In August of 2010, eight months after I returned from Iraq, I went to see the documentary Restrepo with Jim Dao of the New York Times.* Restrepo records the the men of 2nd Platoon of Battle Company, airborne infantry on the farthest outpost in the midst of the worst fighting in the War in Afghanistan. The movie was filmed and directed by Sebastian Junger and Tim Hetherington.
I wrote briefly about seeing the movie in 2010. War documentaries can be slow, wanting to get every detail right. Restrepo roars from one scene to the next. Hetherington and Junger captured moments when everyone around them was in a fight for their lives--they were armed only with a camera. Even the moments of boredom had the feral, roaring feel of men waiting for a fight as if chained.
And the candor, especially of the officers in charge of 2nd Platoon and Battle Company was amazing. The default setting for talking to the press in the military is STFU (Shut the Fuck Up). Most soldiers I have known hate the media. When I first served during the Vietnam War soldiers felt outright betrayed by the media.
The officers and men said what they really thought. I would not have believed the candor if I had not seen it.
Now fifteen years after seeing the movie, I read Junger's book War based on the same year in the Korengal Valley of Afghanistan plus follow up with the soldiers of the Restrepo outpost.
I have not seen a more visceral or candid documentary of any war. I would recommend the movie to anyone. The book had me laughing out loud at some points and then reading page after page never able to stop in the middle of a patrol or fire fight. Usually I like either the book or the movie better (usually the book). In the case of the HBO series Band of Brothers I much preferred the series to the book.
By contrast, War and Restrepo they are companions. I would watch Restrepo first simply to feel the rush of the story then read War to linger on the words and the detail.
In 2011, I volunteered to go to Afghanistan. The deployment orders fell through, certainly for the better. War was published in May 2010. I intended to read the book after seeing the movie, but forgot about it in the rush of life after returning from Iraq. In retrospect, if I had read the book I would have better understood why I wanted to go back and why I should not.
In October of last year, I met Junger at a conference where he was a featured speaker. He spoke about his book Tribe which is very much informed by War and Restrepo. The conference was on Tribalism and Cosmopolitanism at the Hannah Arendt Center at Bard College. We had lunch together and talked about the Army, deployment, Army food, and how strange it was to return to the "real world" after war. And about how funny and terrible Army jokes are.
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*Dao was the war correspondent of the Times and in the middle of a long-term assignment covering the 10th Mountain Division on a year-long deployment to Afghanistan. The 10th Mountain is stationed at Camp Drum, New York. Dao's coverage of a year at war is here.
