Restrepo

Restrepo is a documentary filmed by Sebastian Jungar and Tim Heatherington (there is also an accompanying book) about fifteen months in the life of a platoon of US soldiers deployed to the Korengal Valley in Afghanistan. Restrepo is the name of one member of the platoon who is killed early on in the deployment, off-camera. We barely see him before his death but he hovers like a ghost over the rest of the film, remembered in flashbacks by his comrades. In his memory, they name a tiny outpost after Restrepo, and that outpost is credited (not very convincingly) by the commanding officer of the platoon with turning around operations in the valley. At the time of the initial deployment the Korengal Valley was considered the most dangerous part of Afghanistan for US forces, and the sense that we get of these soldiers in an utterly foreign land, with no sense whatsoever of who or what lives over the next hill, is overwhelming.

Restrepo is an extraordinary documentary, and it is not as though there is a shortage of very fine grunts’-eye view documentaries about America’s post-9/11 military campaigns. Its strength is its intimacy, and its capacity for getting beyond the usual bravado. It is the only documentary of its type where I have seen soldiers cry on the battlefield, rather than tearing up later, after the fact. The centerpiece of the film is a campaign, “Rock Avalanche”, involving a company of soldiers  attempting to expand the “bubble” of security further into the valley and capture some Taliban and their weapons. We never know if the mission is a success. The film doesn’t care, and I doubt the soldiers did. The film reverses the usual order: we first get some interviews about Rock Avalanche with the soldiers months later when they are back in Italy, and then the film cuts to the footage shot during that mission. It is here that a solider is killed and we see the reaction of the tiny squad of men with him. We also get a powerful sense of how loss turns easily to revenge, and revenge is when war becomes war crimes. The platoon commander urges his men to take their grief and turn it into anger at the enemy: “to make the enemy feel like we do right now.”

Of course we never see the enemy, and we have no choice but to identify with the US soldiers, but within those limits, this is as fine a portrait of young men send to do unspeakable things under unspeakable conditions, as you will find. One moment stands out for me. One young solider, Cortez, seems to have a constant grin as he is telling us about the death of his sergeant. We wonder where his grief is. Then in a later interview, with the same inane grin, he tells us that he takes four or five different kinds of sleeping pills, none of them works, and he’d rather not sleep than dream of that night.