anything about Hollywood, but I do think they realized that a lot of people would see the movie who had also read the book. And they know that people generally hate it when a movie is glaringly different from the book.
Because it's real life and such a sweeping story that they streamlined things a bit, but I think they kept fairly close to the story line of the book. I haven't seen the movie, but I read the script. And there were a few things I didn't like. But we talked about them and they took them out. So, I'm holding my breath, but I think it's going to be all right. I don't think I'm going to see anything that jars me.
Proceedings: It must be thrilling to have Wolfgang Petersen, of Das Boot fame, directing The Perfect Storm. Do you think he will bring any threads of Das Boot to this film?
Junger: Yes. He has that ability to develop tension and claustrophobia. He does that very well, and I'm sure he'll be doing it with this movie. For me, that was the most horrifying part of Das Boot. It's that pressure-cooker sort of thing, the situation getting worse and worse, that he does so well.
Proceedings: Tell us about The Perfect Storm Foundation that you started. What does it do, and how does it work?
Junger: Originally, I talked to one person living in Gloucester, Charlie Reed, and he really impressed me. He wanted his kids to be able to go to any university they chose. He didn't want them to be limited by what he could afford to pay or what they could afford to pay themselves. So he kept on sword fishing, which was, at that point, paying good money. He could afford to send them to Harvard.
He had dropped out of school at age 14. Education was not high on his list of priorities. People who have little education often do not value education. In fact, they're often actively suspicious of it.
So I was amazed that not only was he supportive of his kids going to school, but that he would work at something which, in his 50s, he was clearly tired of doing. So, he had the compassion to send his son to Harvard. I was amazed.
After the book started to do well, I began to realize that everything is reciprocal. Gloucester had unwittingly given me this tremendous success, and it was like the universe wasn't balanced yet. I began to think it would be great if a foundation could help someone like Charlie Reed, who wouldn't necessarily have to keep working to make sure his son could go to Harvard. I used him as a sort of emblem.
Obviously, Harvard tuition is much more than the foundation can afford, but we could—and did—provide a thousand dollars here and there to help buy computers. In this way, we thought we could take some of the burden off the people who were trying to fish for a living, especially now that the fishing is not as good as it was. Those days are over.
There were already insurance supplements for people who lost fathers on fishing boats. And a number of the kids from the families of the Andrea Gail crew had scholarship funds. But I thought this foundation should be for kids whose dads are still alive, who never got a check from an insurance company, and who didn't really save anything, because they could barely make the payments on their boats. Those are the people who need help.
We started with one criterion—that your family had to be involved with the maritime trades, of one sort or another. Like most foundations, we've since had to struggle a little bit to figure how to be most effective. Our primary focus is the community of Gloucester, and we award periodic grants of modest amounts of money. The kids write the proposals. I need $1,500 to buy a computer for college. Or I want to go to boat-building school in Maine. We actually paid the tuition for a local Gloucester kid to go to boat-building school.
Proceedings: Do you think there might be a sort of backlash to that? This may sound crass, but educating them might get them out of a business that has a culture all its own.
Junger: What I don't want to happen is for the people of Gloucester to lose something in the process. I don't want them to leave. They could all end up working in banks and we would lose Gloucester as a museum piece. It's the same situation in the Third World. Some people in the Western World are active in saving the Amazon rain forests. We adventurists want to be able to canoe through thousands of miles of pristine jungle. That's great, but the people who live there could say, legitimately, that they're not there to provide a playground for adventure seekers. They're cutting down trees because they need the money.
So, I'm not sure what the right answer is for Gloucester. It's an amazing, picturesque place, but it's also a rough town. And I would be very sad if it turned into something else. But some of the things that make Gloucester visually interesting are also symptoms of its problems. It's a poor town, but that somehow makes it appealing. Even the rough neighborhoods in New York are much more interesting looking than the Upper East Side, but they're still rough.
I was just in Sierra Leone, which was much more interesting than Paris. It's not as beautiful, and it lacks a lot of things, but it's more interesting. I was there for two-and-a-half weeks, and I'll remember that time for a lot longer than the two-and-a-half weeks I spent in Paris. It's a little overstated to compare Sierra Leone to Gloucester, but I think you know what I mean.
Proceedings: What were you doing in Sierra Leone?
Junger: Good question. I went there to write about the illicit diamond trade. The rebel groups there don't have much access to cash, so they are mining diamonds, smuggling them out of the country, and selling them in Antwerp. This gives them access to a huge amount of cash, which they use to pay for their weapons, which in turn allows them to retain control of the diamond areas. It all goes in a circle.
So I went there to write about it, because the RUF—the rebel group in Sierra Leone very much engaged in this activity—was making it possible, but difficult, to go into rebel territory, where they were mining for diamonds. It was just barely possible to do it; a couple of people had done it by the time we got there. Literally within days, the situation completely fell apart. Almost immediately, it became impossible to go into rebel territory.
So basically, we gathered what we could on the legitimate diamond industry and sort of extrapolated on what the rebels were doing. We reported on the aborted coup. The RUF had been incorporated into the government under a peace accord, but its forces were in the field, mining diamonds illegally, selling them to buy weapons, and planning a coup. By pure coincidence, the coup was to go down one week after we arrived.
Luckily for us, the coup was averted because of a big demonstration at the house of the RUF leader, Sankoh. Someone opened fire, a lot of people were killed, and he was forced to flee the day before the planned coup. If that hadn't happened, there was a chance that he could have overthrown the government, and we really would have been in trouble. At that point, we were in the interior of Sierra Leone, and I don't know how we would have got out. Depending on how bad the coup was, it could have been tricky.
Proceedings: Are you currently working on any books?
Junger: I've been doing some background research on a book, but I haven't started writing. I'm not sure when I will, and I can't even tell you what it's about. But yes, I have started the first process of researching a book.