DVD: Restrepo
On April 20th, 40-year-old photo-journalist Tim Hetherington was killed by shrapnel while covering the war in Libya. If you want to understand what a loss this is to our increasingly incompetent and dishonest journalistic community, watch the 2010 documentary Restrepo as I did for the first time this past weekend. Co-Directed by Hetherington and Perfect Storm author Sebastian Junger, Restrepo covers one year with a platoon of US Soldiers in the hyper-violent Korengal Valley, Kunar Province, Afghanistan of 2008. No matter what you think of the war, no matter what your politics, this is a terrific doc, exactly the sort of coverage our military deserves. It gives the clearest picture of the men who fight of any film I’ve seen and makes you understand why the words we trot out on Memorial Day – words like “hero,” “sacrifice,” “courage” and so on — simply aren’t enough to capture the living reality of what these guys do and who they are.
Too many Hollywood filmmakers did the villainous work of making preening, self-aggrandizing anti-war films while our soldiers were at risk and in the field and too many of our mainstream journalists showered those hateful films with praise. Pictures like In the Valley of Elah, Redacted, Rendition and Lions for Lambs depicted our defenders as rapists, murderers, thugs, bigots or fools – even while those real life defenders were right in the midst of the fight. It was an unprecedented bad act by our show business and journalistic elite. It burdened the morale of our troops and supplied propaganda material to our vicious enemies. The guilt of it is on the heads of each and every one of the filmmakers involved and the journalists who praised them.
I wrote several articles of protest at the time, many of them for City Journal. Restrepo comes closer than any film I’ve seen to accurately depicting the kind of men I met while researching those pieces at Fort Bragg and at FOB Kalagush in Afghanistan’s Nuristan province. It reignited the anger I felt for the recklessness and vanity of our spoiled, unpatriotic and ignorant creative class. Good for Hetherington and Junger for showing the simple truth about our military without injecting their political opinions either way.
May Hetherington rest in peace. He lived a life worthwhile.
If only it were unprecedented. Unfortunately, since at least Korea (Pork Chop Hill) this has been the standard response to every military endeavor our nation has undertaken… From the aforementioned Pork Chop Hill, to the Anti-Vietnam War Apocalypse Now, to the Gulf War-set “Three Kings”, to the movies you mentioned, Hollywood loves to hate the military.
Fortunately for those of us who were veterans of later conflicts, the country itself woke up to what was going on somewhere along the way. Average citizens became ashamed of the treatment Vietnam Vets got, and Hollywood won’t be able to play the baby-killer card again–though they’ve certainly tried to make My Lai mountains out of Abu Ghraib mole hills.
Expecting any sort of respect for the military from Hollywood is silly. Soldiers and veterans are willing to put their bodies between their beloved home and war’s desolation. Hollywood types, not so much.
My son Pvt Corey Kleypas was in Nurestan last year for his tour in Crapistan at OP Mace. Saw a lot of action, lots of attacks and lots of cold (7000 ft) and plenty of heat, spiders, goats, monkeys and bad guys. I think Mace is a bit north of Kalagush and a bare a klick west of Pak. The FOB for his platoon was Bostick. I guess you could say I’ve pretty much memorized Restrepo. All those guys remind me of the the 3-61st up on the mountain. And my hero my son.
What a documentary. Even anti-war curmudgeon Roger Ebert gives it 4 stars. Two things, other than the outstanding bravery of these young men and their devotion to duty, stand out: how they talk like your average 20-something street kid who spends his days lounging around, bumming spare change for cigs and beer, wasting the best years of their lives (I was guilty of this sort of thing once upon a time), and the almost superhuman emotional restraint as these soldiers talk about their experiences. My nephew’s in the Marine corps and did a tour of duty in Iraq. He talks about this restraint, where you do not break under any circumstances. That makes all the more wrenching the scene where a man is KIA and one of his fellow platoon members becomes completely unstrung. I’ve lived overseas nearly a quarter century and appreciate these people, and this country, more than I can express.