<http://schema.org/articleBody>
"  Military is a big word. It&amp;#039;s like music, you know? It&amp;#039;s almost meaningless. I mean, how could a word like music have a meaning that includes Beethoven and Madonna? I went off to college. But in the first few weeks, in the fall of &amp;#039;83, the barracks got leveled in Beirut and almost 250 Marines and sailors were killed. They were basically my age. I wasn&amp;#039;t attracted \u2014 attracted would be the wrong word. But I was drawn to it. That began my process of signing up for the Marine Corps. I chose newspapers because I thought it would be kind of like going into the infantry. It would discipline me, you know? On 9/11, my infantry experience and field experience came together with my journalism career. Real fast. I remember the exhaustion \u2014 almost not sleeping for two weeks at Ground Zero. I remember the confusion. You can assemble factual truth brick by brick. But there&amp;#039;s also emotional truth. How people feel may not be rooted in fact, but it can be true to them, and it guides their actions. The first one&amp;#039;s hard, but it&amp;#039;s a lot easier than the second. I have a heavy stomach and I can look at things that make most people turn away. That&amp;#039;s not to say I don&amp;#039;t get upset. Sometimes I get angry inside, quietly angry over the things people do to each other. But I don&amp;#039;t have nightmares. When I sleep, I sleep. I try to get into a relationship with a good driver. Someone who&amp;#039;s not going to panic. They teach me about local things, and I teach them which way to have the car facing in a dodgy place, where to keep the keys. There are things a driver needs to know. Sometimes you think about it mechanically \u2014 should I have my passport on me for this walk, or not? You think about how others might react to your passport, and how the thing that could help you can also endanger you. It&amp;#039;s complicated. I don&amp;#039;t have a lot of trouble coming back. There are different worlds in this world, and I tend to pass through them pretty easily. It&amp;#039;s like \u2014 imagine you put a cat in a sack and then you take the cat to another spot on earth and very quickly lift the sack off. What do you have? A cat. That&amp;#039;s kind of how I am. When I come home, I&amp;#039;m me. I fall right in on the dishes and diapers, tending the garden, working the compost, and chasing the fish. The golden rule of fishing is you never leave fish to find fish.  Russia took all the fun out of drinking for me, as it does for a lot of people. Midway through my Russian tour, I stopped. I just decided it wasn&amp;#039;t fun anymore. That was very valuable. You&amp;#039;d be amazed how much energy you get back when you don&amp;#039;t drink. I eat locally a lot, and almost everything that gets offered to me. Once I ate the semidigested clams out of the gut of a freshly shot walrus. The guys who I was with told me they were delicious. And you know what? They were right. I can move through a firefight as if it&amp;#039;s almost happening in slow motion and make a record of it, understand it, and on some days even anticipate where it&amp;#039;s going as it&amp;#039;s happening. But I can&amp;#039;t sit through violence to a soundtrack. I can&amp;#039;t watch a war movie. There&amp;#039;s no TV in my house. Well, there&amp;#039;s one in my garage that I sometimes have to turn on for news. But I don&amp;#039;t think I&amp;#039;ve turned it on this year. How do my kids respond? They play! They go outside! They use their imaginations! They have childhoods! I was at the siege of Misratah in Libya when the guy next to me checked his e-mail off a satellite. He said something like &amp;quot;Holy shit, bin Laden has been killed.&amp;quot; Misratah was being shelled by an army of its own nation and facing a bunch of pressing tactical and humanitarian problems. I think my first reaction was something like &amp;quot;What does that have to do with what we&amp;#039;re doing?&amp;quot; There may be a day when the decision gets made for me. I may snap a femur jumping off a rock \u2014 and that may decide it. I&amp;#039;m getting near fifty and I&amp;#039;m running around with nineteen- and twenty-two-year-olds. So far, I can keep up.  Friendship is the most valuable commodity you have out there. Any time you go out, the slate is clean. The fact that you&amp;#039;ve survived one thing doesn&amp;#039;t mean you&amp;#039;re gonna survive the next.  There are a lot of different ways to the exit door. I don&amp;#039;t think about money too much beyond the big chunk of it I&amp;#039;m gonna need to send my five kids to college. The emotional toll is that sometimes when you stop, a lot of what you&amp;#039;ve absorbed crowds in, and it can be painful. But, you know, maybe one of the secrets to dealing with that is I don&amp;#039;t stop very often. C.J. Chivers is the author of The Gun, a history of the AK-47, to be released in paperback September 6 by Simon &amp;amp;amp; Schuster. He is a senior writer for the New York Times and publishes additional reporting on Twitter (@cjchivers) and his website, cjchivers.com. Highlights from the Chivers Decade: 9/11/01: While covering mayoral primary for the Times, sprints to World Trade Center fire. Lives at Ground Zero for two weeks. 10/01-1/02: Uzbekistan; Afghanistan. Arrives on the first day of bombing, stays through the fall of the Taliban. 12/02-4/03: In Iraq, is one of the first American journalists covering the buildup to and outbreak of war. 6/04: Begins four years in Times Moscow bureau, two as bureau chief. 8/04: Civil unrest, Georgia. 2006-07: In Iraq and Afghanistan, embedded with Marines. 5/07: Wins National Magazine Award for Esquire story on school massacre in Beslan, Russia. 2008-10: Georgia; Chechnya; Afghanistan (five trips). 3/11-Present: In Libya, covering anti-Qaddafi uprising. Chivers in Esquire: Russia, Putin, Afghanistan, and the Jihad "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/interviews/a10719/cj-chivers-interview-0911/>