Ares | By Paul McLeary | 6 July 2010

Update: See a critical review by Nick Turse

During the 90 minutes it took for an invited audience to sit though a screening of Sebastian Junger and Tim Hetherington’s new documentary about the war in Afghanistan last Monday night, the Department of Defense announced the deaths of six more American Soldiers and Marines. But just as the vast majority of Americans will never see the names of the six service members killed, nor will they ever likely see or even hear of this arresting film that chronicles the sometimes desperate combat experiences of a small group of young Americans.

Restrepo, the much-lauded documentary that chronicles the 12 months that  Battle Company of the U.S. Army’s 173rd Airborne Brigade spent in Afghanistan’s remote Korengal Valley is in all respects a jarring movie, and to their credit the filmmakers avoid the temptation to rely on easy sensationalism or jingoism to try and sell it. But for all of the great press that the movie has been receiving, some claims about its singularity might be a little overstated. The excellent 2006 documentary, The War Tapes, which used footage shot by National Guard soldiers in Iraq covers much the same ground–albeit in a much different war, under much different circumstances. (The two films actually serve as pretty good markers for their respective conflicts — Restrepo is a fight based around a fixed mountaintop fortification that sees almost daily violence, while the War Tapes follows a unit that provides convoy support across the flat expanse of IED-leaden desert roads.)

Not surprisingly, most reviews of Restrepo have focused on the movie’s steady stream of violence, since in the end that is what puts butts in the seats–but some of the most cringe-inducing scenes have nothing to do with combat. Instead, the film shows the difficulties inherent in asking Army officers and enlisted men to do two jobs at once: fight a war against an elusive and dedicated enemy, while at the same time acting as community outreach coordinators and economic advisors to groups of skeptical, impoverished Korengali villagers. In one scene, an American Sergeant excitedly tells the camera that a small group of Afghan elders has come to the embattled mountaintop combat outpost to talk, something that hasn’t happened before. It turns out that the elders have come to complain that the Americans have killed one of their cows, and they want compensation. The Sgt. radios his commander, who says he won’t pay, but will give the men sacks of rice and beans that equal the weight of their cow. The villagers don’t seem to be happy with this arrangement, but neither does the Sgt., who knows that he has just insulted men who he is trying to make his allies.

Other telling moments come when U.S. Army Captain Dan Kearney tries to win over skeptical locals by telling them that a road being built through the valley (which is the reason the Americans are there in the first place) will make them rich. It is obvious that they neither believe him nor are much interested in the road project. What they want to talk about are not promises from a foreigner who will be gone in a few months, but why some of their neighbors have been arrested. Kearney tells them that he has good intelligence linking the men to crimes, but the villagers remain unconvinced. In the end, neither side is willing to fully trust the other, and given the constant attacks on the American outpost, the refusal of the locals to provide intel on who is doing the shooting, and the complete absence of any representative of the Afghan government, little progress is ever made in the relationship.

Restrepo is what population-centric counterinsurgency looks like once it leaves the world of Powerpoint and the think tank seminar and enters the world of combat. It’s ambiguous, it’s unfair, it’s confusing, and people still end up dead. It’s the modern American way of war.

Sources: Ares