This Fourth of July, rather than join the throngs of humanity massing along Chicago's lakefront, I took a solo journey to the movie theater to see the film Restrepo. This documentary follows a platoon of soldiers located in Afghanistan's Korengal Valley during a harrowing 15 month tour. While there were only about 20 people in the theater with me, several of them were visibly shaken by the movie--and I was among them. This film offered some incredibly stark imagery of these soldiers' lives that certainly does not make the evening news very often.
After watching Restrepo, I initially had mixed feelings. I think my initial thoughts on this film were the result of the very minimal approach taken by the film makers--they did not intrude into the film and were not interested in injecting politics into the narrative. This left me wondering what sort of editing cuts were made, as there must be literally hundreds of hours of footage that did not make it into the movie. That being said, the film focused on both the more mundane aspects of deployment, as well as several very intense and emotional moments. The more I digested the movie, however, the more positive I felt about it.
Above all, it made me appreciate that my own time in the military was spent during the very pacific years of Bill Clinton, as I do not envy those service members who have to carry around the baggage of war. Secondly, these men were not glorified as warriors in any way. This is a big issue with me and most war films or documentaries--the tendency to glorify the fighting prowess of the soldiers, even when presenting an anti-war theme. My best example is perhaps Generation Kill, which was written by a journalist embedded with Recon Marines during the Second Gulf War. While the novel (turned into an HBO series) absolutely captured life in the military and was highly critical of the war and George W. Bush, the author totally gloried in the violence that these Marines dealt out. Restrepo, in my opinion, absolutely avoided this common pitfall. Instead, the subjects of this documentary were humanized--they were young men who signed up to do a dangerous thing without really knowing what that meant. And they did the job that they were asked to do.
But what they were asked to do is not the subject of analysis for this film. The film makers did not want to insert their own views on the war, nor did the soldiers in this film ever seem to discuss their overall mission, beyond the tactical and strategic goals of what was happening in the Korengal Valley. To me, Restrepo only fueled my own belief that the war in Afghanistan is unwinnable. There was no defined victory for these soldiers, other than getting through their deployment in one piece, and it's clear that military intervention will not solve the problem (but is actually turning civilians against the US). What the film did best, of course, was to demonstrate how this war is putting thousands of young people--most of these soldiers look like high schoolers--through a brutalizing experience that they will not be able to cope with.