Sebastian Junger and Tim Hetherington’s Restrepo
They all had signed up for this – soldiers and reporters – but none had signed up for this. It was worse than they had imagined. They called the Korengal Valley, scene of the fiercest fighting in Afghanistan, “the valley of death.” After PFC Juan Restrepo was killed, his comrades in the Second Platoon named their outpost after him, and fifty young soldiers, as young as nineteen, dug in to defend ground the U.S. Army would ultimately choose to yield to the Taliban.
Sebastian Junger (author of The Perfect Storm) and longtime war photographer Tim Hetherington spent a full year living with that platoon. Their documentary, Restrepo, took a grand jury prize at the Sundance Film Festival, and now is in wide release. Junger has also just published a companion book, War.
We spoke recently with Tim Hetherington.
It sounds like you’re getting some great press. The Times is doing a Sunday feature, New York magazine has done a feature, and you’ve been in Vanity Fair.
We’ll see what happens. The thing is, it’s how we access the bigger community, the wider community. As reporters we know a certain community, and we can reach them pretty easily. But we want to get out of the circle of people who read the Times. I’m working on how we get into the community of firemen, how do we get into the financial community, how do we get into the farming community. Because this issue touches them all. And this film is a way for them to broach it in a non-divisive way.
Very few documentaries have had a wide audience. In fact, the ones that have really broken open seem to have been Michael Moore’s films, which have a distinctively partisan approach, whereas your approach is scrupulously non-partisan.
Yeah. You’re right, but I think perhaps we can achieve a broader access into the society without being partisan. The subject matter reaches everybody. There are fifty million Americans who have some kind of connections to the military, who either have loved ones in the military or have served themselves. We’re all touched by the war in Afghanistan economically. The U.S. is spending a lot of money there at a time when we’re trying to tighten our belts back here at home. Afghanistan wasn’t Vietnam; it wasn’t started with a lie, like the war in Iraq; it was started because there was a security concern for this country. But we also want to know that taxpayer dollars are being well-spent. This film allows a keyhole into that world, in a way that isn’t divisive.
Very early on in the war in Afghanistan, reporters for the major networks would say that they were embedded with troops, but few reporters since the Second World War have been so embedded for so long as you and Sebastian Junger. Did you see many other reporters in the Korengal?
No, I didn’t, honestly. There weren’t many others who were coming up. At first there was a reporter for the New York Times whom I personally knew, Elizabeth Rubin, and Lynsey Addario, her photographer, who produced a really great report; they came up twice, I think, to the Korengal. But I think the military didn’t want everybody going up there. After our reports came out on ABC News and Nightline in 2008, with some very distressing images, I was going through Bagram Airbase and the public information officer told me that eighty percent of the news photographers were requesting to go to the Korengal. Which I thought was just absolutely phenomenal, that our work focused attention on that place. The military of course can choose which reporters go where. And they started to deny requests, because they didn’t want the focus of reporting to be all on the Korengal. And logistically, there just wasn’t room up there for all the journalists.
We were given access because the military thought that we had done honest reporting at a time when the world was very much focused on Iraq. And the military itself had been feeling kind of neglected in Afghanistan. So our reporting was welcomed even though it didn’t hide or gloss over the harsh nature of what was going on there, both in terms of U.S. troops and civilian casualties.
What were your opinions about the war before your sojourn in the Korengal?
I hadn’t really followed the war that closely because I was following conflicts in west Africa. When we first went to Afghanistan in 2007, I thought we were going to have a pretty quiet time. I thought I would go far a walk in the mountains, drink cups of tea with elders, and occasionally get shot at. Nothing really prepared me for the amount of combat that was going on there.
The first dispatches we sent out focused on the kinetic aspects of the fighting. These weren’t the images of Humvees in the desert that we were used to seeing from Iraq. This was a different kind of fighting, very reminiscent of Vietnam in many ways. Small outposts nearly being overrun. Soldiers really out on a limb, at the furthest reaches of American empire.
And I came with a healthy dose of cynicism. I’m a Brit. The British did fight in Afghanistan and lost severely. The Russians lost severely. So there are a lot of indications that it will be hard to bring stability to that country. And yet, I’m also aware that Afghanistan isn’t America’s Vietnam. You can’t compare them. At the height of the Vietnam War, there were 165,00 NVA soldiers with tanks and heavy artillery. You know what I mean? The Taliban doesn’t have that. They have maybe 20,000 or 40,000 lightly-armed soldiers. It’s a very different kind of war. It didn’t get started on a lie, like the Gulf of Tonkin. Al-Qaida really did command 9-11 out of Afghanistan. And Afghanistan is not just a set of unruly tribes. It has a longer history as a nation than Italy. I don’t know if you can win these kinds of wars, but can Afghanistan find some sort of stability? Absolutely.
How did men of the Second Platoon measure success?
They measured success by getting out of the Valley alive. By seeing their girlfriends and their wives.
Somebody was criticizing Sebastian for suggesting that soldiers weren’t political, and I have to say that…well, I’m not saying that soldiers don’t have political ideas, of course they do, but they didn’t talk about them a lot, and if they did, then that would be in the film. They were focused on getting home alive. If you started questioning your mission, the whole political reason why, sometimes that isn’t very useful to the point of survival.
You’ve captured the camaraderie among men of the platoon, and also their growing trust in you. Have you experienced anything like that before?
No, I hadn’t. For me the time with these soldiers was very profound. That’s what makes the film very special. You feel that intimacy that we developed with them. After a while, I’d seen enough of the fighting, and what was more interesting was the interpersonal relationships among the men.
And I came to understand that these bonds among men were also where the strength of the war machine lies. The heart of it is that the military takes a group of young men, puts them through basic training together, gets them to live closely together, and if you get them to live so closely and to bond, then they will kill and be killed for each other.
Did you draw equally as close to Afghanis?
No, I didn’t. I didn’t have the opportunity to. I don’t speak Korengali. Of course I have a shared humanity with them. I believe that. We show in the film civilian deaths and damage. I came to a house two hours after an Apache helicopter had killed five people and wounded ten.
I focused on the American soldiers because I wanted to build a bridge to the audience. I think I’m having more political discussions about this film than I would have if we had done a film about civilian Afghan deaths.
In so many ways, as you’ve said, your film strips away the last vestiges of glamour from war, but you’ve also captured how men are receiving a rush of adrenaline from it. How did that affect you?
Well, while there is adrenaline in combat, I don’t think that’s why soldiers come home and say that they miss combat. I think they miss the sense of brotherhood. And the sense of significance.
I felt that allure. I was a part of that group. I didn’t carry a gun, I didn’t pull guard duty. But it did affect me.
How did your relationship with Sebastian grow during the course of the project?
Working with Sebastian is fantastic. We have a great working relationship. It was a very tough year when we trying to finance the film. We were broke. And we went through a lot of stuff together.
You both were battle-scarred. An IED blew up under his Humvee, and you broke your fibula and had to walk several miles on a broken leg. What kinds of post-traumatic stresses have you felt? Do you sleep soundly?
Well, war is traumatic. Those events shape you and scar you. I’ve been changed by these experiences, mentally and physically. And I accept that as part and parcel of my job. I do find that I’m hyper-vigilant in places like Times Square, which drives me crazy.
How are things in the Korengal Valley today?
Well, you know, two months ago the Americans pulled out. Nearly fifty Americans lost their lives there, and countless insurgents and civilians. The Korengal now is in insurgent hands. I don’t think the insurgents will necessarily stay there. The men of the platoon were very upset that the U.S. pulled out. But they understand that the small-base strategy has been abandoned by the high command. Large population centers need to be protected.
If this film led to higher American impatience with the war, if it hastened a complete withdrawal, how would you feel about that?
I think a knee-jerk reaction to anything is never a good idea. If we’re going to pull out of Afghanistan, there needs to be a kind of mindfulness.
Footage of hard fighting in Vietnam, for example, the war that people saw in their living rooms, really turned public opinion. The footage that you’re bringing from Afghanistan is equally powerful, and that power is unpredictable.
If public opinion goes that way, it’s hard for me to say if that is right or wrong. It’s for people to see the film and make what they will of it.
