Day 3: Restrepo

I'd been watching some pretty easy-going stuff the last two days so I thought I should bunker down and watch a good old depressing documentary. I definitely found the right one.

"Restrepo" follows a group of soldiers stationed in the most dangerous region of Afghanistan. How dangerous, you ask?  70% of all bombs dropped in Afghanistan were dropped within this region. So really dangerous. The soldiers go into what they view as a suicide mission to help win over the locals and push back the insurgents that have been gaining ground. To do this they build and guard an outpost, designated Restrepo after Juan Restrepo, a soldier who was killed in the line of fire earlier that year.

The film follows the soldiers through their day to day lives in the outpost as they try to build relationships with local town elders, search for the Taliban, and get in an unbelievable amount of fire-fights. It's pretty nuts how one scene shows them taking fire, shooting back, mass confusion everywhere, then five minutes later the film shows the soldiers relaxing around a campfire later that night, playing cards and reading magazines.

The other thing that surprised me was the soldiers themselves. Not having any experience/personal interest in military life I didn't expect to find any of them very relatable, but within the first five minutes of the film I felt like I knew them all. They were the guys I went to school with, my neighbors and my cousins. I became invested in them and it made it that much harder to watch them put their lives on the line.

What I liked most about it was there were no overtones of politics or partisan morals attached. They never mentioned a larger view of the war on terror, Osama, 9/11, or President Bush. The soldiers never delved into their motives for enlisting, or how they felt about the Taliban. Most of the time they just referred to them as "the bad guys". Whatever your views on the current war, you should watch this movie. It'll provide you with an intimate and shocking detail about life on the front lines.

Here's the trailer:

Film via netflix.com