Frontline Journalists Sebastian Junger & Tim Hetherington Report from Restrepo

Journalists Tim Hetherington and Sebastian Junger are no strangers to reporting from the front lines. What we consider dangerous and hostile combat territory, they call a day at the office. On assignment for Vanity Fair, the pair found themselves in Afghanistan reporting on the war. The result is Restrepo, a documentary that chronicles the one-year deployment of a platoon of American soldiers at an outpost in the Korengal Valley of Afghanistan.

In addition, Junger has also penned the book, War, about his experience, and this October photographer Hetherington will see his photo book, Infidel, in stores. Few other parts of Afghanistan have rivaled the remote Korengal Valley in terms of the cost in American lives per square mile. After five bloody years and more than 40 American deaths, U.S. forces finally pulled out. Reporting from Korengal Outpost (“KOP”) and at Outpost Restrepo nearby — named for Pfc. Juan Restrepo, an Army medic who was fatally wounded there — Junger and Hetherington transport moviegoers to Afghanistan and bring them face-to-face with what it’s like to be a U.S. soldier at war.

“You can’t direct in the field,” Hetherington states about their fly-on-the-wall approach to filming Restrepo, Documentary Grand Jury Prize winner at the 2010 Sundance Film Festival. In his book, War, Junger writes: “One American soldier has died for every hundred yards of forward progress in the valley, but what about the survivors? Is that territory worth the psychological cost of learning to cheer someone’s death? It’s an impossible question to answer but one that should keep getting asked. Ultimately, the problem is that they’re normal young men with normal emotional needs that have to be met within the very narrow options available on that hilltop. Young men need mentors, and mentors are usually a generation or so older. That isn’t possible at Restrepo, so a 22-year-old team leader effectively becomes a father figure for a 19-year-old private. Up at Restrepo a 27-year-old is considered an old man, an effeminate Afghan soldier is seen as a woman, and new privates are called ‘cherries’ and thought of as children. Men form friendships that are not at all sexual but contain much of the devotion and intensity of a romance. Almost every relationship that occurs in open society exists in some compressed form at Restrepo, and almost every human need from back home gets fulfilled in some truncated, jury-rigged way. The men are good at constructing what they need from what they have. They are experts at making do.”

Restrepo captures the combat, boredom, and fear that our troops experience. The filmmakers collectively state, “Their lives were our lives; we did not sit down with their families, we did not interview Afghans, we did not explore geopolitical debates. Soldiers are living and fighting and dying at remote outposts in Afghanistan in conditions that few Americans back home can imagine. Their experiences are important to understand, regardless of one’s political beliefs. Beliefs can be a way to avoid looking at reality. This is reality.”

Venice: You both have reported from the front lines before. How did you approach directing your first film — in combat, no less?

Tim Hetherington:

Restrepo is an unusual film in that we didn’t go to Afghanistan as a film crew to make a film. The filmmaking was very organic. We were there originally on assignment for Vanity Fair. I’m the photographer and Sebastian is the writer and he had in mind that he wanted to write a book about a platoon of soldiers and he thought making a documentary was a good idea. Sebastian and I are very well in tune with narrative. We didn’t go to film school so we didn’t know what was right or wrong; we just decided to put together what we thought was powerful.

Sebastian Junger:

It was just another facet of the journalism. I didn’t really think of myself as a filmmaker. I really thought I was chronicling the experience of this platoon in a way that was new to me.

As journalists, you report, not comment. In this case was it difficult to keep your opinions to yourself?

TH:I come from the U.K. where a lot of journalism has become opinions. I’m not in the business of writing long pieces in newspapers or magazines. I’m an imagemaker and of course I understand all images in fact contain subjectivity. But in terms of the written word, Sebastian always says as a reporter it’s not his job to give opinions; it’s his job to report. I think we understood that. We didn’t want to make a political film. We wanted to make a film that transplanted you into the reality of a soldier’s life, that for 93 minutes you got a deployment and that this would be the closest as humanly possible to being at war without actually going there.

SJ: We didn’t put ourselves in the film. The only people onscreen are the men who were fighting. We didn’t even interview a general because there were no generals in the valley and the soldiers didn’t have access to them.

There were times when you were shooting with only one of you in Afghanistan. How easy was it to actually collaborate?

TH: The film has been a complete collaboration. Sebastian and I are a great team. We complement each other very well. It just happened in the end that we couldn’t go at the same time. He got injured at one point and then I broke my leg so it wasn’t really out of design but it worked that way. A lot of documentary films are made in the edit, and in the edit room we collaborated very closely.

SJ: I’ve always worked with a photographer on all my assignments so I’m used to working with someone. This was more time intensive than anything else I’ve ever done. I couldn’t have covered as much of the deployment on my own as I was able to with Tim. It was an excellent partnership.

Did you find the military very cooperative?

TH: We were so far from military control, in terms of bureaucratic control. In war, the closer you are to the fighting the further you are from bureaucratic control. Because we were on the tip of the spear with the guys there wasn’t much press office control because they weren’t up there. I was really surprised by the U.S. military. You’re led to believe that they’re going to be this censoring body but they weren’t at all.

SJ: As an American, I’m quite proud to say that I had absolutely zero meddling by the U.S. military. I was not allowed to show things that would breach security and cost the lives of our soldiers but those issues were virtually nonexistent. I was in no way censored or edited or even pressured to file my stories in a particular light.

Were you comfortable on the ground with the troops and did you find that the soldiers thought they had to protect you?

TH: We’ve had experience before and I think the soldiers, after the first couple of times going out with us, realized that. They were very comfortable with us. We knew how to handle ourselves and you become part of the group and everybody is watching out for each other at the same time. And we were included in that group. We definitely pulled our own weight.

Did your opinion change at all from your time in the Valley?

TH: I gained an enormous amount of respect for the soldiers. I remember coming back to the U.S.; I live in New York, and reading columns and columns of opinion pieces about the war in Afghanistan written by people who had barely been out there, and the only people whose ideas I respected the most were the actual soldiers. I think part of the problem is that the media, on the left and the right, only portrays the soldiers in a two dimensional, symbolic way. Soldiers on Memorial Day end up being these patriotic symbols that make us feel good about our country, when in fact they’re three-dimensional people. Spending time with them and recording their history really makes me appreciate them as people.

SJ: My opinion about the war in Afghanistan did not change, other than it reinforced my belief that starting in 2001 the war was undermanned and underfunded and under-resourced, and we had the overwhelming gratitude of the Afghan people in ’01 and ’02. They hated the Taliban and were glad to be rid of them and were grateful to us for helping them do it. And because we didn’t follow through, essentially we turned our attention to Iraq, and it’s because of that that we’re still fighting this war nine years later. There was nothing that happened in the Korengal Valley that changed that opinion. If anything, it was reinforced.

How do you think things will progress in Afghanistan? Like you said, at one time we did have the people’s support.

SJ: I think their gratitude turned to bewilderment when they saw our very low level of commitment to stabilizing that country after 9/11. I think most Afghans don’t enjoy the presence of international forces in their country. Who would? But they’re pragmatic people and the situation there in the 1990s … something like 400,000 Afghans lost their lives in the chaos and bloodshed of the ’90s. So after 9/11, after NATO forces moved into Afghanistan, as bad as war may look from the outside, right now it’s nothing compared to what was going on in the ’90s.

Can you talk about why you were compelled to tell this story?

SJ: I’ve been covering wars for 20 years, almost, and I’ve always covered them from the perspective of the civilian population, which is extremely important, but particularly because my country is now at war, and probably will be for a long time, I wanted to know what it was like to be a soldier in combat. I think it’s a universal experience and I don’t think it changes much from war to war, century to century. I wanted the people of the United States, who are tired of arguing about this war politically, to become interested in what the experience itself is like for these young people stripped of all political context — just simply what it’s like for them. The better we understand that, the better we can bring them home. And they are coming home and we’re going to have to deal with the effect this has had on them.

You spent a lot of time with these guys and you see during the film how hard it hits them when they lose one of their own. As a journalist, do you have to take a step back or do you feel the same way?

SJ: The guys who were killed out there I didn’t know very well. I became very close to some of the guys in the platoon and had those guys been killed I would have been devastated. I would have had an experience not as intense as theirs losing their brother but it would have been a tremendous shock to me.

Why is it important that audiences go see this movie?

TH: Sebastian and I have been doing this business a long time. We’ve been in a lot of conflict zones. We understand the mechanics of making an interesting narrative from a conflict zone. We went into this conflict knowing and understanding what a good story is. I can’t say I’ve been completely compelled by many of the war documentaries out there because I couldn’t find the stories very compelling.

SJ: Because it’s a completely apolitical film and the soldiers themselves are maybe the only segment of the population that do not have particularly political feelings about this war. What they’ve experienced out there is something else. It’s an emotion experience for them that affects them deeply, and I think this film is a way to participate in their emotional experience from a cinema in the United States.

Who are among your heroes?

TH: In terms of filmmaking, Chris Marker, a French filmmaker who made a film called Sans Soleil [Sunless] in 1983. In terms of image-makers, people like Susan Meiselas, whom I’m very close to, and Gilles Peress; they’re both conflict photographers.

SJ: I met Ahmad Shah Massoud, who was the leader of the Northern Alliance. I met him in 2000 before he was killed and he was a really inspirational person.

What do you hope audiences take away from Restrepo?

TH: There are a number of things that they’ll take away, I’m sure. First of all, regardless of your politics, the soldiers’ experience, because they are fighting on your tax dollar. That experience needs to be understood and digested as closely as possible. And sending you on a 93-minute deployment in the cinema is not a lot to ask, really. That experience as a soldier should be honored. I hope it will help people understand better what these young men go through.

SJ: I hope they leave their politics behind and enter the cinema and simply allow themselves to experience what it’s like to be a soldier in combat. They can go back out into the world and discuss the war politically, hopefully sensitized in some way to the soldiers’ experience. ▼