Restrepo, a long-form documentary from Sebastian Junger (he of A Perfect Storm fame), finds a third dimension in the binary pro-war vs. anti-war dynamic of modern fighting cinema. The year long embedded campaign Junger and his producer Tim Heatherington documented with a platoon of American soldiers in a remote outpost in northern Afghanistan tells a very different story from the traditional media narrative on television or movies.
Named for a fallen member of the platoon early in their time in Korangal Valley, the titular Restrepo refers to an outpost firebase on a remote spur deep into enemy territory. As the American military began to implement General Patraeus' infamous COIN doctrine in 2007, U.S. soldiers found themselves in uncomfortable and dangerous territory: equal parts warrior, civil engineer and relief aid worker.
Outpost Restrepo, built by hand with shovels, pickaxes and bloody hands, changed the entire course of the campaign due to it's immediate proximity to the local villages. Soldiers were able to engage villagers in weekly shura elder meetings for face-to-face discussions as well as mount counter-attacks and patrols to stay on the offensive.
COIN did not prevent all fog-of-war heartbreaks however, as the nadir of the platoon's deployment comes during an operation when they are forced to apologize for the the deaths of several civilians killed in an aerial bombardment.
Throughout all of this, Restrepo exhaustingly hammers home the unfailing humanity of the soldiers and villagers they live next to. They get bored, they fight, they cry when a loved one dies. Even moments of levity of a village elder asking to be repaid for his dead cow caught in the firebase's razor wire invoke the absurd immediacy and outright intimacy of this most modern and ancient of battlefields.
Restrepo is that most successful species of art: it does not finish with a clear moral or politcal message. The viewer is left staring into the Afghani mountains with uncanny sympathy and respect for the men of O.P. Restrepo, without any real decision of if they should have been there or not.
