Battle Company: Loving Life, Making War

Battle Company: Loving Life, Making War
By A. O. SCOTT
Published: June 25, 2010
“Restrepo,” a documentary that sticks close to a company of American soldiers during a grueling 14-month tour of duty in an especially dangerous part of Afghanistan, is an impressive, even heroic feat of journalism. Not that the filmmakers — Sebastian Junger, an adventurous reporter perhaps best known as the author of “The Perfect Storm,” and Tim Hetherington, a photographer with extensive experience in war zones — call attention to their own bravery. They stay behind the portable high- and standard-definition video cameras, nimble flies on a wall that is exposed to a steady barrage of bullets.


Hanging out with the members of Battle Company in their hilltop outposts in the Korangal Valley between May 2007 and July 2008, Mr. Junger and Mr. Hetherington recorded firefights, reconnaissance missions, sessions of rowdy horseplay and hours of grinding boredom. Afterward, when the tour was done, the filmmakers conducted interviews in which the soldiers tried to make sense of what they had done and seen. There is nothing especially fancy or innovative here, just a blunt, sympathetic, thorough accounting of the daily struggle to stay alive and accomplish something constructive.
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Loving Life Making War