There's a valley in the eastern part of Afghanistan known as the Korengal which is one of the worst places one could ever fight a war, or work as a journalist. The mountains around it are rocky, forested, and steep. Defenders have their pick of well-hidden sniper positions and easy escape routes. It's right by the Pakistani border and has never been truly conquered. The Russians left the Korengal alone and even Alexander the Great supposedly gave the place and its rugged inhabitants - relatively recent converts to Islam, the men dye their beards red and line their eyes with kohl, while the women wear bright colors and don't veil themselves - a pass. In the you-are-there documentary Restrepo, viewers are made to understand why this is a place that rejects foreign occupation with a nearly magnetic repulsion.
From mid-2007 to mid-2008, Battle Company from the renowned 173rd Airborne Brigade was stationed at a lonely, isolated outpost in the Korengal where they took enemy fire nearly every day, one of the longest exposures to combat American troops had seen since World War II. Writer Sebastian Junger (The Perfect Storm) and cameraman Tim Hetherington spent months in the valley with Battle Company, following what happened after their captain, a bluff and impatient guy named Kearney, decided to take the fight to the Taliban.
In the middle of the night, a couple of platoons from Battle hiked up from their main base at Korengal Outpost ("The KOP") to an outcropping above that the Taliban had been using as a firing position. Intending to stick a middle finger right in the enemy's face, they dug while being constantly fired on, and stayed there. They named the new outpost after beloved medic Juan "Doc" Restrepo, who had been one of their first fatalities in the Korengal.
Junger and Heatherington spent almost all of their time at Restrepo, two journalists among fifteen amped-up, heavily armed, and extremely isolated men who knew very well that they could be overrun at anytime. This isn't just being at the "tip of the spear," as Pentagon strategists like to say; it's being on the very sharp edge of that spear-tip. Firefights happen every day as the platoon fights to keep one road open though the valley, a mostly symbolic move that seems primarily motivated by a desire to keep the Taliban off-balance.
The filmmakers leave little evidence of themselves here. There is minimal narration, and most of the context is provided by the soldiers themselves, who talk right to the camera in interviews intercut throughout that were done months after the deployment was over. They're an engaging bunch, funny and wise, though with bottled-up storms of tension that come blasting out in the random and almost-friendly beat-downs they administer to each other, and even one wonderfully surreal moment where they dance with goofy abandon in their claustrophobic fort to a trashy techno track.
The result is a strange mixture of extreme intimacy and remote distance. Junger and Hetherington are embedded so deep that the camera is frequently ducking behind trees or Hescos (the giant, blocky, earth-filled modular units the Army uses to fortify remote positions) as Taliban rounds snap by. After one fearsome ambush, a soldier goes down and another bursts into tears - he's almost shrieking, and adrenalized collapse is more horrific than any of the combat witnessed. Confusion reigns overall, exacerbated by the film's inability to capture shouted dialogue and its refusal to provide even the most minimal background information.
There are times when the film seems little more than a companion piece to War, the illustrative book that Junger wrote about this deployment and which provides a much deeper understanding of the fight for the Korengal. But this could all be purposeful, the filmmakers' idea being that there is no honest way to show on film what an extended period of combat is like. It tries as much as possible, though, to show the after-effects, opening and closing with the soldiers' footage of a pre-deployment train ride in Italy (their unit's home base) with Restrepo, the good-natured heart of the unit who will ever after be their ghost.
From mid-2007 to mid-2008, Battle Company from the renowned 173rd Airborne Brigade was stationed at a lonely, isolated outpost in the Korengal where they took enemy fire nearly every day, one of the longest exposures to combat American troops had seen since World War II. Writer Sebastian Junger (The Perfect Storm) and cameraman Tim Hetherington spent months in the valley with Battle Company, following what happened after their captain, a bluff and impatient guy named Kearney, decided to take the fight to the Taliban.
In the middle of the night, a couple of platoons from Battle hiked up from their main base at Korengal Outpost ("The KOP") to an outcropping above that the Taliban had been using as a firing position. Intending to stick a middle finger right in the enemy's face, they dug while being constantly fired on, and stayed there. They named the new outpost after beloved medic Juan "Doc" Restrepo, who had been one of their first fatalities in the Korengal.
Junger and Heatherington spent almost all of their time at Restrepo, two journalists among fifteen amped-up, heavily armed, and extremely isolated men who knew very well that they could be overrun at anytime. This isn't just being at the "tip of the spear," as Pentagon strategists like to say; it's being on the very sharp edge of that spear-tip. Firefights happen every day as the platoon fights to keep one road open though the valley, a mostly symbolic move that seems primarily motivated by a desire to keep the Taliban off-balance.
The filmmakers leave little evidence of themselves here. There is minimal narration, and most of the context is provided by the soldiers themselves, who talk right to the camera in interviews intercut throughout that were done months after the deployment was over. They're an engaging bunch, funny and wise, though with bottled-up storms of tension that come blasting out in the random and almost-friendly beat-downs they administer to each other, and even one wonderfully surreal moment where they dance with goofy abandon in their claustrophobic fort to a trashy techno track.
The result is a strange mixture of extreme intimacy and remote distance. Junger and Hetherington are embedded so deep that the camera is frequently ducking behind trees or Hescos (the giant, blocky, earth-filled modular units the Army uses to fortify remote positions) as Taliban rounds snap by. After one fearsome ambush, a soldier goes down and another bursts into tears - he's almost shrieking, and adrenalized collapse is more horrific than any of the combat witnessed. Confusion reigns overall, exacerbated by the film's inability to capture shouted dialogue and its refusal to provide even the most minimal background information.
There are times when the film seems little more than a companion piece to War, the illustrative book that Junger wrote about this deployment and which provides a much deeper understanding of the fight for the Korengal. But this could all be purposeful, the filmmakers' idea being that there is no honest way to show on film what an extended period of combat is like. It tries as much as possible, though, to show the after-effects, opening and closing with the soldiers' footage of a pre-deployment train ride in Italy (their unit's home base) with Restrepo, the good-natured heart of the unit who will ever after be their ghost.
