The duty of a war documentary: 'Restrepo'

By Sarah Sluis

Last week I saw the Sundance Award-winning documentary Restrepo (read FJI's review here). Directors and journalists Tim Hetherington and Sebastian Junger (author of The Perfect Storm) followed a group of soldiers in the Korengal Valley for a year. In an area known as "The Valley of Death," these soldiers engage in firefights every day, and up to multiple times a day--the kind of combat not seen since Vietnam. The documentary's stated purpose is to document the life of the soldiers, without including the overarching politics

or outside viewpoints. I enjoyed the documentary, with some hesitations. After hearing it lambasted by another blogger, who felt the movie "misleads and distorts in a way that any fair-minded person would and should find infuriating," I feel the need to weigh in.

The documentary opens with the kind of scene that scares you half to death and gives you a huge adrenaline rush. While in an armored Hum-V, the soldiers take fire. They abandon their vehicle, take cover, and return fire. The camera moves Blair Witch-style, looking down at the ground as the camera operator runs for cover. Sonically, it goes from recording huge booms and gunfire so loud it's distorted, to eventually losing all sound, broadcasting a barely perceptible static. It's freaky, and one of those scenes you can't believe is real, because it feels like a movie.

Of course, most of the time the soldiers are hanging out, horsing around, or shooting at targets hundreds of yards away. They also have weekly meetings with local elders, and occasionally wake up residents in the middle of the night to gain information or detain them for questioning. Here, my sentiments toward the soldiers were not as positive. These soldiers are not culturally sensitive. You can understand their

frustration, but at the same time they act incredibly rude. The leader speaks to the elders with exasperation, annoyed that they are still focusing on the errors of his predecessor. The soldiers laugh about "the cow incident," in which they killed (and ate) a villager's cow that had become tangled in their fence, but they also don't seem understand how the cumulative impact of these incidents can engender ill will among the residents. No wonder the townspeople are hiding the Taliban, and the situation seems like it can only get worse.

Even if the documentary itself doesn't address how this behavior can affect what's going on in the bigger picture, its scenes are indelible. This week, General Stanley McChrystal is in the news for his comments in a Rolling Stone article, which just led to his dismissal as top U.S. commander in Afghanistan. When I read the article, I paid attention to the new military strategy referred to as COIN (counterinsurgency theory). "Think the Green Berets as an armed Peace Corps," the article explains, you "[send] huge numbers of ground troops to not only destroy the enemy, but to live among the civilian population and slowly rebuild, or build from scratch, another nation's government." I seriously doubt that the soldiers' presence in the Korengal Valley fostered good will among the locals. At its most benign, their actions were a nuisance and prone to misunderstandings. Once the soldiers start taking residents out of their homes in the middle of the night, killing cows and speaking to them in rude and frustrated voices, the relationship between the locals and the soldiers becomes one of toleration. Trust? How can they trust each other? The residents are hiding Taliban and soldiers accidentally kill innocent people trying to find them. By presenting footage without extensive commentary or contextualization, the filmmakers are doing audiences the favor of letting them draw their own conclusion.

Restrepo shows, it does not tell. Will everyone that watches the documentary be worried about how the soldiers treat the locals? No. But with many sources of information about the war in Afghanistan, there is a place for a documentary like Restrepo, and its portrait of Afghanistan is one I will remember for a long time.