Best Of: Sebastian Junger’s Journey to the Edge and Back

I'm Caleb Bissinger and this is the next big idea. Today, Sebastian Younger almost died a few years ago. What did the experience teach him? What can it teach you? Nine o'clock, a June night four years ago, the last traces of daylight glint in the western sky, and Sebastian Younger, the best selling author of The Perfect Storm and co director of the Oscar nominated documentary Restrepo, lies on an operating table.

He is dying. The doctor asked permission to put a large gauge needle through my neck into my jugular to transfuse me, and it didn't sound very pleasant. I said, you mean in case there's an emergency? And he said, this is the emergency right now. What Sebastian didn't know, what the doctors didn't yet know, was that an undiagnosed aneurysm in his pancreatic artery had ruptured.

It was now geysering blood into his abdomen. He was losing a pint of blood roughly every ten minutes, and there were only twelve pints of blood in the human body. Sebastian, as he puts it, was a human hourglass. As the doctor raced to transfuse him, I became aware of this black pit that opened up underneath me and it was pulling me into it.

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